I have a flip phone and not gonna lie: having a phone that fits your pocket is great. But the impression I have is that people hate them?
foldable screens are wack af, stuff like the old motorola razer and japanese domestic market phones made sense.
The fact foldable screens exist is crazy to me. We even have phones with no visible crease now.
Technology should be designed to be both user repairable and last at least 7 to 10 years for the initial user, with an additional 5 years of second hand use if refurbished.
Real example:
You were gifted a Kindle 3 Keyboard in at the beginning of 2010. You use until 2019-20, the battery is dead, technology has progressed, so you decide to upgrade. Instead of throwing out the Kindle Keyboard, you replace the battery and load it full of children's chapter books, giving it to a friend's kid, sure it's older but it's got every Goosebumps book, he'll love it.
He uses that for another 4 years, until it breaks or simply becomes too outdated to be practical. Then the device is recycled/parted for materials. This is the ideal tech lifespan for now.
(Modern) Foldable phones offer the exact opposite of this for very little gain beyond "it's smaller!". Smart phones are unironically a technological dead end, like the automobile.
I used to have one of those bad boys in high school, with a flip out keyboard. I also used to have a BlackBerry which to this day is my GOAT phone tbh.
I don't know if I want another foldable phone really. I don't have problems with my current standard smartphone.
People who have one say it's great, but they are so prohibitively expensive that I'm not even considering getting one.
The lower durability and increased cost make them a nonstarter, at least for me.
Are you asking about the old flip phones or the new foldable ones?
I was thinking of the new foldables, but they certainly inherit a lot from old flip phones.
The foldable ones feel like innovation for innovation's sake. Like the normal rectangular ones already seem fine to me. In fact I think they should generally be smaller so as to fit in the pocket better but the industry has been gravitating towards phones the size of billboards. Phone companies have already been doing weird shit like putting twenty cameras in the backs of phones to make then look more advanced outwardly and this seems like a continuation of the trend.
I would so much rather have a phone that folds out into a tablet, but manufacturers refuse to release one that's not both massively overpriced and much crappier than the non-folding flagship that they're based on.
Pixel Fold 2 be better please
I've never seen one irl, but they look neat. Eventually they'll come down in price and might even become the norm.
I don't hate the concept, but it isn't for me. I just want a relatively affodable and small form factor phone. I don't need it to folder out into anything bigger, I like my devices to be small.
I am not a heavy phone user. I check email, lemmy and a few websites. I have almost never installed any non-stock apps onto my phone. On vanishingly rare situations I make a phonecall. I don't really use a bunch of apps, and while I play games in other formats mobile has never really been my jam.
