Have you ever stopped to think that the world seems to keep getting weirder and weirder? The eccentricity certainly hasn’t escaped us when it comes to the raft of “foldable” smartphones that have recently broke cover, if not quite landed on UK retail shelves just yet.
The idea of a phone that you can fold out to form what is basically a small tablet might, at the moment, just seem like a technical novelty. However, could it have promising implications for the way business owners get their work done? There are certainly good reasons to think so…
Could you be lured into the fold – the Samsung Galaxy Fold?
Though many foldable smartphones have been unveiled to oohs and aahs, perhaps the most headline-grabbing addition to the foldable smartphone list so far has been the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Could it be the product to take the device category mainstream?
The Fold is certainly impressive on paper, with its 7.3-inch screen – only half an inch smaller than the display of an iPad Mini – that can be folded over into pocket-sized form. T3 reports that the Fold won’t be released until April 2019, but will pack impressive technology under the hood.
That tech includes a whopping 12GB of RAM, 512GB of onboard storage, a triple-lens rear camera – including two 12-megapixel lenses and one 16MP lens – and a 4,380mAh battery divided into two along the fold. However, all of that will come at a cost of roughly £1,515.
Practical implications of a screen you can unfold
The killer feature of the Fold remains, naturally, the screen itself – not least because, according to Samsung, it will be possible to run three apps simultaneously on the device, if you wish. The usual boundaries between smartphone and tablet look set to become even more blurred.
That’s good news for business owners. As pointed out in a ZDNet article, while cellular-capable laptops and tablets with the ability to facilitate phone calls exist, these devices fall short of a phone in portability, therefore preventing the traditional smartphone from being rendered redundant.
However, foldable phones could help to finally bridge the lingering-app between large-screened smartphones and small tablets. Productivity apps for both are already plentiful – and it’s not hard to imagine how the functionality they enable could be enriched yet further…
Google has heralded the foldable phone’s arrival
As acknowledged by WIRED, it was last year that Google unveiled screen continuity and multi-resume support for Android. In other words, the mobile OS can now natively support folding displays of various configurations – and quite a few other foldable phones are already in the pipeline.
Huawei, Oppo, Motorola and Xiaomi have all already revealed unreleased models and prototypes – so, the business apps you run well on your tablet could soon lose none or little of their functionality in the transition to foldable displays. In augmenting that functionality with business-friendly services from a telecoms firm like Planet Numbers, you could soon be good to go.
