Hollis Johnson/Business Insider; Samantha Lee/Business Insider
The Samsung Galaxy Fold still hasn't been released.
- Four major smartphone makers - Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi - unveiled their first foldable smartphone prototypes earlier this year.
- Samsung and Huawei, the two biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world, were expected to launch their first foldable phones, the Galaxy Fold and Mate X, in the first half of 2019.
- But after Samsung bungled the debut of the Galaxy Fold, and Huawei delayed its own foldable device, the future of the foldable smartphone is up in the air.
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Over a decade ago, the world started shelving their cellphones - with their static screens and limited applications - to embrace smartphones, which offered large touchscreens to watch movies, play music, and even browse the web.
We have loved and lived with these rectangular designs for years. But several months ago, we got a glimpse of something new: potentially the next evolution of the smartphone.
Imagine holding your phone as it is right now, but opening it up like a book, and seeing a new display inside that was double the size of your outside screen. That's the dream of foldable phones, to be both a phone and tablet in one form factor. Unlike smartphones, which have singular, fixed displays, foldable phones promise more screen real estate when you need it.
When a handful of the biggest smartphone makers in the world announced their first foldable phones in February, it looked like the world was ready to welcome a new form factor once again. But it only took a few months and a bunch of upset tech reviewers to postpone that dream for the foreseeable future.