The Samsung Z Fold 4 still doesn’t make a good reason to buy a foldable phone

Foldable phones intuitively seem like a great idea. phones are good! Pills are good! Put the two together, fold it in half and whoops: you’ve got the best of both worlds. Credit also to Samsung for willingly subjecting itself to all the growing pains of figuring out how to make a good foldable phone. Last year’s Galaxy Z Fold 3 folded well, and the new Z Fold 4 looks even better, if only slightly. (I have a lot of thoughts about the new era of flip phones, like the Z Flip 4, but we’ll save those for another day.)

What Samsung hasn’t done – which nobody has really done yet – is argue why you actually want a foldable phone. And until it can explain why it’s worth all the extra expense and compromise, I have a hard time figuring out why you’d be willing to give up the phone you know and love to get one.

What Samsung needs to do with the Galaxy Fold (and the rest of the industry will eventually have to deal with their own foldable devices) is convince people that it’s worth buying a phone that’s more expensive, more fragile and more takes up space in your pocket.

The worst thing about foldable devices right now is that they force you to make significant sacrifices on the most important device you own: your smartphone. The new Fold 4 is slightly shorter, about an ounce heavier and about twice as thick as the Galaxy S22 Ultra. It’s also $600 more expensive. The Ultra has a larger battery, better camera specs, and a 6.8-inch screen that supports an S Pen. The Fold 4 is noticeably larger when open, but the candy bar phones still get big. And Fold makes a lot of sacrifices for more real estate.

It’s not clear to me Samsung knows why you should make all these sacrifices. On its website, the company offers as one of its first selling points that you can prop the screen up on a table by opening it halfway for hands-free video viewing or recording. Here in reality we call that a stand, and that’s a terribly expensive one. In this mode, you also only use half of the screen, which defeats the entire purpose.

So far, multitasking seems to be the foldable’s only real benefit. Open your Galaxy Fold and you can run two apps side by side or even three or four on the screen at the same time! That, I agree, is a delightful thing. Being able to use my browser and notes app side-by-side, or view my calendar and email together is much better than constantly switching between two full-screen apps. And it’s best to see two pages at once in the Kindle app. And you know what? Big screens are just fine – good for gaming, good for reading, good for watching Netflix.

But these aren’t just arguments for foldables; they are arguments for tablets. And so far, the arguments for Android tablets do not seem to convince many users. While Android has gotten better as a large-screen OS, and the Fold 4’s Android 12L-based software bodes well, too many apps “optimized” for foldable devices actually just stick a giant sidebar on a page, which doesn’t help a lot of. Others just streeeetch everything to fit the bigger screen. Don’t even get me started on how the vast majority of apps handle Microsoft’s approach of two separate screens connected with a hinge.

*The Z Fold 4 does Android pretty well, but it’s still mostly just a big phone screen.*

Samsung has done an admirable job of bringing all the craziness of Android to the Fold’s screen, and in general it’s not that the Fold isn’t working; There’s nothing about the Fold that’s dramatically better than whatever phone or tablet you might already be carrying around. And if you put them in a single device, they both get a little worse.

Over the years, I have been intrigued by a series of attempts to build a device that can and can do anything. There were the modular devices like Google’s Project Ara and the Asus Padfone. There were the expandable phones from Essential and Motorola and others. In any case, they were mediocre versions of everything that somehow added up to less than the sum of their parts. Right now, foldable devices are stuck in the same place: big, bulky, expensive phones that unfold into small tablets that — in terms of both battery life and durability — are dying too quickly.

The other approach to the much-tested future is to try to build the best version of each device, let users choose which ones they want to use at any given time, and ensure their software, settings, and data move seamlessly through it ecosystem flow. That’s pretty much the Apple approach: it happily sells you a Mac, iPad and iPhone based on the idea that they’re all for different things, and then uses iCloud and the App Store to make everything work on those devices . It might get more expensive – although you can pick up an iPhone 13 and an iPad Mini for less than the Fold 4 – but there are fewer compromises.

Still, I’m saying all this and I can’t help myself: I want the tweener devices to work. I want a touchscreen Mac and a foldable phone that’s both a great phone and a great tablet. It would mean charging fewer things, updating fewer things, and carrying fewer things around. But I’m not going to downgrade my phone just to connect a half-decent tablet, and that still feels like the state of the foldable.