Attendees of product launch events have been known to clap enthusiastically for wireless transfer demos. They’ll whoop for tweaked contrast ratios and it’s hard to truly do justice to the buzz in the room for an incremental upgrade on a smartphone camera.
All this phone fever occurred at Mobile World Congress 2019, as it does every year, but just imagine being Huawei CEO Richard Yu on press day of the Barcelona smartphone show or Samsung’s mobile chief DJ Koh, days before at Galaxy Unpacked in San Francisco. Yu and Koh both got to do something quite unusual: announce and show off genuine advances in phone design – the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X – to rapt audiences.
All this showmanship and gadget hype is absolutely Apple’s fault, and yet Cupertino is a notable, if not unsurprising, absence from our new folding phone reality. So, with WeChat users in China declaring Apple dead this week, is a folding iPhone-iPad hybrid inevitable if Apple wants to stay in the business of defining how we use our everyday tech?
Folding smartphones are the latest, and most visible, illustration of how Apple’s rivals have moved beyond mere imitation and into the kind of territory that makes us consider clapping (never whooping). Sure, the Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X are nowhere near iPhone class on design polish or usability. But put a iPhone XS Max next to Huawei’s foldable phone and Apple looks to be behind the curve.
“The Mate X, much like the neural engine on the Kirin processors, is hugely important for Huawei in convincing industry press, industry watchers and the early adopter community that it can be on the cutting edge and can bring meaningful innovation to the smartphone ecosystem,” says Daniel Gleeson, senior analyst at Ovum. “Chinese handset companies are beginning to overcome the ‘cheap, copycat and low quality’ label that has followed them around for years, and this is a major part in changing those conversations. While some Chinese brands appear to still be in thrall to Apple’s designs, Huawei, OnePlus and Oppo seem much more intent on carving their own path forward.”
As for a folding iPhone, Gleeson says forget a 2019 launch – the last thing Apple does is rush out hardware – but predicts that it’s “unlikely but possible for 2020”. Patents filed by Apple for flexible and folding displays have been popping up online for years. Patents aren’t guarantees on future products, but for what’s it’s worth, the US Patent and Trademark Office, with delightful timing, published one from December 2017 this week.
It details a “selective heating” system designed to avoid damage to the bendy screens in cold weather. Patents filed in 2014 and 2016 show an illustration of a device with an inner fold, on what looks to be a tablet-like form factor, similar to Samsung’s efforts, and describe a screen that can fold in half or in thirds.
That fits the conventional wisdom that Apple is developing this technology in some capacity but will likely aim to be best rather than first, as per the Apple Watch. “It is inconceivable that Apple has not been experimenting with flexible displays in it design labs for years,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. “However, Apple is rarely the first to embrace cutting edge technologies like this. That said, you can be sure Apple will be scrutinising the new products from Samsung, Huawei and others with a forensic level of detail trying to figure out how Apple can best deliver a foldable iPhone.”
In many ways, an iPhone-iPad folder from Apple (iFold? iPhad? iPhold?) makes a lot of sense. Just think how easily Tim Cook could pitch such a device as the perfect conduit for its upcoming TV and movie streaming service and its Netflix-for-news-and-mags subscription, expected on March 25. It’d also make a neat combination with the much anticipated AirPods 2, and when an Apple Watch Series 4 can handle alerts and phone calls, the screen in your pocket might as well be as big as pockets allow.
If you think about it, there’s something unavoidable about folding phones. Smartphone displays have been getting bigger and bigger for years, with Apple waiting, seeing, then dominating in the phablet category. In order to keeping getting bigger, the fold is required. Regardless, the owners of current-gen devices are quite happy to buy grip rings and pop sockets to hang onto their giant phones at any costs. They’ll be fine with a fold.
No company has made more of a success out of tablets than Apple, and the size of MacBooks shrinks by the year, but even iPad sales were in free fall for 16 quarters in a row. Buying, and carrying around, a tablet on top of a smartphone is, though, a very different ask to buying and carrying around a phone that turns into a tablet. The 7.9-inch iPad Mini, rumoured to be getting an upgrade this March, is something of an underrated form factor, and all the tablet apps that have flourished on iPads - video editing apps, sketching apps, DJ apps, education apps - could flourish on a future folding iPhone.
From conversations in the halls and hotels of this year’s MWC, it’s clear that there are a number of hurdles that folding phones will have to overcome before we see a bendy iPhone. First, they can’t flop. This could be quite difficult to measure. Samsung has indicated this week that the Galaxy Fold will be a luxury, limited edition device - a spokesperson told The Verge “you won’t see it on the stands” and that we should expect a personal, concierge-style service for buyers with “intensive aftercare”. Huawei, too, won’t confirm how many €2,299 Mate X units it’s planning to manufacture.
