We have been using smartphones long enough to find them far too common. That’s how human thinking works, I guess. We get excited about something new, scoff at it first, tom-tom about it later, and normalize it to the extent of not even thinking about it. That is what smartphones have become to us. We don't think about them until the battery dies, the phone acts funny, or it goes missing.
You can find enough reasons on the Internet as to why people do this. One of them would be the stagnancy that has been plaguing smartphones for a while. It's not that innovations are not happening in this space. It's just that they are incremental, not awe-inspiring. And most of those innovations have largely been happening at the processor, camera, screen or the UI level.
What hasn't changed is the rectangular form factor with rounded corners. The diagonal length becomes longer or shorter, but it remains the same. If you think about it, the differentiation in smartphones today is due to color and the level of reflectivity of the device surface, size, brightness of the display, whether the display has a notch or a punch hole for the camera, and the number of lens circles at the back and their arrangement.
Smartphones began to become boring a long while back. Royole, a Chinese company, tried to make a small ding in the growing boredom around smartphone design. They launched the world's first foldable smartphone with a touchscreen display in late 2018. It was not a finished product. It had malfunctions like false touches and not being pocket-friendly. Still, that phone brought about a twist to the entire smartphone story that I want to talk about in this episode, and what it could mean for marketing. Let's explore if this is a future of smartphones that marketers can fold into...
Rise of the foldables
A year later, major smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola and Huawei introduced their own version of the foldable smartphones. Other brands like Oppo, Vivo, Honor, and OnePlus followed suit. Each introduced their take on the iconic clamshell mobile phone design from the early 2000s and brought it to the smartphones.
Since then, mobile phone brands have been releasing an iterated version of the foldable phones, each improving upon the limitations of the previous one. These foldables come in two variants - flip and foldable. Flip phones have a hinge that splits the two halves of the phone horizontally. When opened, it becomes a larger, rectangular touchscreen display with rounded corners. A form factor that most are used to. Foldable phones have a split down the centre, vertically, which opens up like a book. They become a larger, squarish high res touchscreen display, and a full-sized rectangular smartphone with a fully-functioning second touchscreen.
While this clamshell design is not new, but its application in smartphones is quite interesting. It brings cool factor and premium vibes to smartphones that had diminished in the recent years. And of course, it brings the much-needed respite to mobile phone brands that have been struggling with flatlining of revenue growth. According to the research firm, IDC, the share of foldables in the global smartphone market was a measly 1.2% in 2022, and it expects it to grow roughly 3X to 3.5% by 2027. It's still small, but noticeable, given the stagnancy of the smartphone market I just talked about.
Interesting possibilities of foldables beyond design
From a user perspective, the biggest attraction is the ability to carry expandable large screen size in a small form factor. In an unfolded state, they can allow for better multi-tasking in a handheld device through split-screen and easier drag & drop functionalities. Folding phones can enhance content experience with a book-like experience when reading an e-book or a blog, for example. The expanding or folding and rotating screens can allow for better in-app and content experience as multiple UI layouts become possible. Samsung's Fold 3 has a "Flex Mode" which does exactly that.
Beyond that, productivity gets a boost because with a larger screen real estate, a user can watch a YouTube video on one side and keep an email or chat conversation going. Multi-tasking without the need to hold the phone up. Samsung S24 Ultra now has Galaxy AI. Generative AI has now found its place in smartphones. It had to happen, and it has.
Now, all this may sound like it's nothing out of the ordinary. Remember, the rectangular slab design that we have been using requires multiple gestures for basic multi-tasking like app switching. True multi-tasking would require screen space that can accommodate at least two apps to run simultaneously. Larger devices, laptops, tablets & desktops, are still most suitable for that sort of functionality. Foldables seem to have hit that sweet spot for smartphones, offering large screen size and still being pocket-friendly.
More than multi-tasking and adaptive interface layouts, foldables offer some very interesting possibilities for better experience. New kinds of interactivity like foldable gestures and flexible controls. I'll elaborate it for you. Foldable gestures could trigger specific actions by partially unfolding the device. You could fold the phone half way to pause a video or open it fully to activate gaming mode. Bending the screen could provide flexible options to control audio volume or zoom in on Google Maps.
