this year.
They are incredibly slim, they are powerful, the cameras are finally good enough, and I no longer break in sweat worrying about breaking the thing.
How the heck do I open that thing?
In the past few years, it seems all engineering efforts went into figuring out the perfect hinge and how to reduce the crease, a challenge that has proven to be tougher than I expected. But I think most finally got the hinge right, sturdy and reliable. But something incredibly important got overlooked in the process: how the heck do I open the damn thing?
We have seen various approaches to this.
Huawei Mate XS had this red button in the center that would pop open the phone. Cool, but a bit weird and problematic in real world use (Image by PhoneArena)
The Huawei Mate XS phone from 2020, for example, used a button that would spring open the screen. Cool! But also… strange and a bit problematic as it increase the risk of accidentally dropping the phone.
Samsung’s Galaxy Fold started with curved sides, but recently switched to flat sides, and you have to kind of dig in-between the two halves to open the phone. It’s not hard, but it’s not easy either.
Galaxy Fold 6 on the top vs Honor Magic V2 on the bottom (Image by PhoneArena)
Others like the super slim Honor Magic V3 have rounded sides, so it’s a bit easier to pry them open.
But none of these is perfect.
A simple solution
The Vivo X Fold 3 Pro (on the top) uses a simple, but clever solution with angled sides (Image by PhoneArena)
Enter the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, a phone with a frustratingly complex name and a delightfully simple to open design.
What Vivo has done is simply angle the sides ever so slightly to make prying the phone open much easier.
Yes, it’s a small detail, but small details matter for an action you will perform dozens of times, every day.
If you have used a foldable phone, you are also probably familiar with the feeling when your grip is not quite right, and you fumble a bit, and you almost drop the phone. It has happened to me a few times, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I did not drop it then. But what if we can avoid this with a design that actually helps our hands?
Not perfect
I don’t think that the Vivo design is perfect, and I still occasionally don’t get the grip just right and have to try a couple of times. This feels clumsy and there has to be a better way.
Everyone seems concerned about the crease, but opening the phone is one action we have to perform so many times per day that I feel finding the perfect design for that is not only more important, it’s a crucial step towards making foldable phones more mainstream.
In an ideal world, there would be a fine-tuned spring-assisted system that allows you to open a foldable phone with just one hand, but before we get there, I would love seeing little design changes like the one Vivo has done that improve the ease of use of these otherwise cool and futuristic phones.
What do you think, are foldable phones the future, now that we are past the initial pain points?