Gadgetory

- Once upon a time, phones had no screens at all. - Hello, Ms. Jasper? - Then got black and white screens, color screens, glass screens, curved screens, bezel-less screens, and now, they have foldable screens. (upbeat electronic music) I can give you a quick history of foldables, because really, there's only three of them so far. There's been the Royole FlexPai, which has been unquestionably bad. There's been the Samsung GalaxyFold, which is mostly questions, so we'll call it questionably good. And then there's been the Huawei Mate X, the big debutante here at Mobile World Congress, which has the potential to actually be great. The thing with foldables is that they're a category of smartphone that has to define itself. It has to define its pricing, and its market. It has to define whether it should fold one or even twice. It has to decide whether the screen should be on the inside or on the outside. So, I tried out the Royole FlexPai to start with, at CES a month ago, and it was a disaster. At the moment I'm looking at it and it's upside down, I don't know why it's upside down. I'm usually good with technology. I feel like my grandfather. In terms of construction, it was really durable and rugged. But modern technology, and this is why I refer to smartphones, has to be slick, and it has to be elegant, and it has to be more or less perfect. It's tough to make these, and I think the Royole FlexPai demonstrates that difficulty. I have to say, I arrived here in Barcelona for MWC, not a believer in foldables. Looking at the FlexPai and looking at the Samsung, they just look like really distant technology. They also look like a whole bunch of compromise. With the Samsung GalaxyFold, you essentially get two phones. Okay, let's be straight about that. You get 12 gigabytes of RAM, you get six cameras, so you get two phones' worth of specs. You also get two phones' worth of thickness, and you also get two phones' worth of price, because it's $2,000. And I think a big reason why Samsung isn't showing off the GalaxyFold to everybody from every angle is that you're going to have a gap when it's folded, and it's going to be quite significant, I imagine. That's the trouble with putting the display on the inside of a foldable, you need a bigger radius around the hinge. When you put the screen on the outside, that radius is actually taken up by the device itself, and that's how Huawei achieves basically a gapless phone with the Mate X. I got to handle the Huawei Mate X for myself. I saw it up close and personal, and I got to touch it and feel it, and the only problem that I have with it is the hinge, which I'm going to forgive for now, because it's not going to be released until June, and I imagine Huawei will optimize it and you know, make it a bit smoother. Everything else about the Mate X is so positive and different. Once you open it up and unfold it, you get 5.4mm of thickness. There is no smartphone right now that is 5.4mm thick. The Mate X also has this extra handle/grip section, and that's great because you can integrate the cameras into that. You have a thickness in there to have good cameras as opposed to crappy teller cameras. And then at the same time, you have OPPO, which is a device that looked a whole bunch like the Mate X. And Xiaomi, which is a device with two folds. And what it says to me is that, everybody who could possibly and potentially make one of these devices is fully invested into making those a reality. (futuristic music) Now, let's talk about a few more of the challenges involved in coming up with foldables. One of them is the spine in the middle, basically the bit that folds. Every device that I've looked at up close and personal has a little bit of a ridge, a little bit of a bump, right there in the middle. In my experience with the Mate X, again I just feel like it's so far ahead of everything else, I wasn't able to feel a bump or any sort of ridge in the middle where the fold actually happens. And as a user facing the screen, I wasn't able to see any imperfections in the screen. Can you improve that even further? Can you make it perfectly flat? I'm sure everybody's working on that, but that's a huge challenge. Another thing to consider, all of these displays are going to be plastic. Phones used to have plastic displays back in the past as well, we can live with them. Using plastic touchscreens, it hasn't been a problem for me, either with the FlexPai or with the Mate X, so credit to those companies for getting fundamentals, the technical fundamentals, done correctly. But those things are ones that hardware companies are good at. Has Huawei ever shown us great software? Has Samsung? Has TCO or Royole or any of these companies? The answer is no. And the biggest challenge with foldables is how do you get the software to behave correctly. How do you do multi-app multi-tasking at the same time? You know, Samsung demoed that, Huawei showed its side-by-side multi-app multi-tasking, but I haven't tried it for myself, and that's really the incomplete part of this story. And it's also going to be about the form factor. We still need to decide where the big screen should be in a foldable, and how many cameras do you actually need? Huawei says three, Samsung says six, I say you could get away with one, if you just do a good foldable clean, clever design. And then the question is going to be, do you want it to fold around your wrist? Do you want a Moleskine that happens to actually be a phone on the inside? (techno music) So as I say, there's plenty of challenges ahead, plenty of questions still to be answered, plenty of companies that haven't even thrown their hats into the ring. And honestly, I'm not even all that fazed by the pricing that Samsung and Huawei have introduced. This is early-adopter pricing, this is what you get when it's legitimately cutting-edge technology that is as early as you can possibly get it. As all of this happens, as prices come down, as companies figure out what it is that we as consumers are going to prefer, we're going to need to be patient. But at the same time, this isn't going to be boring. This is going to be exciting as hell. There's plenty of potential, plenty of opportunity for all of these companies, and just judging by the hype that I've witnessed here at MWC if we see the same rate of progression throughout the year, this is going to be an extremely exciting year for smartphones, because of this foldables development. So only in Barcelona for a few days, but it already feels like it's been a hell of a week, so to check out all of our coverage of foldables, 5G, no 6G, sorry! You know where to find us. Youtube.com/theverge and www.theverge.com