Then, there is the possibility of having enhanced context-awareness in the UIs which basically means that the UI could change or adapt to display specific controls based on the orientation and degree of unfolding of the device. iOS and Android have had context-awareness UIs for a while now, combined with generative AI, foldables can take it even further.
Unfolding exciting opportunities for foldable marketing
B2C marketers are likely to be the first-movers to leverage these possibilities to their advantage. They can use these enhanced functionalities for immersive and interactive product showcases. Unfolding the phone could reveal a life-size image of the product accompanied by interactive zoom functionality and 360-degree view. This is already happening. More screen real estate and unfolding functionality could help create a virtual unboxing experience.
Using the two-fold display space, they could tell interactive stories that reveal in an unfolding manner and add more layers to storytelling. Almost like unstacking story elements drawn on multiple butter papers. Since there is more screen space, personalized recommendations could also appear side-by-side to the product user is exploring.
The unfolding function could enable gamification of user experience through interactive games or challenges. This could help create engaging brand interactions and loyalty. And of course, foldable phones could be good companions to extended reality content and experiences by pairing with AR/VR/MR headsets.
Some of these possibilities are also applicable to B2B marketing, if not all. The current marketing approaches adopted by B2B service businesses could also get an uplift with interactive presentations that can display charts, graphs, and videos and utilize extra real estate to show allied content at specific points.
B2B product marketing could almost entirely copy-paste what B2C marketers could do with such technologies. Interactive product demos, how-to videos, and customer support for instance. All on a foldable device. Beyond this, the sales enablement could be made more effective through engaging training content and sharing necessary technical inputs without having the need to pull out a laptop. It's next level of sales enablement in palm of a sales person, in real-time.
What foldables need to become to get marketers into the fold?
As is the case with any emerging tech, foldables are not a mature product. Yet. Every iteration of the foldables that gets introduced in the market has improved over the previous one, and this cycle will continue. It might get a spike of improvements that make foldables suddenly relevant if Apple or Google or Samsung pull a rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick, which is possible.
For now, foldables need improvements in mobile OS that make sure the UI works properly on every screen resolution. For Android devices, it has improved but issues still get reported every now and then.
Then there is the issue of crease. Foldables use OLED and ultra-thin glass technologies that have allowed development of flexible touchscreen displays without compromising on display quality. These flexible touchscreen displays form creases at the hinge which dilutes the overall user experience. This problem has been solved to some extent, but it's still there and noticeable.
Intuitive and user-friendly gestures that are unique to a new form factor are what truly create valuable user experience. Seamless integration of hardware and software is paramount for faster adoption. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in that space to get attention of the businesses and marketers, in particular.
These technological improvements and advancements are needed to get better clarity on what is available for marketers to play around with. For instance, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 has a 6.2 inch cover display with 2268 x 832 pixels resolution, and 7.6 inch main display with 2208 x 1768 pixels resolution. Now, most of the content currently developed is for 1920 x 1080 px or HD resolution, having 16:9 aspect ratio. The Fold 5 display offers a resolution that is neither HD nor 2K which is 2048 x 1152 pixels as per DCI standards maintaing a 16:9 aspect ratio. This inconsistency poses issues for marketers to develop content that takes full advantage of the screen real estate offered by foldables.
Since this product category is at early stages, phone manufactures are offering varying cover and main display sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios. This is very confusing for marketers to decide how to develop new content and adapt existing content. Android, in particular, has struggled for a very long time to attract app developers due to varying smartphone screen sizes. This is likely to make it even more difficult from a marketing point of view.
Having said that, I think foldables have a promising future. Like I said before, primarily because they sit at the sweet spot of having a large screen size and still being pocket-friendly. This pocket-friendliness does not extend to the price which is another barrier for their adoption right now. It should get addressed as the technology matures. According to research firm, Canalys, foldable smartphone prices have nearly halved since 2020. This makes the argument in favour of foldables even more compelling.
The issue of adaptiveness of content developed and how best it can be served through UI and gesture improvements seem to be formidable barriers for marketers. May be AI can be of help? Addressing these challenges, which you can trust companies to do sooner or later, can make foldable marketing an attractive space for marketers to reach and engage customers, and get them into the fold.
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