Foldable Screens Bending The Rules Of Phone Design

"Remember when phones used to flip?" asks James O'Malley, as foldable screens make a return

- James O'Malley,

I REMEMBER IN THE early Noughties, the phone I most coveted wasn’t a Nokia 3310—even though it was a near-indestructible brick, on which you could play Snake. What

I wanted was a Motorola RAZR. What made it cool wasn’t just that it

was "razor" thin (hence the name), but that it was a flip phone. It kept your keypad and screen safe, it was more portable—and it meant you could answer calls with a big, theatrical flick of the wrist, as if to say to the world, “Look at me and all of the important business I am doing”.

However, before I could get my hands on one, flip phones quickly fell out of fashion as phones became almost unfathomably smarter. It turns out a flipping mechanism is a bad idea when what you really want is to maximise the size of the screen, so you can fill it with apps and all of the other modern functions we expect from our phones.

But all of this could be about to change. And two decades on, we could be currently living through the rebirth of the flip phone. Why? Because we can make phones that don’t just flip—but fold.