It’s been roughly a year or so since I made a permanent switch to a Samsung Z Fold 6 as my daily driver from a smartphone perspective. Prior to the same, I had used a Z Fold 5 for a period of about a month as part of a technology review about a year earlier and even then the experience made me wonder if laptops and tablets could eventually be supplanted by foldable smartphones. Indeed, I shared an experience at the time as part of the review of the Z Fold 5 where my MacBook ‘died’ during a new business ‘pitch’ and the I was able to continue without skipping a beat as the Z Fold 5 made is possible to keep our pitch going. Phew!

So, one year on, I have to confess that using a foldable smartphone like the very good looking and highly capable Samsung Z Fold 6 has become an addiction of sorts because foldables that can shift form factors from being what looks like a slightly thicker smartphone to that of a medium sized tablet is incredibly handy for someone like me. This led me to share this post of the reasons why I think it would be extremely hard for me to go back to regular smartphones in the near future.

The first reason I can think of as to why a foldable like the Z Fold 6 just makes sense is that you essentially get the benefit of a very capable smartphone and tablet in one device. This may seem quite obvious and not something particularly special as things stand but unless you use a foldable everyday it may be difficult to fully appreciate the benefits. The funny thing though is I actually use it mostly closed and only open the tablet sized inner screen when I need to read content in a larger format or watch video content on the same. It has become second nature to do so and I hate the idea of using the smaller screen for any of these use cases.

The second reason that a foldable is hard to beat is that on many occasions, when you may not have a fully fledged laptop available you can use it to do more or less the same things with the benefit of the larger inner screen. This means that you can make presentations and even use it as you would a laptop or tablet to create content. This makes it ideal for anyone, from a content creator to a senior business executive who wants the best of both worlds in a high quality smartphone that can also essentially double up as a laptop and/or tablet replacement.

The third reason that I would say a foldable smartphone makes sense is probably more for my ego than anything else in that these sort of devices are generally not really mainstream (yet?) and as such tend to be quite rare to see or experience in use out there. Foldables also tend to have a fairly steep price, even relative to many of the more conventional ‘candy bar’ style flagship smartphones out there meaning that they tend to be out of reach for the majority of consumers. In a nutshell, having a foldable generally makes you one of the few rather than the many if you are keen to stand out from the crowd.

Finally, having a foldable typically ‘signals’ higher social status without you saying a word and quite often can become a conversation starter with the ‘right’ people, if you get what I mean. Indeed, a premium foldable is often as expensive as a small plot of land in certain parts of Kenya so the investment in one is not to be taken lightly. A decent foldable definitely enhances your ‘flex mode’ in our image conscious society at large so dropping it on a table or using it typically ‘elevates’ your business or personal ‘positioning’.

So, as things stand, my Z Fold 6 is over a year old and the next generation Z Fold 7 came out a couple of months ago as a yet lighter, thinner, and more capable foldable smartphone. Naturally, I want to give that a go too although Samsung did not launch their latest foldables in Kenya this year. There are also rumours that Apple plan to launch a foldable iPhone next year meaning that there is every possibility that this unique smartphone form factor could truly go mainstream at scale if that happens. However, for those of us who already signed up we are happy with foldables as our preferred smartphone form factor for the long term.