Foldable Smartphones Are Becoming Mainstream, Says Samsung

Tsing

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Samsung's big bet on foldable smartphones is really beginning to pay off, according to Dr. TM Roh.

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I'm considering the new fold... IF they include a s-pen. If not then I'll probably avoid it too.
 
Grimlakin said:
I'm considering the new fold... IF they include a s-pen. If not then I'll probably avoid it too.
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Oh come on. Using a stylus is so 1990's. :p

What can it do on a phone that you can't accomplish with your finger?

IMHO, all those "S-Pens" accomplish is to waste space in the chassis that could be used for other things. Maybe more battery capacity?

If I had a phone that came with one, chances are I'd never use it.
 
Zarathustra said:
Oh come on. Using a stylus is so 1990's. :p

What can it do on a phone that you can't accomplish with your finger?

IMHO, all those "S-Pens" accomplish is to waste space in the chassis that could be used for other things. Maybe more battery capacity?

If I had a phone that came with one, chances are I'd never use it.
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I don't use mine all the time but I do use it from time to time and find the utility nice. Also for my wife since she has some nerve disorders using a touch screen for more than a minute or two actually becomes uncomfortable and painful for her so having a stylus is a saving grace.
 
Grimlakin said:
I don't use mine all the time but I do use it from time to time and find the utility nice. Also for my wife since she has some nerve disorders using a touch screen for more than a minute or two actually becomes uncomfortable and painful for her so having a stylus is a saving grace.
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That makes sense. I have no experience with those types of medical issues and how they are helped. I didn't realize that holding a stylus would make it easier in that case.

I was thinking of usage scenarios in which I would benefit from a stylus, and the only one that came to mind was hitting that **** tiny X to close ads :p
 
Tempest said:
I still don't even have a "normal" smartphone. 📵
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I consider myself old school too, but that I don't know how you do.

I consider them essential to every day life these days. I use it many times a day to look up crucial information or directions while on the go.

How do you pull up th emenu at those restaurants that just give you a QR code?
 
I just got my 1st personal cell phone about 6 months ago due to various things with the family. I went with an iPhone, not because I wanted it, but because I'm exhausted of having to walk everyone through how to use Skype/Zoom/Meet and just gave up for facetime.

Prior to that, I had numerous work cell phones but even then I was the IT admin at my job for almost 2 years before the ED pulled me aside and said, "Pete, I'm sorry, but we need you to take one of the phones in case we need to get a hold of you".
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
I just got my 1st personal cell phone about 6 months ago due to various things with the family. I went with an iPhone, not because I wanted it, but because I'm exhausted of having to walk everyone through how to use Skype/Zoom/Meet and just gave up for facetime.

Prior to that, I had numerous work cell phones but even then I was the IT admin at my job for almost 2 years before the ED pulled me aside and said, "Pete, I'm sorry, but we need you to take one of the phones in case we need to get a hold of you".
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Ah.

I got my first personal cellphone in 1997 when I was 17, which wasn't uncommon in Sweden at the time. They adopted earlier than here. It was one of these:

1658527449360.png

It was a basic phone (as were all of them at the time) It supported texting, but I never got into it. I just used it for voice calls.

Then I moved to the U.S. in 1999, and didn't get another cellphone until 2002. I was at college at the time, and found I just didn't need it. That, and the only people who had cellphones at the time were the international students, lol.

In fact, I've never had a landline phone in my name. As a kid in the 80's and 90's we of course had them in our house. And there was one in my college dorm room, but by the time I got my first apartment I had my cellphone and didn't see the need to also pay for an expensive land line.

The 2002 phone was some random garbage of Cingular Wireless. It was an analog phone. Eventually Cingular was merged/acquired/whatever and turned into AT&T and I was forced onto digital.

Then I had basic phone after basic phone for a few years, followed eventually by the first gen Motorola Razr flip phone in ~2005. it was actually cool. It could run some limited java based apps, but was hardly a smartphone, at least not by modern standards.

