Bring on the trifolds

Don’t get me wrong, I love a small phone. I plan to keep my iPhone 13 Mini until it becomes a security hazard. But big phones have clearly won the battle, and if I have to carry a giant phone around then I think it should do more for me. It should have more screens, more ways to prop itself up. I should be able to run two apps at once. Maybe three! My phone should literally bend to my will. But I also don’t want it to be bigger than a regular big phone. A tall order, I know, but then I tried the Z Fold 7. Finally, a foldable that feels so much like using a regular phone that it makes the inner screen feels like it’s all upside.

If you asked me a few weeks ago what I thought about trifold phones I might have told you that it seems like a gimmick. Who needs all that inner screen? What do you even do with it? I get those questions about the single-hinge Z Fold 7. But here’s the thing: you figure it out. We’re so used to doing things on small screens that I think it’s hard to imagine what to do with a bigger screen until it’s in your hands. Here’s an incomplete list of things that I’ve used a folding phone’s inner screen for in the past week:

Some of these things are basically impossible on a regular slab-style phone. I watched my colleague Victoria Song try to use WordPress on an iPhone and it did not go well. But some things are just nicer on a big screen, and when something is nicer you might actually do that thing more. I’ve seen more than one Uber driver with a folding phone mounted as a kind of second display on their dashboard. You can do that with a regular phone, but the extra real estate on the inner screen makes a real difference.

You’ve been able to do all of this with a folding phone for years now, but I can’t emphasize this enough: doing these things on a phone that feels about the same size as a regular phone when it’s folded is a huge deal. I could carry my laptop around all day if I wanted constant access to a bigger screen, but for obvious reasons I don’t do that. This is what has converted me to a folding phone believer.

So bring on more hinges, more screen, more reasons to not get up and find my laptop when I need to do a “big screen” activity. The trifolds are coming. I’m ready to embrace them.