Folding their way into the future

Technically marvellous foldable phones are the hot new thing from two of the top smartphone makers

Logic dictates that smartphone screens can’t bend, right? Except they can. The newest sensation to hit these allimportant devices is foldable screens. Last week Samsung got the jump on its competitors by announcing its Galaxy Fold before the annual Mobile World Congress.

As the industry gathered in Barcelona this week, Huawei announced its own foldable, the

Mate X, the day before the main conference began on Monday.

Long-rumoured and frequently leaked, these new handsets are a technological marvel with bendable screens that cynics might call a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. They might recall curved-screen televisions, which were similarly amazing technology that never solved any pressing problem and were more hype than substance. But these new phones certainly are tech wonders.

The Samsung folds into itself, with an outside hinge, and looks not unlike those Nokia Communicators — but with a bright 4.6-inch screen on the outside — and opens into a 7.3-inch tablet. The Huawei folds the other way, mitigating the need for another screen by having the foldable display on the outside. Its 8-inch display folds in half with a 6.6-inch front screen and 6.4-inch rear one.

Both phones use 5G, the new data standard of the next generation of wireless broadband, which offers much faster download speeds.

It’s an interesting new category of smartphone, which, though expensive now, has interesting potential.

Tablets and the in-between phablet phones are too large to fit into your pocket even if their larger screens are better suited to reading, watching video and consuming other media.

A foldable handset solves that by giving you a phone that has the usualsized screen but unfurls into a tablet when you need it.

It seems an obvious evolution of screen size, especially since the phone can quickly become so much more.

The Mate X is “a voyage into the uncharted”, says Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer business CEO.

Despite the thrill of these foldable displays, they will be enormously expensive when they ship later this year. The Galaxy Fold will cost $1,980 (R27,600) and the Mate X €2,299 (R36,400) — pretty much out of reach of the average consumer. But in a few years and with inevitable economies of scale they’ll be more affordable.

Other manufacturers are also entering the foldable game. LG revealed its V50 Thinq on Sunday but it’s really two screens with a hinge in the middle. It lets you run either two apps or different functionality on each screen, such as a Youtube video on one and comments on the other; or a game with the controllers on the second screen. Xiaomi’s rumoured foldable device was a notable absence from its launch event on Sunday.

These are early days for foldable phones, but you can expect them to get thinner, slicker and more useful in the next few years.

The phones will be enormously expensive when they ship later this year — out of reach of the average consumer