Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How To Make The Flip Phone Better (Again)”.
This video is sponsored by surfshark. You know i bought my first flip phone over two decades ago, as a high school graduate heading to college, still very much finding his way in a world where not having a phone permanently in your pocket was suddenly the exception, rather than the rule. The inevitable nostalgia that springs there from helps explain why i’m so entranced by the new generation of flip phones, like the samsung galaxy z, flip 3 and motorola razer 5g, and also why i’m so forgiving of the flaws that necessarily come with their bleeding edge, folding screens. But this time, i’m not here to re-recite all the reasons i love clamshell foldables. Instead, i want to talk about four things.
The modern flip phone needs to do better before it can return as a true mainstream option, and you might be surprised at how many of these ideas to reform the future come from the past all right. Let’S start with an obvious one, even more critical than improving battery life. In my view, flip phones need to be less fragile. Now you might say that the moving parts on any clam shell make it inherently less durable than a slab phone to which my one word response is nextel. For over a decade, this scrappy underdog of the u.s wireless world catered to a small but dedicated cadre of corporate and construction customers, whose phones needed two things: a built-in walkie-talkie and a durable design. The full story of nextel is a fascinating one, i’ll eventually explore. In my series, when phones were fun, but the important part for now is that nextel delivered those rugged receivers through its manufacturing partner motorola 15 years before it would relaunch the razer motorola, packed water resistance dust proofing and what was then called military standard durability into a Rubber-Coated meatball named the i-580. This bone was rugged enough to survive years in the hip holster of my mother, who was the hands-on caretaker of a horse farm, my father a sailor and woodworker who was always covered in salt, water or sawdust, and my salesman’s stepfather, who never met a phone.
He couldn’t destroy until this one. They make the point for me. Putting a hinge on a phone is not so synonymous with fragility, as many seem to believe, and that holds true in modern times as well.
You’Ll see a lot of marketing material from foldable manufacturers focused on the hinge and the frame samsung added stronger aluminum to both for the z-flip 3. It also brought water resistance and, of course, the very nature of a flip phone protects its screen when closed, but don’t let all that distract from the real issue. These soft folding displays are still easily damaged when open the plastic version is prone to creeping deformation over time and the ultra thin glass iterations aka samsung’s susceptible to cracking over time as well, and as i learned when i shattered my razer 5g on the sidewalk.
Sometimes it’s neither the display nor the hinge and frame you need to worry about, but the glass panels that make up the casing. Finally, because these phones are so rare, they’re much harder to fix if you do break them so while i will still encourage you not to reflexively dismiss a phone just because it includes a hinge, i’m happy to admit that right now we’re a long way off from Recreating the i-580 check the comments on any video about clamshell, flip phones and right below the person concerned about durability. Is someone saying they’ll never buy one of these because each time you use it, you have to flip it open it’s an extra step, an added inconvenience. Hundreds of times a day that people just don’t need folks. I can’t dispute that, while the starfleet officer in me loves the flipping action, it is less efficient and it makes it more likely that you’ll drop the phone in the process. That’S how i broke my razor, but here’s the thing there’s already a solution to this, because the same nextel motorola marriage that gave us push to talk also gave us push to flip no fumbling to find a seam, no risk of denting the display with your fingernails.
You just press a button and a spring-loaded release pops the flip open for you with a satisfying snap rivaled only in acoustic gratification by the conclusive clap of the lock re-engaging. When you close it, it might surprise you to learn that there were actually several different ways to do. Push-To-Flip back in the day, motorola’s pebble flip phone used a pole to flip variation on the mechanism. Nokia deployed a similar spring hinge on its 6131 shown here. In a clip which i’ll link to below and samsung, as it frequently does, went the extra mile with its p510, which used a tiny motor not just to open the phone for you, but to close it as well i’ll link to this video below as well. At the time, i remember some deriding these features as the height of superfluous gimmickry.
You know how lazy can you get, but today, with the majority of buyers expecting instant access to the screen the moment their phone leaves the pocket and one-handed use just as critical as ever. I genuinely think push-to-flip would be a big help on selling folks on this type of foldable. Of course, the only thing more convenient than a flip phone that opens itself is one. You don’t need to open as often a couple months into carrying the galaxy flip. 3. Almost every day, i’ve gotten pretty good at using the widgets on the cover screen without opening the phone. I can pause my music and switch my earbuds from noise cancelling to ambient sound, so i can order my coffee at the cafe and then reverse that process. On my way, back out the few apps that work on this smaller screen are sensible. You know you want to be able to glance at your calendar or the weather, and i i haven’t used it yet, but i swear someday this voice. Recorder is going to come in handy, but despite the upgrades, this screen is still too limited at press time.
