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How it started
Believe it or not, it didn’t all start with Samsung. Royole, a now-bankrupt manufacturer of flexible displays, was the first to release a commercial folding phone, the “charmingly awful” FlexPai. Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold followed a year later, plagued by a variety of faults that saw review units break within days. That launch went so badly that it prompted Chinese rival Huawei to delay the launch of its own Mate X foldable by five months; its unusual design with the foldable screen wrapped around the outside of the phone proved unpopular regardless. Motorola was next to join with its first Razr foldable, closely followed by Samsung’s similar Z Flip; we scored each 4/10 and 6/10 respectively.
To say it was a rough first two years for foldable phones would be an understatement, but things did get better. Samsung’s subsequent generations of foldables didn’t break half as easily as the first wave, and it learned the valuable lesson that integral parts of the display stack shouldn’t be as easy to remove as a screen protector.
More manufacturers joined the market, with foldables launched by Google, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor, and more. Prices slowly came down too — while flagship book-style foldables have hovered more or less around the $2,000 mark for seven years straight, cheaper models have appeared too. Motorola’s entry-level Razr is now $799, and last year Samsung introduced a cheaper FE variant of its Z Flip 7, for $899.
The hardware evolved over that period too. Foldables got thinner, lighter, and more durable; the creases got flatter and less visible, while some displays began to include stylus support too; the cameras started to catch up to standard slab phones. Perhaps most importantly, the form factors began to shift too.
How it’s going
Until recently, foldable phones settled into two broad categories: compact flip phones, by now with square cover screens that extend across the outside of the phone’s front; and larger book-style foldables that are thin when shut and almost square when open.
Durability has improved to the point where Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold was able to introduce an IP68 rating; Honor’s Magic V6 has since one-upped that with IP69. That phone is also the thinnest foldable on the market, and the one with the largest battery, two feats that have been made possible by silicon-carbon battery designs, a more energy-dense technology that enables smaller batteries with larger capacities. The latest foldables are barely thicker than flagship slab phones when closed, and almost as thin as the USB-C port when open, while packing batteries that last a day or two per charge.
Oppo’s Find N6 is almost as thin and long-lived as the Honor phone, but has another trick up its sleeve: an almost invisible crease. It’s still possible to see and feel the point where the inner screen folds, but only if you really hunt for it, and even then it can often be difficult to find depending on the light.
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