With the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4, foldables have rapidly reached the boring, iterative update stage of smartphones. Is that such a bad thing?
Foldables, once relied on to save smartphone enthusiasts from the spec bump treadmill of annual releases, have quickly fallen into that rut themselves. No devices exemplify this more than the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and the Galaxy Z Flip 4.
Both are very good pieces of hardware, but both are also evolutionary takes on what’s come before. If you’ve used a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, you’ve basically had 95% of the experience of the Z Fold 4 — and the same holds true for the Z Flip 4. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
There’s been a lot of criticism lobbed at standard smartphones for being, well, standard. Now that foldables are going down that same path, it’s time to examine whether that’s actually a bad thing. After all, it’s not just that foldables are just being spec bumped; it’s also that foldables have been standardized rather quickly.
In the first year when foldables were a thing, there was much debate about what the ideal form factor for a foldable was. That discussion is over. There are now two standard types: the folding one and the flipping one. Now, we’re in the spec bump stage.
On the one hand, we have the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, the Mi Mix Fold, and the Oppo Find N. Each one is a variation on the same theme.