My first smartphone was the first iPhone in 2007. I thought it was insane to pay $600 for a phone, but then my girlfriend at the time got it, and I wasn't about to not have one if she had one :p

That was followed by an iPhone 3g, and later an iPhone 4. At that time in 2010 I got my first work phone, a blackberry curve. They didn't ask me or anything, it was just on my desk my first day on the job. It felt like a **** dinosaur compared to my iPhone 4. I gave it an honest try for the first few weeks, but I hated using the thing, and I hated carrying two phones, so eventually I just shut it off, and stuck it in my desk drawer and never used it again.

By approximately 2012, I was starting to get frustrated by the fact that iPhones had tiny screens, hadn't gotten copy and paste yet, and I never liked their walled garden approach, so I decided it was time to give android a try. I took the opportunity to get rid of AT&T and switched to Verizon, picking up a Samsung Galaxy S3 in the process, and I liked it, but I didn't really love it, until I installed CyanogenMod on the thing, and that made it a spectacular phone.

Then I had a series of Android phones. LG G2 -> Motorola Droid Maxx. I briefly bought a cheap used Asus Zenfone 2 just to use while I traveled in Brazil, and I wound up really liking it. When I got back home, I decided I'd had enough of the Droid Maxx, picked up a Nexus 5x and signed up for Google Fi.

Since then it's been Pixel -> Pixel 3 (both small ones, I didn't like phablets) and now a Pixel 5a (5g)

I know many people consider work phones to be a fringe benefit, and use them for personal purposes, but I'd probably turn that down if offered right now. There are just too many privacy issues when you use a phone that you don't own. The data on the phone is always the property of its owner.

Luckily my current employer offers an $80 per month cellphone allowance you can use towards your cellphone bill. It's the best of both worlds. I get my phone paid for and I don't have to sacrifice any privacy (beyond what I am already sacrificing by just having a phone)
 
Been using a cheap samsung A5 for the last couple of years, can use it to call or text people, and browse the internet while at home on my wifi.

Been thinking of upgrading as it is starting to get slow using internet and battery life seems to have gone down quite a bit. Rarely call or text though, I use prepaid service and barely use 15€/year on it.

More on topic, the only person I know who has a foldaable phone is Linus/techtips, probably a sponsored one, but he seems to like it well enough, he did wear out the screenprotector not that long ago.
 
Like others have stated, I've never seen a foldable phone anywhere outside of advertisements and maybe reviews (although I don't really recall seeing reviews either). Honestly I wasn't sure any had actually made it to market.

Zarathustra said:
I got my first personal cellphone in 1997 when I was 17
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At 18 I was the first person in my family to get a cell phone. Didn't want one, didn't think I needed one, but my parents got me one cuz they wanted to be able to contact me easily while I was away at college. Like most cell phones around the year 2000, it was very simple, just a small old-school LCD screen to display phone numbers, and that's it. The phone had no capabilities other than placing and receiving voice calls. It was from Nokia and the service was Cingular.

Zarathustra said:
My first smartphone was the first iPhone in 2007.
Click to expand...
My first smartphone was the HTC Evo 4G in 2010. That's the first time I really got to spend time with a touchscreen. Hated them ever since. I can't stand them, almost as bad as trying to use a controller and analog sticks for first-person shooters. What's worse is that cars are chock full of them now.

Zarathustra said:
I thought it was insane to pay $600 for a phone, but then my girlfriend at the time got it, and I wasn't about to not have one if she had one :p
Click to expand...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! Surprised that got you to put cash down for one. Also I am surprised you gave money to Apple.

Zarathustra said:
If I had a phone that came with one, chances are I'd never use it.
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My previous phone was a Galaxy Note 4. I almost never used the stylus (and with my mom's Note 4 it kept falling out and she eventually lost it, I seem to recall). However I did actually use it to jot down handwritten notes real quick, which was impossible to do with my finger. Now I am using a cheap Galaxy A32, given to me for free by T-Mobile after they bought out Sprint and shut down their network. The Note 4 wasn't gonna work on the T-Mobile network. So I'm back to not having a stylus, and of course I don't miss it.

