LG folds at prospect of launching bendy phone while Samsung flaunts its upcoming kit on telly Samsung has launched TV ads featuring its foldable phone – but its rival chaebol isn't so keen. LG has put plans for a foldable product on hold, it confirmed yesterday. That's despite considerable investment in flexible OLED display technology. Last month it announced a rollable OLED TV, which will go on sale this year. But …
I want one of them with two or three pull out positions.
OR
A phone TWICE as thick as my current one. Phones have been too skinny for maybe 5 years. One with integral cover and x4 battery life better than looking cool in shop / adverts and needing a fat bumper/cover, which makes the phone about as thick as a big purse or stuffed wallet.
Perhaps a detachable sleep cover that can be replaced by a docking USB keyboard.
Can't see the logic in integrating the cover into the phone. Covers need to absorb shock, so can't be made hard, so therefore will inevitably scratch and scuff over time. What exactly is the downside to a replaceable phone cover?
Also, different people want different things from covers. Some prefer the wallet design to protect the screen, some people find wallet cases too fiddly. Some people find little kick stands useful, some don't. Some people like glittery purple cases, most don't.
Sure, but I'd expect even more dry spyware and adware in their products as part as their house reordering. I abandoned LG products after I saw an ad _in_ their TV for a Samsung TV apparently owned by a Toyota SUV owner. The only option on that TV to fight ads was to "customize" ads by creating an LG account.
Yeah, it is very rare to see a smartphone manufacturer taking sensible decisions.
"And the public needs to be convinced by the demonstration of a compelling use case" Well, that has never stopped any one from throwing all sort of stupid gimmicks at phones. See everything from quad cameras, to the notch, to face recognition, to "IA" in the cameras....
Hopefully this means the market is moving away from the current situation where the manufacturers decide what is best for us (heralded by Apple, but wholeheartedly embraced by the rest) to a more open and sensible one.
> all sort of stupid gimmicks at phones. See everything from quad cameras, to the notch, to face recognition, to "IA" in the cameras....
- notch is just placing status bar info next to the camera so the actual usable screen for websites is bigger.
- multiple cameras are for zoom or wide angle. It's just easier and more reliable to have multiple sensor + lens units than it is to have a mechanism to move multiple lenses across a single sensor, or to have a variable zoom lens in a phone.
- using software (and the hardware to accelerate said software) to eek every bit of image quality out of a relatively small sensor is no gimmick. Seek out reviews of the Google Pixel camera on any website suck as DXOMark or DPReview to see real life test shots and lab condition testing.
... but how do you bend everything else - batteries, memory, chips, etc? So the screen should be separated from the rest, as in the LG TV. Moreover how much people are going to wait for the device to "unbend"? A book-like device could work, other form factors may not.
Doesn't Apple's new generation of iPad Pro already have this bending feature built in?
I'd happily have a phone with the form factor of something like a Nokia Communicator. When in phone mode a mini touch screen or jog wheel to select the contact to call - and open up to use da big screen. Then it fits more nicely in your pocket. But I wouldn't want to pay all that much for such slight convenience.
Neither do LG, which is why they're not launching one. But I'd guess this started off like most Pointless Product Development. A director with poor technical knowledge hears a rumour that a competitor is developing a folding phone. He concludes that they must already know something about a major market opportunity, and that LG (or whoever - this is how it works in many companies) will be at risk of falling behind if they "don't innovate" the same concept. He then tells minions they should be working on a folding phone. Minions consider (and immediately dismiss) the idea of telling director that it is a bloody stupid idea, and the product development budget is re-allocated to create a line for "foldable phones". For some years, unlucky researchers get allocated to this fool's errand, but still nobody dares tell the director, other than to give optimistic but vague reports on progress, with commercial launch comfortably far off in the future. Eventually, when the original director retires, his predecessor takes a look and says "why are we wasting money on a folding screen?", and the minions go "It was your predecessor's idea, it won't ever work". The foldable phone is cancelled, but there's always a risk that the new director hears some unproven anecdote that Apple/Samsung/etc are developing a wacky new feature (eg in-screen cameras), and the cycle begins again.
I suspect that this was how the shameful botch that is Bixby came about.
"I don't even understand the need for a bendy phone."
It's not hard to understand though. 1) I'm not willing to carry a tablet-sized device, ie. one larger than a normal phone. 2) I absolutely need a screen larger than a normal phone has - I do all my book reading on my phone, and the current screen size absolutely makes it suck. Also, any browsing I do on it almost sucks worse than seeing my dentist, because I happen to not give a crap about vertically scrolling cards like Facebook timelines or Twitter tweets or Messenger messages, and anything else* is just miserable to read on a screen that size, both in portrait and landscape mode.
* I have yet to see a website with a "mobile" (or worse: "adaptive") version that isn't definitely worse than seeing my dentist...
Best/Last phone with a removable battery. Gives me a 30s recharge time. Take the case off pop the back off put battery in replace and power on. So much better than the silly inductive chargers.
Perhaps the way to go would be a tiny slim phone, for the wow factor and water proofing but sell an after market case with a decent replaceable battery. Pls :-)
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