Second, folding phones need to prove their reason for existence beyond simply being the next, new thing. Apple will be doing its own work in the shadows but it will be easier to see what’s happening with the Android foldies. Huawei’s president of the consumer business group west Europe, Walter Ji, was quite candid when he told a MWC press briefing that it hasn’t locked down any uses for the rear screen in phone mode, aside from as a camera viewfinder. Apart from working with Google to optimise Android Pie for folding screens, Huawei also declined to name any app partners at this stage.
One common thread at the Barcelona show was that once 5G really gets here, new ways of using our phones will emerge – cloud gaming was everyone’s favourite “simulated 5G” demo at MWC – and these will require new, larger form factors. Apple is also predicted to trail behind in announcing and releasing a 5G handset so that when EE starts rolling out 5G to 16 UK cities by mid-2019, as it has promised to do, a 5G iPhone might not be among them.
It’s something that Royole, the flexible display and component manufacturer who beat Samsung and Huawei to getting a folding phone on sale (in China), is banking on. “You could watch high-resolution video at the same time as doing high power consuming computing or using some AI based application,” says Ze Yuan, director of R&D for Royole, which has a 1.1 million square foot campus in Shenzhen that it says is capable of producing 50 million flexible displays per year. “The Multi Window obviously is going to be more dominant for when 5G comes in, so having a larger size display is ideal for that. If you think about it, tablets and smartphones are eventually going to merge, and the boundary between tablets and laptops is merging, too.”
Royole’s FlexPai phone is considerably chunkier up close than the Mate X, but it does the job and it’s robust – a Royole rep dropped it display first onto the counter to prove it. At MWC, TCL also had its 7.2-inch DragonHinge foldable OLED prototype behind glass – this one also opens like a book (via a series of small gears in the hinge) like the Galaxy Fold but without the extra front display. Motorola’s folding Razr phone, which looks, going by the patents, to sport an inside fold like Samsung’s, will launch by the middle of the year but nothing has been seen of it yet. These are all concepts or first-gen devices, and CCS Insight’s Ben Wood says we are “currently in the Stone Age of folding phones”.
Xiaomi and Oppo, two Chinese companies making pushes into the UK and Europe this year, have both posted videos of folding phone prototypes, but both brands decided not to demo anything on the MWC showfloor. Donovan Sung, director of product management at Xiaomi, refers to the fact that Xiaomi’s prototype has a “double fold” as a point of difference but says that “we don’t want to launch anything until we feel ready”.
Oppo’s VP of overseas business, Alen Wu, struck a very similar note when discussing its prototype, which has a similar outside fold and bar design to the Huawei Mate X. “We’ve put the folding phone on the back burner,” he said, via a translator. “To be honest we haven’t been able to convince ourselves that the foldable display form factor can meet our two requirements. First, we look at whether this new product can really solve some customer pain points. The second consideration is that we have come up with outstanding, beautiful, design. It’s best when you combine the two.”
If Apple intends to release a folding iPhone in say, 2020, it has its own challenges to contend with. “Supply is the main issue facing Apple for bringing a foldable display to an iPhone,” says Gleeson. Apple has relied on Samsung Electronics for iPhone X screens and LG Display for Apple Watch screens - both optimised by Apple – leading Goldman Sachs analysts to predict that Apple is an estimated two years behind Samsung in phone design. Samsung’s Kate Beaumont, director of product, services and commercial strategy, stresses that the Galaxy Fold is “the culmination of nearly 10 years of development”. Still, this is where Apple's secret screen facility in Santa Clara, which is said to be focused on designing and producing its own displays, including MicroLED screens, could pay off.
“The big advantage that Samsung and Huawei have in 2019,” Gleeson continues, “is that their product portfolio strategy allows for super limited, experimental devices to have a place. The other major challenge is that Apple never introduces a new technology just to keep up with competitors – it creates high-value experiences to pair with the technology showing consumers why this is a big deal and why people need to upgrade now.” He points out that face unlock and fingerprint scanning existed long before Apple brought them to iPhone but Apple brought those technologies in with a high-quality implementation and clear, easy and compelling experiences.
If Apple creates high-value experiences, it’s not afraid to charge for them. You could argue that without Apple increasing iPhone prices in recent years, we wouldn’t find ourselves discussing two £2,000 phones without making the entire story about the price tag. Fewer people will buy “super premium” (Samsung’s label) folding phones than the £800 – £1,000 phones, which themselves required an adjustment. This is the most important, most used piece of tech we own whether or not Royole is correct that phones, tablets and laptops will merge even further. Huawei’s Walter Yi predicts that this could be a standard for smartphone design, in “five or ten years” not one or two.
Apple could always decide to stubbornly ignore the folding phone trend entirely and pretend it isn’t happening, which it has done so far with categories such as VR headsets, fitness trackers and smart-home hardware (bar one smart speaker). If that’s the case, its next chance to be not true-first but first-in-a-big-way could instead be a device that threatens the supremacy of the screens in our environments entirely: Apple AR smartglasses are widely expected to be announced in 2020.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
