Foldable phones have a chance if their prices can drop fast enough – but will business users be convinced?
Microsoft’s ill-fated Surface Duo couldn’t convince many folks that it was superior to foldables, but it started out with a few advantages over them. The hinges could rotate 360 degrees.
Managing multiple apps was easier, its screens had a 4:3 aspect ratio (arguably better for productivity if harder to grasp), and it was a few hundred dollars cheaper, in part because it lacked an external display. That omission also helped to make it significantly thinner than Samsung’s contemporaries: the Galaxy Z Fold 2 and 3.
Had it survived, though, that last advantage would have been wiped out by the Galaxy Z Fold 7 (see our review here), which normalizes the folding phone form factor more by expanding its front display and reducing the device’s thickness at the modest cost of removing S Pen compatibility.
Indeed, the now-discontinued Galaxy Note, the original “phablet”, was like the Z Fold of its day, offering a premium productivity experience.
Now that the Z Fold has slimmed down, is it on its way to becoming mainstream? Or will it, like the other best foldable phones on the market, remain niche, eventually getting swallowed up by the mainstream monoblock as the Note did?
Slim devices vs. High prices
Making the Z Fold 7 thinner has eliminated a key barrier to adoption, but the price consumers pay is more than just the loss of a stylus. It’s a new $200 premium. Of course, some of that can be pegged on inflation and the volatility of tariffs.
However, price will certainly be a far more important driver of folding phone growth than thinness, something Samsung has addressed in its folding line with the more consumer-ish Z Flip 7 SE for which there is no Fold 7 equivalent as there was for the Fold 6, at least in its home market. Samsung could have kept the 6 in the line-up with a price drop as Apple has done with older models.
But let’s dig deeper into the Fold’s usage proposition itself: One way to think of it is a tablet you can fit in your pocket. But, unless they’re being used as a laptop replacement, e.g., Surface Pro, tablets are tertiary devices; their shifting use case helps explain why Apple is beefing up the iPad user interface to make it work more like a Mac.
Unlike a tablet, a phone is always with you and always connected – essential for today’s business users. Unlike previous display expansions, though, that expanded inner screen is designed for use by two hands; opening the device certainly is. And that’s another step.
In other words, book-style foldables are more session-based; the default is to use the front display. Samsung confronted this head-on in a supplemental interview video in which the host interviewing “Maya,” an ascendant restaurateur, plays devil’s advocate:
“If it’s like a regular phone folded, why bother unfolding? Like, what’s the plus?”
“That’s the thing. It’s like your regular phone. You can still do a quick text, all that. But then, it’s got this really nice extra feature, right?”
Um, right. One shouldn’t harp too much on the “extra feature” trivialization (when it is the defining feature of the device). After all, “Maya” also plays down the use for the front display, which can do a lot more than “a quick text.” But it hardly makes for an ironclad case as to why one should pay twice as much for a device.
Soft skills
The case for a folding device today has some similarities to the early days of the iPad, which was originally marketed as doing a few key things better than a phone or laptop. In fact, some of them were the same: photos, maps, the web, office apps, and games.
As much as Apple and third-party developers expanded the iPad’s suitability to more tasks traditionally handled by a laptop, it’s in Google’s and third-party developers’ hands to make foldables more worthy of our hands.
Indeed, Google (and Samsung before that) got the jump on Apple in bringing windowed apps to the Android tablet environment, and the Android steward’s move to include desktop modes and Linux support help the case for both Android tablets and foldables.
On the other hand, Google has had far less success than Apple in getting third-party developers to make the most of larger Android devices–from the first Honeycomb tablet version to 12L.
Finally, there are two wildcards that could help or hinder Android foldables. The first is the rumored arrival of the Apple foldable. Much as the Galaxy S25 Edge “set the stage” for the Z Fold 7, the iPhone Air may be presaging the “iPhold” and Apple has a way of legitimizing features. That said, at a rumored price that exceeds even that of the Fold 7, it won’t be an overnight transition.
Second, there are the long-awaited “rollables,” once seriously teased by LG as a next device before it threw in the flexible. tactile surface known as a towel. Rollables address the main usage challenge with foldables in that there’s a much smoother transition between using the standard-sized display and the larger one.
Either way, you can definitely expect Samsung to be a leading player here, if not first to market. In its first round, it may not offer as much of a screen area increase as a foldable, but the convenience may be enough to make it “a nice extra feature” particularly for those looking for productivity gains.
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