You can’t reply to messages or archive gmails without opening the phone and the always on display is pretty much useless for anything but the date and time on every other samsung phone. Even on this one. If you leave the screen open, you get distinct icons for the notifications. You’Ve missed, so you just need to glance at the screen to see if you need to deal with something. Samsung just gives you an enigmatic orange dot.
If you have any notifications waiting at all to see what they actually are, you need to wake the phone up and swipe. This is the one area motorola’s flip phone, just trounces samsung’s the razer offers a truly useful always-on display. It gives me a full keyboard to reply to texts.
It lets me quickly, toggle mobile hotspot or wi-fi. It lets me verify two-factor authentication when i log into my email in the morning, all without ever opening the phone. I know when i read them out like that. They seem inconsequential like the ultimate first world problem, but again i’ve admitted that opening the phone carries an extra step, those conveniences add up, and they really make me miss the razor when i switch away from it.
My last ask for the future of foldables is quite literally the most fun and i’ll share it right after this cheap, simple, reliable. Usually you have to pick two, but my sponsor surf shark has consistently been ranked all three by sites like tom’s guide. Surfshark is a virtual private network or vpn that gives you private access to the open internet.
What does that mean? Well for one thing: it can prevent your internet service provider from giving special treatment to certain types of content like throttling your video streaming speeds. Speaking of video ever try to watch a show, but it’s not available in your region. Well surf shark can help there too, and if your travels take you to a country with internet censorship, laws surf shark can help. Keep you connected whether you’re on your smartphone tablet or laptop get the vpn that eats other deals alive, hit up surfshark at the link below and pay as little as 2.49 a month when you sign up for two years, using the code below thanks to shark. For sponsoring this video, my final ask for the future of flip.
Phones was going to be make them cheaper, but samsung’s aggressive pricing combined with motorola’s, inevitable price reductions as the razer gets more gray. In his hair i mean these things are already below the thousand dollar mark and they can always get cheaper and i hope they do, but in lieu of pricing i would ask manufacturers to embrace the fun of the flip here. Samsung is way out ahead, ironically, by using a strategy.
Motorola first tried almost a decade ago. Not only is the flip 3 already marketed as a fashionable and fun phone now for an extra 50 or 100 bucks buyers can get a bespoke edition of the phone, with five different combinations of color on front and back and two frame styles, while i’d prefer more Color choices and – and i miss the funky materials like leather and the engraving option from the old moto x, again very weird – that samsung beat motorola to the punch with this. The bespoke edition is certainly a lot more fun than choosing from the stock color options.
Oh and it’s bolstered by a software feature i didn’t know about when i posted my flip 3 review, you can use animated wallpapers on the cover screen. That’S for all flip 3s, not just the bespokes. I had an internet friend of mine make up some custom star trek ones for me, but you can use pretty much any gif or gif if you’re nasty and that’s awesome. The final thing that would add to the fun is also my last ask for the whole video and it’s a hardware change that, admittedly, might be a tough sell, see i use samsung’s freestanding flex mode for quick, insert shots in my videos and group selfies. All the time and probably half of those times i wish samsung had mounted one of its cameras sideways. This is yet another feature from motorola’s.
Playbook you’ll see it in some of the company’s one and g series devices with cameras that are rotated by 90 degrees, so they’ll still shoot in landscape. Even though you’re holding the phone upright. I never found it terribly useful on those slab phones, but it would make flex mode on these foldables much more convenient. You know, even though i know i’m an edge case, and space is already at a premium inside this thing. Well, i’m asking for it anyway, because it’s still a good idea. What changes would you make to modern flip phones to help push them back into the mainstream fewer compromises on the camera? Stop ditching samsung decks whatever they are drop them in the comments below and bonus points if they too are tips for the future. From the past, this video was produced with a mix of devices review units purchased by my publishers at future review samples on loan from their respective manufacturers and foldable, and flip phones that i bought myself. The complete list is in the description below also i reached out to samsung for comment for this video asking about future features coming to the flip 3, and if the company responds i’ll, pin that in the comments, but as always, samsung was given no editorial input or Copy approval rights and was not shown this video before publication until next time, i’ve been michael fisher thanks for watching and stay mobile.
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