Been a folding phone user for multiple generations now.
The flip-phone style ones: Excellent! The folding aspect really aids in switching between a small device with minimal controls to a normal phone. I would use these over a standard phone. No question.
The portrait-to-not style ones like pixel fold? Is nice on occasion but the software is a complete let down. For reasons I do not care: The orientation is either wrong or the software cannot handle the form factor. The end result is a poor user experience.
Considering "usable space" as a percentage of the screen that contains useful content these are worse when unfolded than folded. Yes the screen is larger but most of the screen ends up useless. The actual useful chunk suddenly becomes horribly small in proportion.
The default layout showing composing an email in gmail is a prime example. The actual content area of the email: Same size as when folded. The rest of the screen is unused or taken up by the keyboard. Yes the keyboard is now larger but it's somehow weirdly proportioned.
There are adjustments that can be made to improve that. Some have to be applied every time the phone is unfolded or the apps restart (or neither or both who knows?)
Oh and my pixel fold screen has failed 2x in 3 years - I do not treat it gently.
> The portrait-to-not style ones like pixel fold? Is nice on occasion but the software is a complete let down. For reasons I do not care: The orientation is either wrong or the software cannot handle the form factor. The end result is a poor user experience.
Just to +1 on this; my second folding phone was the pixel 9 fold. That phone was released several _years_ after android OS added support for multiple screens, in preperation for samsung shipping the first ever folding phone before covid!
Despite LITERAL YEARS ELAPSING, a decent number of popular apps _still_ - in aug of 2026 - do not handle the aspect ratio changing well let alone transform to actually take advantage of the additional real estate.
It remains to be seen if apple's rumored folding iPhone will be the catalyst that gets most devs to actually care about this.
The main reason that I do put up with the fragility is because I can do side-by-side multi-tasking and give my aging eyes a break when I need to read something.
I am very happy with my Pixel 9 Pro Fold, the replacement because of early models losing 5G on unfolding was swift and it's been one of my least annoying phones so far, and I used many models, OSes
While I daily use an iPhone now, my original Pixel Fold is still working and running GrapheneOS. Besides a bug caused by GrapheneOS where the outer screen wouldn’t work, it has been flawless, and I can’t really blame Google for that one.
Giving it up was tough, as I consume a lot of books and mangas. I’m just waiting for Apple to release their foldable before I ditch this iPhone.
I had a flip phone. It was silly, and a waste of money, but I’d buy another one. It was fun, quirky and a bit different to the general black rounded rectangle.
My pixel fold 9 got 3 hardware failures (battery, speaker and folding sensor) and was warranty replaced for a fold 10. While it was being replaced I was using a non foldable phone and was totally missing the folding experience (large screen and multitasking for some personal use cases), so I am team foldables for now. otoh I do not get the idea behind the flip phones
I tested out last year's foldable phone for a couple of months.. borrowed it from a friend.
Maybe I'm just losing interest in phone tech - but to me, it was only down sides and no upside.
The phone was bulky. Fragile.
The larger screen you get when you open the phone - was absolutely useless for most of the content I watch. The screen is 4:3 and most of the content I watched was 16:9. The black bars at the top and bottom of the video meant that the actual video content is exactly the same size as my non foldable Motorola Edge 40.
That's an excellent point. If it's not close to 16:9 you hardly get more space, or you zoom the video a bit and cut off the sides. 16x9 seems to make more sense. But if you fold it in half, then I think you a weird sized device (wouldn't it be pretty long for cell p hone) - that's probably how we got here
My phone from 2018 it's still working perfectly.