Zarathustra said:
I consider them essential to every day life these days. I use it many times a day to look up crucial information or directions while on the go.
Click to expand...
I feel like often there are times when you need Internet access away from home, and you're not always gonna have a laptop with you (and a way to use a cellular data network with your laptop). Plus you can't keep a laptop in your pocket and whip it out when necessary. I also use my phones for GPS navigation. I used to use a Garmin device (which was stolen from me when I got robbed in 2010), but then I discovered that Google Maps is waaaaay better. Waze isn't bad either (although I don't use Waze for navigation, I use it for warnings about cameras, police, and other hazards out there on the roads - a great companion for my radar detector). Phones also replaced my MP3 player (which was also stolen in that 2010 robbery). Since my car is well over 2 decades old and doesn't have USB ports, I use a tape deck adapter to play music stored on my phone in my car. I tried to play video games on my phone through emulation (or ports), but touchscreen sucks for that, as it does for most things. Sure I could use a controller, but I'm not gonna carry a controller around with me all the time along with my phone. One thing that is very handy about smartphones is having a camera readily available at all times. I also make use of text messages because I'd rather not bother with voice calls if I can help it. Although again, touchscreen makes typing a bitch, so I'm not that reliant on text messages. But yeah in most cases I prefer them over voice calls (email is the form of communication I like the most). Oh yeah, my smartphone is also my general purpose alarm clock/timer.
 
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DrezKill said:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! Surprised that got you to put cash down for one. Also I am surprised you gave money to Apple.
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Lol,

I deserve that.

My argument at the time was that most of what Apple does is dumb, but there is nothing else on the market right now (in 2007) with the functionality of the iPhone.

I chafe at Apple's "revolutionary" and "magic" sentiments, in fact, the iPhone was nothing of the sort. It was evolutionary. The whole world of phones was going in the direction of touch screen candy bar devices, but Apple got there first, and there wasn't anything else on the market that did what the iPhone did in 2007.

I wasn't going to get one, but I also wasn't about to sit there and be jealous of my girlfriends phone, so I bit the bullet. :p

And while it was a lot of money for a phone back then, it wasn't a bad choice. I did a lot of things with that phone that I couldn't have otherwise done, and apart from the walled garden, it was pretty awesome, but when other alternatives without the walled garden became viable, I went for it
 
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Some of you may find the following paper interesting, but I'd suggest ignoring the title. I'm not interested in creating an iPhone versus Android phone war, and their analysis didn't produce a clear winner anyway; it's configuration dependent.


Here's a direct link to the full text (PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.13722 (at least skim it!)

iPhone or Droid​

iPhone or Droid

https://xkcd.com/662
 
I was done with Android after my Galaxy Note 3 was like 3 years old, and got stuck on some kind of crappy update loop on one of the included Samsung apps (or maybe it was a Verizon app). I couldn’t uninstall it without rooting the phone, and I couldn’t apply the newest OS because they really wanted you to buy a new phone.

I’m not willing to root with my phone, etc like I’m willing to muck with my PC. If I’m stuck with my phone being controlled by the vendor, Apple is a way less terrible experience than Android.
 
I’ve been Apple pretty much the entire ride.

There really have only been 3 versions of phones:

The original, the design of which culminated with the iPhone 4. The quintessential “smart phone” design that kicked it all off.

The second generation - larger screens and the odd push for cameras, but most notably with the shift to proprietary Apple SOCs (the first of which was the 4S). This generation went clear through the iPhone 8. This also brought about the beginning of biometrics being standard with TouchID

Then the 10 through today - we lost the home button and the screen goes to full frontal. Biometrics “evolves” to FaceID. The loss of the home button added a whole new level of UI “gestures” for control.

You could pick almost any phone in those three groupings and it would be almost identical to any other phone of the same grouping. Yeah they got faster and added some tricks, but it was all minor in the grand scheme.
 
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