It's good that companies take these leaps of fate but they sort of seem reaching.
Why not wait and keep pushing the tech until it's worth releasing a beautiful product that can capture actual market share?
The ecosystem is Android. The vast majority of apps should work just fine, even on a display with an unusual aspect ratio.
Also, the smartphone market has started saturating and device makers are clamoring for a feature - any feature - that will get people to buy new ones. This has resulted in lots of little useless features as they attempt to differentiate, but here we have an actually super useful feature which is costly to implement and will induce real gadget-envy for the first time in years. So there's going to be a gold rush behind it.
Sort of like the Touch Bar on MacBook Pros (which I have). Yeah it’s awesome to have on select apps like Photoshop, Safari, etc but it’s in no way so valuable as to build a whole product around - like this phone is trying to do.
You can take the Touch Bar away from me at any moment and I won’t mind.
Unless apps deeply integrate with this folding capability etc its just a gimmick that I expect will die pretty quick or remain a very niche product.
I use multiapp all the time on my current phone. I love it. Android makes it easy to move in and out of multiapp mode, swiping the separator when you want to go back to full screen. Many android apps already support this feature.
This is the same thing, except with a larger screen & different panel arrangement.
It reminds me a lot of the first MacBook Airs that sold to a niche market at a premium for a few years until the technology had advanced to the point that they could target a mainstream price point, at which point they became exceedingly popular.
I could easily see the same thing happening here.
I agree. The writing is on the wall... people are ditching desktop computers in droves in favour of handheld/portable devices.
Just as I usually do with any new V1.0 tech... I'm staying away, but am excited about future improvements!
(It's not like I can buy laptops any more, since those are all garbage even when I pay $4000 for a supposedly high-end system, so I certainly have spare device money laying around!)
I've never been able to view these properly on a kindle. Well, last time I tried anyway, is it better now?
A foldable phone may meet his criteria, a Kindle would not.
Most of my books are still physical books. It‘s weird but I often buy books based on their cover.
The real bottleneck is UI, not CPU's.
Modern non-phone CPUs can have TDPs of more than 80W. If your phone did 80W, it would burn your hand. So, forgive me if I'm skeptical of any benchmark that says a phone outperforms a laptop.
You're arguing that the phone CPU can get significantly better performance, do so with less power, and occupy a form factor smaller than what a laptop requires? Why would I not just manufacture a less space-constrained version of this chip (to make it cheaper) and stick it in a laptop?
I Googled the specific benchmark you referenced. I'm not able to find results on it, but one of the top hits was this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/googl...
Kind of like how a plane is faster than a car. You're trading off some flexibility for that added speed.
This sounds like punishment to me.
Hopefully enough early adopters buy this thing so that they keep iterating and improving on these. It's easy to see how a phone with a folding screen would be desirable to a lot of people... if it were thinner and cheaper. The first foldable phone is probably not going to be a great product, maybe not even the first 10 of them. In 5 years maybe they'll be great though.
Now there are lots of people that could benefit from this because you can have bigger letters on the screen. So it is far from a vanity product, like the latest and greatest iPhone it does have genuine utility.
There is also a class of people who are vastly richer than everyone else, you see them drive in stupidly expensive cars. For this type of customer the $$$$ of this gadget is not a consideration.
This gadget won't be 'displaying three apps at a time' any more than your desktop has three windows open side by side on it. It matters not about the keyboard, this is for consuming content with big type. Everyone has a regular phone already, this will sell well as soon as they can get the production volume up.
I can only speak for myself, but I have been waiting. Since 2011, to be precise, which is when Sanyo and I believe Sony came out with 4.3 inch phones that folded out into 7-inch tablets.
If there's any company that can invest properly in this form factor, it's Samsung, so I'm glad they're doing this.
Certainly not going to buy it at that price point though!