A Washington Postheadline of January 21 proclaimed: “After years of rapid growth, the global smartphone market is slowing as consumers wait for the next game-changing feature and some of the biggest markets reach saturation.”
Without doubt the biggest feature change on the horizon right now is the foldable phone, but it’s a moot point as to whether it will be sufficiently game-changing in the short term to give the industry the boost it needs.
Bryan Ma, IDC’s VP for client devices research doesn’t think so. He expects foldables to be front and centre at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month but sees headwinds strong enough to push large scale adoption back by a decade at least.
Samsung and Xiaomi have already demoed foldable smartphones, at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year, but Chinese manufacturer Royole went one better. It unveiled a commercially available product, the Royale FlexPai. You can order it today from Royale’s web site, but it does not come cheap. The 128Gb version will set you back $US1588 and the 256Gb version $US1759.
If you believe Royale the price has not proved too much of a deterrent. “Due to the overwhelming response since the launch of FlexPai, please anticipate around 4~8 weeks to ship,” it says.
And if the price doesn’t put you off, the product description might: it’s called the “FlexPai Developer Model”. There’s another downside: it’s fat.
Meet the fat foldable
Getting a screen that can fold 180 degrees repeatedly and reliably is no mean feat. Samsung has demonstrated a foldable with the screen on the inside that folds very neatly in half, but it’s not yet commercially available.
The FlexPai folds with the screen on the outside and to limit the curvature of the fold there a distinct gap between the two halves. The specs don’t give this, only the unfolded dimensions. But based on the 7.6mm thickness of one half and the photos, I reckon it would be pushing 30mm at the spine: a vey retrograde step after years of smartphones getting every thinner.
This is unlikely to deter those that want the bragging rights of owning the latest and greatest gadget and are prepared to make compromises in functionality.
And functionality is what could hold back foldables for some time, says Ma. Sure you get a bigger screen, but what exactly will you be able to do with it is far from clear and so is the foldable form factor.
“Foldables will be hyped a lot [at MWC],” Ma says. “But we think it will be a good number of years before they become reality. There are a lot of challenges. From a hardware perspective there is cost, reliability yield.”
There seems little doubt those challenges will be overcome, but Ma sees software as a greater challenge.
Foldables face challenges
Apps will need to be able to dynamically scale to the larger screen, to change orientation from portrait to landscape, but he does not see there being sufficient incentive for app developers to invest in building this functionality, especially as there is no clarity as to what will be the dominant foldable form factor.
“We don’t know if they will fold in or out or up and down. There are some designs that have dual folds. And we don’t know how consumers are going to use them,” he says.
“[At Mobile World Congress] we are going to hear a lot about some new OEM with some new flashy foldable mobile phone, in reality the sales are going to be relatively small for the next few years. This sort of thing takes years to shake out.
Ma is talking of five, ten or even more years for foldables to really take off. In mobile devices that’s a very long time. The smartphone era, initiated with the iPhone is only just over a decade old. The first iPhone was unveiled in January 2007.”
The transformation of the industry it initiated was total and rapid. Remember the Nokia N95? It was the world’s smartest phone from the world’s leading phone maker. It was launched in September 2006, just months before the iPhone. But Apple iOS and Android smartphones put an end to Nokia mobile. Seven years later Nokia sold its mobile devices business to Microsoft.
Wearable versus foldable
It’s also possible that foldables might prove to be a technological dead end. After all, bigger screens per seare not the goal, increasing the area on which information can be displayed is.
“Ultimately what foldables are trying to achieve is display size, and why could you not do that with a wearable device?” Ma asks.
He says this is a possibility but puts a five to 10 year timeframe on this technology as well, held back by similar issues of form factors, modes of operational and application support.
Having seen some of the things that are already possible with specialised applications on smart glasses, I think I’d put my money on these rather than foldables in the long term, ie about ten years hence.