Do phones need to fold?

As Samsung( re) launched its clamshell folding phone last week, I deterred discovering the same question pop up amongst my social curves: why?

I was wondering the same thing myself, to be honest. I’m not sure even Samsung knows; they’d winning me over by the end, but only reasonably. The halfway-folded, laptop-style” Flex Mode” offers an opportunity to place the phone on a table for hands-free video announcing. That’s pretty neat, I suspect. But … is that it?

The best provide answers to ” why ?” I’ve come up with so far isn’t a exceedingly filling one: As they can( maybe ). And since they are sort of it is necessary to do something.

Let’s time-travel back to the early 2000 s. Phones were quirky, motley and no manufacturers certainly knew what was going to work. We had basic snap telephones and Nokia’s indestructible bricks, but we also had telephones that swiveled, slipped and included chunky physical keyboards that seemed absolutely crucial. The Sidekick! LG Chocolate! BlackBerry Pearl! Most were pretty bad by today’s standards, but it was at least easy to tell one model from the next.

( Photo by Kim Kulish/ Corbis via Getty Images)

Then came the iPhone in 2007; a rectangular glass slab defined less by physical buttons and permutations and more by the software that powered it. The machine itself, a silhouette. There was hesitation to this formula, first; the first Android phones shipped with swiveling keyboards, trackballs and numerous slip pads. As iPhone marketings grew, everyone else’s buttons, sliders and keyboards were boiled away as decorators imitated the iPhone’s form factor. The best reaction, it appears to be, was a simple one.

Twelve years later, everything has become the same. Phones have become … digesting. When everyone is trying to build a better rectangle, the combat became one of hardware specs. Which one has the fastest CPU? The best camera?