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The Pixel 9 Pro Fold perfectly highlights the big foldable problem – nothing is 'right' yet

https://9to5google.com/2024/09/08/google-pixel-9-pro-fold-problem/

There's one problem that plagues every foldable smartphone, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold perfectly encapsulates what that problem is.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold perfectly highlights the big foldable problem – nothing is 'right' yet

There's one problem that plagues every foldable smartphone, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold perfectly encapsulates what that problem is.

20 comments

SnotFlickerman

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highlights the big foldable problem – nothing is 'right' yet

This is everything these days. Products are being shipped before they're complete just to be able to be the first to market (AI offerings most especially). It's dogshit and it's saddling consumers with things that are broken out of the box, because there's no fixing a limitation of the design.

Just check out these generic automated cat litter boxes that are killing cats. Apologies for reddit link. Capitalism is just shitting out whatever as fast as it can.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1fbwusc/this_generic_automatic_litter_box_sold_under/

june

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...feeling very justified in my decision to pay $700 for the name brand automated litter machine

SnotFlickerman

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Sometimes, paying more really does result in a higher quality product. It's a shame that it's not as often as it used to be.

Established products tend to be safer, for sure.

nehal3m

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You’re right, that works sometimes, until manufacturers get wise and just charge the quality price for a piece of shit. For one-off, niche market things the majority of consumers has no way of knowing which one is a quality product that will do it’s job for a long time and will fail gracefully, and which one is a dangerous time bomb. By the time you find out the money has already paid for some executive’s third gold bath tub.

SnotFlickerman

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That is why I said "tend to be." In a lot of cases, that's simply not true, especially for some legacy companies like General Electric who have gone through decades of stock buybacks.

MrQuallzin

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Guessing it's the Litter Robot? We've got one as well. Our youngest cat constantly tries to play in it while it's doing a cycle

MaXimus421

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Yeah, they're just slinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. There's no real thought put into anything these days. I'm very tired of the 'Form over Functionality' bs that's being hidden behind fancy marketing.

WoodScientist

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The point of not being able to take advantage of the screen size is really interesting. I wonder why they don't design these to fold out into something with a normal phone aspect ratio, just bigger. That way you could actually take advantage of all the screen real estate.

cron

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I think its hard to have a foldable device that has a phone aspect ratio (2:1) when open and a reasonable size (and thickness) when closed.

This could only be done like the flip phone (1:1 --> 2:1) or by multiple folds (like the triple fold huawei).

Bookmeat

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They made metric paper. Time to make metric phones.

manucode

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1:√2 wouldn't be the worst aspect ratio for a phone screen

Pulptastic

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Golden ratio here we come

WolfLink

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Just make it a Nintendo DS style: two separate screens with a hinge in between. They can make the gap caused by the hinge fairly small.

doggle

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I think Microsoft tried that, actually

Ilandar

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Yeah, as did LG (sort of) with the second screen on the V50.

Ilandar

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There are two problems and they are price and durability. These products will only ever "serve niche users" while those two concerns remain. The reason people are not buying these devices is not because of the aspect ratio, as much as tech journalists who receive these products for free would like to think this is the case.

irotsoma

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It's also why tablets never really took off. Sure a lot of people use them, but mostly as a big screen phone in portrait orientation. But they could be so much more if designers actually designed apps to adapt to changing sizes. Even something simple like displaying two screens of a normal phone app side by side in landscape mode rather than having to switch back and forth. But ultimately, cost makes developing for multiple screen sizes a "low priority feature", and those kinds of things never get funding. Instead they would rather put a feature that looks cool to investors and executives the product managers are trying to get to fund the project and on marketing materials to get sales people on-board, but is ultimately useless to the end user. Which comes back to the main problem in late-capitalism. The end user is no longer the customer, the corporate overlords and their investors are.

SuperSleuth

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There's nothing more I want out of a phone than what I have with the P9F right now. Price should come down, but I'm using this thing until it's dead. Only other thing that could entice me is a rollable like LG was going to release here.

madis

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I think the only thing that should be right is the price.

Everything else - form factor, thickness, aspect ratio, whatever - can and should be experimented with, and nothing will break because the apps adapt anyway.

Well, unless they are unoptimized for tablets in general, which most are...

Lucidlethargy

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Why the fuck can't you pull it wider when you open it, so it's an actually useful 16:9 display?

They advertise this on their website as "the largest display on a phone", but it's SQUARE. I hate this just as much as I've always hated the long form factor modern phones have.

I miss my Nexus 6.