Are foldable smartphones really the next big thing?

ON SUNDAY, China's tech giant Huawei officially unveiled Huawei Mate X, its first foldable smartphone. That came just five days after Galaxy Fold, the first foldable smartphone of Samsung. But foldables might not be the future of smartphones, two experts tell China Daily's Zhang Zhouxiang:

Yuan Xuanhua, an industrial designer with 20 years' experience in smartphone engineering: Some media outlets have described foldable smartphones with so many sweet words as if they were a technological breakthrough. Unfortunately, they are not. The technology of foldable displays was invented 20 years ago in a quite easy way - by replacing the glass that supports the display with foldable organic materials. Such displays not only fold, they also curve.

Concerning the foldable screens of Huawei and Samsung, they have better displays with higher density rate and clearer, more stable display performance, but in essence they are still using the same technology. Therefore, the foldable smartphones are a consumption-led innovation rather than a technology-driven breakthrough.