Worst might be a bit dramatic but I personally have never seen the point in folding phones. They dont fold out big enough to become a tablet but cost twice as much as buying a regular phone and a tablet separately.

AI is the worst thing to happen to smartphones.

The worst thing to happen was the boring black rectangle format winning and all other designs disappearing. You don't have to buy a foldable if you don't want to. It's next to impossible to buy anything that's doesn't look like every other phone on the market.

Two bricks held together with a hinge is weaker than just a brick... Who would have thought...

These are absolutely a gimmick. A fun gimmick for sure, but not worth the prices for flagship phones these days, especially when cheaper non-folding phones are more durable

From the article:

“I recently posted my take about this on Mastodon and I accidentally rage-baited one of my good friends who daily-drives a folding phone. So he messaged me on Signal passionately defending it. He finds it useful as a phone + iPad Mini replacement, especially since he bought his used for $400”

Therein lies the issue. The future that Apple, Google, et al sees is one where we move towards device convergence. There was a brief period where it wasn’t uncommon for a person to have a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, etc. if you go back a bit more there were even more devices (iPods, cd players, etc). but the modern context has shown that phones can do a LOT of compute. An iphone 16 pro max from 2 years ago can perform around the level of a GeForce 1050, an aging but still somewhat viable card, except where that takes around 75 watts the iphone gpu takes 6-7 (lol). The iphone 18 pro max is closer to a 1060, which is about double the compute power. And then you have stuff like the m5 ipad which is a bit more powerful.

They’re not top end machine equivalents but they don’t have to be. 80-90% of users (possibly more) don’t do anything that requires such compute power. This has been reflected in consumer spending for years now. Smartphone and laptop sales are still growing, albeit at a slower rate, whereas desktop and laptop sales continue to fall. The future is people using smartphones for everything, tablets for power users, and laptops/desktops for the extreme high end power users. This sucks because it’s an ergonomic nightmare to do everything on your phone, the walled garden approach of all major phones will greatly hasten everything being locked down, mobile browsers are trash and even though the majority of traffic comes through them web designers still ignore making sites work on mobile browsers, etc

Of course the anti corporatist narrative fits in well here: these companies are excited for this convergence because it shifts control away from the user. The pc by nature is an open platform and has to have some degree of openness to work with multiple hardware configurations and peripherals. The phone is consistent hardware (extremely so in apples case) and the precedent has long been set for locked down everything. at the same time the consumer eats this shit up despite tons of people yelling about it so maybe we deserve it. But convergence makes sense from a consumer perspective too; we can’t afford to buy a laptop, phone, and tablet.

Nah. The worst possible thing they could be is the second worst thing.

The worst thing to happen to smarohones was when Androids stopped coming with slide-out physical keyboards.

Fuck Apple for many reasons, but the onscreen keyboard is the most egregious and unforgivable of those reasons.

It's complete bollocks though, isn't it?

I've had more or less every-other generation of Samsung foldables since the first one - all are still going fine with the exception of the very first (when I buy a new phone, I give the old one to friends or family.)

One of them even got dunked in wet concrete (unfortunately while in my pocket, also dunked head to toe in wet concrete, but that's a long story.) After hosing it down and drying, it was fine.

It's fine not to like foldables because you don't actually want what they offer - but the technology is fine.

How do you even make a protective case for these? Seems like it's too easy to drop it and crack the screen

I used to be a fold hater until I got one..now I've had 3 folds and never going back to a boring slab phone AND a mini tablet , my fold 7 is a all in one that fits in my pocket and weighs the same as a mini tablet minus the extra phone. My gf got my old fold and now lives off it as she runs 3 apps at once on it. Before she lugged around a s23ultra and and 13inch tablet.

The secret is to buy last year's model used at 1/3 the price of new and the haters are people who never actually used one especially for multi tasking multi windows which is why they don't understand them. I was one til I did.

I love mine, had a folding for for 5 years now. Currently using a Razr. They work great, display works for about 2-3 years is my experience. It's usually cheaper to buy a new one than repair as the display assembly is a new chassis with the hinge.
I don't use a case, the display is protected by closing it, but Motorola included one and they include the protective screen cover (mandatory). As flexible display technology improves, I expect they will last longer.

A whole group of folding phone haters has emerged, normal people just don't buy the thing they don't want. Theses people go on crusades blathering on about their opinion, of which I couldn't care less about. They seem to be triggered by the area where the display bends ( I don't notice it) but it is there and I can feel it, how fragile the device is but I see people with broken displays on regular phones all the time, and the price ( they can't afford one? ). I assume they just need a proper hobby.

A folding phone isnt inherently unrepairable. Yes it is less durable but if you look some of them the only drawback is that the internal screen scratches easily and are otherwise very stable. Would i get a folding phone to use as a phone? No, but as a mini tablet it is extremely neat. And once again, as all devices, you can make them repairable. But yes they are more expensive but you know you dont have to buy them right? You know you could just buy a fairphone, put linux on it and use that for like 8 years or what the support is?

I really like the idea of a tri-fold phone running Nura that can revert to a tablet or desktop. It's one device for multiple form factors, for different use cases.

Still literally zero good reason for them to exist

Huh? It's the one real smartphone innovation I've seen in the last decade or so. A phone that can become a tablet would be very useful.

Worst is definitely losing the sd card slot.

I really loved the new razr I had for the last two years. Hella fun to play with...but everyone's right. It's a fragile gimmick going after your nostalgia. Folding screens like this just aren't ready for the abuse we put on them.