The smartphone industry wants you to buy a foldable phone. Should you get one?
The last few years of smartphone innovation have been a bit of a disappointment. Manufacturers seem to have run out of ideas. Every year screens are getting bigger, bezels thinner, camera arrays increasingly bizarre. The modern smartphone has turned into an Instagram monster — ideal for taking pictures and scrolling through visual feeds, but not for too much else.
Those of us who try to do work on our phones have been largely neglected. The last major software innovation for productivity was probably split-screen multitasking in Android back in 2016, and the last major hardware advance likely Samsung’s pen-enabled Note line in 2011. Other than that, not much has changed on the productivity front.
This is now about to change, at least according to the plans of some leading phone manufacturers. Several of them have released folding phones, and they justify the eye-watering price points of these new devices with a promise of higher productivity that a much larger phone screen supposedly enables.
There are fundamentally two approaches to foldables in the current market: Samsung and Huawei offer phones with truly foldable displays that can turn into a mini tablet with a seamless big screen when unfolded. This comes at a significant cost, and there are considerable durability concerns regarding the display material that by definition has to be quite soft. Microsoft and LG on the other hand have opted for traditional flat glass displays but put two of them together to provide more screen real estate. Prices for these phones are not quite as high, but still way above those for standard phones.
As my first foldable I picked the Microsoft Surface Duo. Apart from the slightly less bizarre price point („only“ $1400 instead of the $2000 that Samsung charges) and supposedly higher durability, I liked that the Surface Duo unashamedly is a business phone. Other manufacturers still try to push vague lifestyle benefits of their products, but Microsoft makes it clear: the Duo is all about productivity, preferably using Microsoft software of course.
The Duo is also a very elegant product, incredibly thin and covered all around in glass. It doesn’t have any displays on the outside, which gives it a minimalistic look and feel. The hinge mechanism feels precise with just the right amount of friction and allows the two screens to be positioned in any angle. Opening the device like a book is an unusual experience, and shutting it after work is done is a very satisfying action. It’s also nice that it supports pen input with any existing Surface Pen. Overall, the hardware feels gorgeous.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to care much about other current expectations regarding flagship phones. The Duo’s bezels are thick (which, aesthetics aside, makes it easier to hold it), its camera is mediocre at best (this phone is not for Instagram), and its chipset is last year’s generation (which doesn’t matter much if you don’t game on your phone). It also doesn't have 5G, which with current network coverage is hardly a letdown.
Instead, Microsoft has been focusing on getting the software side right for its productivity-obsessed target audience. The Duo has an elegant way of using both its screens for multitasking and also to get more efficiency out of some apps. For example, you can look at your calendar and emails in Outlook at the same time. Or you can watch a webinar on one screen while catching up on emails on the other. You can display a slide deck on one screen and write review comments on the other. There are almost countless combinations, and some are not immediately obvious. I discovered small new use cases every day in my first week with the Duo — such as monitoring my food delivery order while scrolling through tweets. Not exactly very productive, but very, very 2020.
But do these app combinations really result in what Microsoft is promising here, namely higher productivity? It depends. Some are useful and convenient, but hardly game-changing. Others, such as watching a video while doing something else, mostly cater to the distracted modern mind. A few, for instance the option to look at your email inbox on the left while displaying individual messages on the right, are genuine micro timesavers. I kept having small Aha moments when I figured out yet another thing that benefits from having two screens. None of these things in isolation are game-changers, but collectively they make for an experience that feels like it's truly quite a bit easier to get things done on this device compared to a traditional phone.
One area of mild disappointment for me has been writing on the Duo. Even though it offers a „Compose“ mode in which the onscreen keyboard fills one of the two displays entirely to make typing easier with much bigger keys, I personally didn’t manage to type much faster compared to a normal phone — maybe 20% on average. The error rate was a bit lower, but typing on glass is still a far cry from the speed and accuracy of a real keyboard. I wrote the entire first draft of this post on the Duo, and it probably took at least twice as long as on a computer, with higher cognitive load from dealing with suggestions and typos. That’s OK in a pinch, but this clearly isn’t a writing machine.
A surprising experience however is how nice it is to read news or long-form articles when you configure the displays in such a way that they act as a flat tablet-sized single screen. Yes, the gap in the middle is weird, but after a while your brain gets used to it (much like we barely see display notches on normal phones anymore) and works around it with subtle scrolling behavior. In any case it felt like it was much more pleasant and less tiring to read longer texts with this larger screen, which for me personally provides strong benefits in my daily work. It’s not as good as a real tablet, but the benefit of having access to this functionality anywhere I go is great.
The Duo also offers nice ways to consume video content. It works well either in „laptop“ mode or in „tent“ mode in which you fold over the display so that the device can stand on its own. Furthermore, you can completely fold both displays flat on their backs so that the Duo basically turns into the equivalent of a normal single-screen phone. This versatility is an advantage that the Duo has over all other foldables.
Now let's get to the bad stuff: The Duo is simply not a very good … well … phone. Making phone calls without earbuds requires that you fold it over fully, and it feels awkward to hold because it’s so wide. Presumably most people who make long calls use some kind of earbuds nowadays, but the occasional quick call is still not very pleasant on this device. Other foldables might have an advantage in this respect because they typically use an external display and loudspeaker that doesn't require unfolding it for a call.
More importantly, the form factor makes the many little actions we do with our phone one-handedly every day quite awkward: Checking the time, looking at a map, getting a train schedule, quickly responding to a text, and so on. All these things require you to unfold the Duo, which is a two-handed operation. Particularly on trips when it's helpful to be able to access information very quickly I found myself wishing for a traditional phone. This is something that the more expensive foldables from Samsung and Huawei solve presumably better with an external screen.
