Apple’s iPhone Fold is once again making the news, as it has been, from time to time since the past couple of years. On the brighter side, at least the talk is no longer about whether Apple will launch it at all. Now the conversations are more focused on what’s in store for users—and I see that as a win.
The latest from the rumour mill claims that the iPhone Fold when opened, will have an iPad-like app layout. This means that the device will support running multiple apps simultaneously. Many apps will include sidebars on the left side of the screen, and developers will receive tools to modify their existing apps to work with the new interface.
There are two ways to fold things: from top-to-bottom or from side-to-side and it’s looking like Apple is going for the latter with the iPhone Fold. So basically, the device is going to appear like a lovechild of the iPad and the iPhone—appearing as an iPhone when closed and as an iPad when open. And even though the iPhone Fold’s display will include features similar to those found on the iPad, that’s as far as the resemblance goes. The operating system is of course going to be the iOS rather than iPadOS, since it is an iPhone after all.
As for the design, the outer display will have the hole-punch front-facing camera and it will also display apps, while the back of the device will feature two cameras instead of a triple-lens setup due to limited space. However, there’s going to be an absence of Face ID which has become a staple in most iPhones in recent years. Instead, the Fold will have a fingerprint sensor in the power button.
Most of these recent rumours focus on the display quality and how Apple’s iPhone Fold could make multitasking easier. However, my issue with the whole thing is that—if the screen is almost as wide as an iPad and I probably can’t use it comfortably with one hand, doesn’t that go against what a mobile device is supposed to be?
And all that hassle, just to get a device that functions almost like an iPad and almost like an iPhone. To top it off, it’s not even going to be cheap. The expected pricing is somewhere around ₹1.85 lakhs—which is way pricier than the existing iPhones (which are already quite pricey themselves). Sounds to me like a lot of trouble for very little reward.
