The varying Form Factor (1)

    Not to hype-up or anything, but honestly, I’m really excited about this topic. So, most of us, almost every one of us, we use a regular smartphone, a smartphone which doesn’t fold into half or a phone which doesn’t flip or one which doesn’t have a secondary display. But there are actually several smartphones that can do all those things, in the market. Nowadays, there are smartphones that has a screen size as big as a tablet but can fold into half, to a normal form factor, there are smartphones that has not one but two functional displays which you can make use of, there is a smartphone that have wings (don’t ask me whether it’d fly), and many more different designs. A couple of years back, I thought we’ve reached a peak in smartphone designs, like this is the saturation point and we are stuck up with this rectangular block glass sandwiched design. But, oh boyy! I was wrong. Looking at the current circumstances your future smartphone may not be just a glass bar.

EARLY ADOPTERS

    It all started a couple of years back when a company named Royole showcased their device called “FlexPai” which had a display size of around 8 inches (for reff. normal display size of smartphones is 6 inches) but that is not the fun part, they, Royole, claimed that you can fold this huge size tablet like smartphone into half and bring it to the size of a regular device. Cool right! It’s like having both a tablet and a smartphone in a single device, use it as a smartphone like everyone but if you need some extra screen real estate, just unfold it, you have a tablet in your hand now. It was a first-gen product, so it had its own problems like durability issues and software was not so perfect, like that.

Into the Fold

    Before moving ahead, let’s take look into how this actually works. So, we all know our screens are made up of glass and we also know, glass is glass and glass doesn’t fold. So, how these folding phones operate then, well, the screen in these devices are actually not glass, though the companies market them as glass, they are not. These devices use an Ultra-Thin Glass display, and again even though its named glass, it is actually not, it has a plastic layer over the display which helps it to do all the bending and folding. And there is a thing called “Hinge” (not the dating app) present in these devices which helps in this process of folding and unfolding. This Hinge basically acts as a Spinal cord thingy for the smartphone and is one of the most important parts of these folding and dual-screen smartphones.

    So, now as we’ve completed the Folding phones 101 course, we can go ahead and look into some more devices. Along with Royole, another huge tech company jumped into the scene and started making folding smartphones and that is Samsung. They launched their first-gen folding device, the Galaxy Fold 1. The Fold 1 folds in unlike the FlexPai which folded out. It has actually two screens, a huge primary display and if you fold in there is a smaller secondary screen on the outside. Again, a first-gen product so it had tons and tons of caveats. But Samsung rectified those issues and launched a second-generation Fold 2 just a couple of weeks ago. And it is a huge jump from the Fold 1. The outer screen is now big and it is more durable and the software implementation is very well optimized.

Flippy boy

    All this time, we were looking at smartphones that have a huge display and can fold into a normal smartphone, but there is another implementation of this folding mechanism, the Flip phones. Remember those olden days of using these clam shell shaped Flip phones. So, the smartphones with these form factors may look like a clamshell kind of a thing, but you can flip it open and use it as a regular smartphone. These can give you a dose of nostalgia. Samsung’s Z Flip and Motorola Razr are a couple of ‘flippity foppity’ smartphones that are available.

Phew!! It is going on and on. There are lot of interesting stuffs are yet to discuss in this topic but I guess I’ll stop it here for now. And maybe post a follow up for this where we can look into other formfactors like dual screen devices and the all new winged smartphone. So, watch out for that post and I guess that’s it for now.

THANK YOU FOR READING                                                             DIGITALLY YOURS ✌️