So far only Microsoft‘s own apps and a handful of others — including Amazon‘s Kindle app and Acrobat Reader — support the Duo‘s specific format. When that works, it works really well. Kindle eBooks feel like real little books with the two pages side by side. But many other apps still don't use the Duo‘s advantages or behave downright weirdly. Quite a few apps (including Instagram, ironically) seem to get confused about the Duo‘s unusual screen format, and it's not clear how motivated app makers will be to support this niche device and its other foldable cousins. Other foldable phones seem to suffer from similar issues with erratic multitasking behavior of many apps.
The camera is bad in two ways: Its quality is quite far away from what we’re used to from expensive phones these days, maybe on the level of what was typical four or five years ago. More importantly, using the camera is tedious, typically involving folding the device and dealing with the very finicky camera software. The camera is fine for basic business needs — taking pictures of whiteboards and such, but not much more. In all fairness, other manufacturers haven‘t put their top camera hardware into their foldables either, so this is not a device category for photo fans.
And then there is durability. Supposedly the Duo is more robust than its cousins with their soft foldable displays, but it still is covered in glass on all four sides. The folding form factor makes it impossible to use traditional cases on this type of device. Microsoft provides a rubber bumper that you can stick to the edges, but this doesn't seem terribly elegant and takes away a lot from the haptic quality of the device. After a few days, I dropped my Duo from not very high, and promptly the front cover glass panel cracked. I'm not sure that this class of device is best suited to the often fairly rough life on the road, which to some extent almost seems to defy the purpose of a highly mobile productivity device.
Overall, the Surface Duo is clearly a first-generation product with many rough edges. I have personally always been one of these g̶u̶l̶l̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ fearless innovators the industry lovingly refers to as „early adopters“, and I can live with most of these shortcomings. But mainstream users would likely be disappointed by so many issues in such an expensive product. Definitely better to wait for the next generation.
But back to the original question: Are foldable phones a category that makes sense, provides real advantages and is here to stay? Historically speaking, that's quite hard to predict. Sometimes it's all about a manufacturer getting all the details of hardware and software right before a category really takes off. For example, the iPhone was by no means the first all-screen smartphone, the iPad wasn't the first tablet and the Amazon Kindle the first eBook reader. But they implemented some aspects much better than anybody else who tried it before and achieved market dominance. With foldables, we‘re clearly not at this point yet. This category is still stuck deeply in the experimentation phase.
My main question is what gap in our daily lives this kind of product is really trying to fill. Yes, phones could definitely use some improvements for productivity, but adding more screen real estate seems like more of an incremental improvement compared to, say, some fancy new form of text input (call me old-fashioned, but I’m personally still waiting for a next-gen revival of Blackberry-style physical keyboards). The downsides of the form factor — limited durability and awkward usability for traditional phone tasks — might actually outweigh the benefits at this point.
Interestingly, I found myself using the Duo most frequently at home, sitting on the couch. This thing is a dream for catching up with industry news or articles and then sharing them in various ways. It’s also useful for quick hits in catching up with email in the evening or morning when you don’t want to get to a PC, or for watching a quick YouTube video on the go. But other than, I still found myself to be more efficient for phone-y task on my traditional flagship phone. When I’m traveling, I almost always bring a laptop or iPad, and then the advantage of having another productivity-enhancing mobile device with me goes away quickly.
Apparently I’m not alone: Judging from some reports from long-term users of Samsung‘s first foldable phone, people seem to use their foldable as a secondary device next to their main phone, kind of like a compact tablet that is easier to bring with you and does certain things better than your phone — comparable maybe to an eBook reader. But if that‘s the limited scope of use cases for foldables, it is very hard to justify their currently stratospheric price points.
Back in 2009 (about 7 months before the iPad was released), I wrote a post about what it would take for Apple to make a really good tablet device, based on my frustrations with earlier tablets. Interestingly, most points were implemented in the iPad. If I had to come up with a similar wish list for foldables, it would be this:
- If a foldable is supposed to be people’s primary mobile device, make sure it’s really good at traditional phone tasks. Samsung is probably ahead of the pack in this respect with the Z Fold 2. I don’t see that there would be space in the market between tablets and traditional phones, so foldables have to be a credible phone replacement.
- Get multi-tasking right. Doing several things at a time on phones or tablets is a good idea but has been a mess traditionally (yes, even on the iPad). Microsoft should be commended for trying a new approach with its fixed dual screen setup in the Duo. It’s very efficient when apps support it, and we can only hope that more app makers will make that effort. Google already provides the underpinnings in Android 10.
- Innovate in input methods. The traditional on-screen keyboard is still not more efficient to use on a foldable. Pen support is still limited. And while voice input has made tremendous progress, it’s not yet quite robust enough and doesn’t work in every situation (try talking to your phone on a plane). What’s the solution? A return to mechanical keyboards? Even better voice and pen support? Something new entirely? In any case, when productivity is the focus, we need something that lets us enter text more efficiently on a mobile device.
- Figure out durability and pricing. That’s probably a question of time, but spending $1400-$2000 on a device that can break so easily is not going to be an option in the mass market.
Overall, we’re just witnessing the first rounds of the birth of a new kind of device. Foldables are now at a stage where you can see where this might be going, but a lot of things still need to be figured out. For now, this is a category for enthusiasts and people with very specific use cases.
