I absolutely love foldable phones. Not in a "they're an interesting experiment" way — I love them enthusiastically, across every form factor, and I think they're by far the most fun and charming category of smartphone being made right now. I know they get a lot of hate. I think that hate is mostly wrong, and I'm going to tell you why.
Every Form Factor
The book-style bi-fold is the one that gets the most attention, and deservedly so. You open it like a paperback and get a proper tablet-sized display. You close it and it fits in a pocket. The tradeoff for that — some thickness, a price premium, and a crease — is, to my mind, an extremely small price to pay for having significantly more screen in your pocket at virtually no actual size tradeoff when the phone is folded. People talk about the crease as though it's some kind of deal-breaker. I genuinely don't understand that reaction. After a couple of days of use you stop seeing it completely. It is a non-issue.
The flip-style fold is a different kind of clever. It takes a full-sized phone and folds it in half so it actually fits in a pocket the way phones used to before screens took over. The outer display, if the manufacturer has bothered to make it properly capable, means you can handle a lot of your day without ever opening the phone. I love the practicality of it and I love the way it looks — there's something genuinely charming about a phone that folds like that.
And then there's the tri-fold, which is still very new and very expensive and probably more phone than most people need. I love it anyway. The ambition of it, the fact that someone built it and is selling it — that's exciting. The form factors are multiplying, and that's a good thing. Book-style bi-fold, flip-style bi-fold, tri-fold: each one is a different answer to the question of what a phone should be able to do, and I'm genuinely here for all of them.
What Good Foldable Software Looks Like
The hardware is only part of the story. What makes a foldable actually worth using is what the software does with the fact that the screen folds. OnePlus has done some of the best work here — the way the interface is designed around the fold, the genuinely useful multitasking that takes advantage of the larger canvas, the awareness of the hinge angle so the phone can sit at 90 degrees on a table and behave differently than it does fully open. That's software design that's been thought through rather than bolted on. It's what more manufacturers should be doing.
This connects to something I think about a lot with phones in general: smartphones should be becoming more like desktop computers. Not in terms of how they look — the UI doesn't need to mimic a desktop and probably shouldn't — but in terms of what they're capable of, how they handle multiple things at once, how seriously they take the idea that you might want to do real work on them. Web apps are already built mobile-first. The hardware and software are capable enough. Foldables are the form factor that actually takes that trajectory seriously.
Blackberry Keyboards and Slide-Outs
I'm genuinely excited about the comeback of Blackberry-style physical keyboards on phones. There is something that touchscreen keyboards have never actually replaced about the feel of real keys — the tactile feedback, the muscle memory, typing without looking at your hands. A touchscreen keyboard is fine. A good physical keyboard is better, and the people who learned to type on a Blackberry know exactly what I mean.
What I really want to see — and I think would be extraordinary — is a foldable that uses a Blackberry Priv-style slide-out keyboard. The Priv had a full touchscreen that slid up to reveal a physical keyboard below it. You got the full-screen experience and the physical keyboard experience in the same device without permanently compromising either. Now imagine that on a book-style foldable. You'd have the large inner display, the outer display, and a slide-out keyboard as a third input mode. That is a phone I would buy immediately. I don't know why nobody is building it.
The PDA-style layout of the past — smaller screen, keyboard front and centre, more purpose-built tools than smartphone and less pretension than a laptop — still has a real appeal to me. There was a directness to those devices that modern phones have mostly lost in their pursuit of being everything to everyone while looking identical to each other. A foldable with a proper keyboard would get a long way back toward that.
What I'm Actually Using
Right now I daily drive both an iPhone Air and a Xiaomi 14T. The 14T is genuinely my preferred device for most things — the camera is better than the iPhone's in the real-world situations I'm actually shooting in, Android with some customisation is less restrictive, and I find myself just liking it more overall. The one thing I do miss is not having a programmable button or a dedicated camera button, both of which the iPhone Air has. That's a real gap. But as a camera phone and a daily phone, the 14T is excellent.
If I were buying a foldable today, it would probably be the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7. The Chinese-brand foldables — particularly from some of the companies that don't have the same global market presence as Samsung — are also doing very interesting things, often at better prices with hardware that competes seriously. I'd look at both before deciding.
A Note on Nexus
I've been thinking lately about the transition from the Nexus line to the Pixel line, and what it represents in the broader sweep of how the industry has moved. The Nexus programme was something genuinely unusual for a company the size of Google: they would hand off the design and manufacture of their flagship Android device to rotating third-party partners — LG, Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Asus, Motorola. Each one brought a different sensibility to the hardware. The Nexus 5 by LG was a near-perfect phone for its time — compact, clean, affordable. The Nexus 6 by Motorola went the other direction, almost absurdly large, but interesting for it. The programme had the quality of an experiment that was still genuinely open about what it was trying to find out.
What I find compelling about that model in retrospect is the implicit trust it contained. Google trusted external manufacturers to carry their reference vision for Android. Different teams, different approaches, different ideas about what the phone should be. That diversity of perspective produced hardware that felt varied in a way the Pixel line doesn't. The Pixel line is more refined and arguably more competent, but it's also more controlled — one hardware team, one aesthetic, one house style repeated across successive generations with incremental improvements. It is excellent at what it is, but it is not experimenting.
The move to Pixel felt, at the time, like a natural maturation. Google taking direct control of the hardware, building the full stack the way Apple does. I understood the logic then and I still understand it. But the thing you lose in that bargain is the openness — the sense that the programme might produce something surprising, something that reflects a vision you didn't anticipate. The Nexus line was never safe in that way. The Pixel line almost always is.
I think this mirrors something that happened across the industry more broadly around the same time. The experimental period of Android hardware — dual-screen phones, sliders, curved backs, modular designs, honest hardware weirdness — gave way to a consolidation around a narrower set of forms. Everyone converged on rectangles with cameras, and then spent years arguing about exactly how many cameras and what millimetre thickness. The Nexus era was the last time a major player openly distributed that question to multiple partners and said: you figure it out. I miss that, even though the Pixel 9 is technically a better phone than any Nexus ever was.
In Summary
Foldable phones are practical, they're space-efficient, they make use of their form factor in ways that flat slabs simply cannot, and they're tremendously more fun than anything else being made in the smartphone space right now. The crease is not a problem. The thickness is manageable. The price will come down.
I find everything about this category charming — the engineering ambition, the different answers to the same problem, the fact that buying a foldable feels like buying something that someone thought hard about rather than something stamped out of a template. The rest of the market has mostly converged on a rectangle. Foldables are still asking interesting questions. That's worth a lot.