The Evolution of Foldables, Told in X-Rays

Foldable smartphones have come a long way. The complex devices on the market today incorporate folding OLED panels, flexible glass, and increasingly sophisticated hinge mechanisms to deliver tablet size screens in a phone shaped form factor.

But the origin story of the foldable phone is far less glitzy. It all started as nothing more than a plastic flip cover held in place by two plastic nubs that we’d be generous to call a hinge, and a spring and magnet mechanism that helped keep the cover held closed. Released in 1989, the Motorola MicroTAC 550 is an example of this style of phone.

Fast forward to 2020, a relatively short 31 years in the grand scheme of things, and the Samsung Galaxy Fold introduces consumers to a true folding phone experience, taking a pocket sized slab and turning it into a tablet. From 2020 to 2026, foldable tech rapidly gained momentum. Not only have materials, screens, and hinge designs changed, the form factors have changed too as seen in Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8.

The form factor in foldable phones has been, and is likely to remain, somewhat fluid. Following in Oppo’s wake, Google was the second smartphone manufacturer to release a passport-style foldable in 2021. Samsung’s taller and slimmer foldables dominated the market at the time, and Google seems to have decided to follow Samsung’s lead starting with their second generation of foldables all the way up to this years Pixel 11 Pro Fold.

Any discussion about foldables would be incomplete without a look at the Chinese foldables market. China accounts for around 55% of the global foldables market share while Chinese manufacturer Huawei absolutely dominated last year with 44% of global foldables sales, dwarfing all other foldables manufacturers as well as the next three biggest manufacturers combined.

The story of foldable screens started in China with the Royole FlexPai. The software was crap, and it had a bunch of hardware flaws, but so did the Galaxy Fold that followed a couple of months after. These early foldables were tech demos in all but name.

Consumers first got their hands on a passport-style foldable with the Oppo Find N in 2021. Oppo had identified the same form factor that Apple is widely expected to settle on 5 years later for their own foldable debut. In the meantime, the Oppo Find N6 surpassed the Galaxy Fold line with a foldable that reviewers claimed set the bar for design and functionality.

Meanwhile, Hauwei released the Pura X Max in May of this year, a passport-style foldable touting silicon-carbon batteries, support for up to 66 watts of wired and 50 watts of wireless charging, a physical camera aperture, and a homegrown Kirin 9030 Pro SoC. To say that China is now at the cutting edge of foldables development would be an understatement.

And of course lets not forget the plucky yet mostly forgotten flip phones that have made a valiant comeback in foldable form. It started with phones like the chonky Motorola MicroTAC “Digital Personal Communicator,” just one example of this precursor tech with its extendable flip cover.

That design evolved into the popular Moto Razr clamshell design from 2004. The flip cover is still there, and in this form factor it’s much easier to see the subsequent foldable phones that followed more than a decade later.

Since then we’ve seen multiple flip phones hit the market, and the Razr still has a foothold in the clamshell market with what I’d describe as more than just the stubborn persistence of boomer nostalgia.

What’s next for foldables? I think that largely depends on two things: Apple’s flex in the coming days, and whether there’s actually enough momentum for Samsung and Apple to remain relevant in a Chinese dominated market. The likes of Samsung may have been first where foldable screen technology is concerned, but in almost every other respect, including advanced hinge design, Chinese manufacturers have matched or surpassed anything produced by the smartphone heavyweights.

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