Samsung's given up on perfecting failure

From Dominic Preston at The Verge:

But unlike Samsung’s previous squarish Folds, which weren’t much wider than simply turning your phone on its side, opening the Z Fold 8 up really does fit more video onto your screen, and the wider aspect ratio will be much more natural for gaming too. It feels less like a foldable and more like a tablet and is all the better for it.

There's a misconception that Apple arrives 'fashionably late' to parties and stars all the limelight after its competitors have put in all the effort working the room.

The reality is closer to this - Apple lets its competitors do their R&D in public, and on customers who suffer through many iterations of mediocrity, before either the technology or just plain sensibilities are in place to make a device it can recommend to everyone. Apple is happy to, and has the resources to, do its testing behind closed doors and only release something to market when it knows with some level of conviction that . This isn't to say that their v1 product releases are the finished article, or that it's a faultless strategy, but that to a large degree the foldable iPhone will be a 'ready for prime time player' rather than a prototype.

Which is what makes the foldables market, if Dominic Preston's take is accurate, so amusing - Samsung have had a seven year head start on Apple to figure out the perfect form factor for a folding device and have iterated on pretty much the same 'ultra tall' folded aspect ratio every time. But then we all caught wind that Apple's soon-to-be-released contribution will settle on a much squatter silhouette - one which makes for a more jarring appearance when folded but feels like a much more natural mini-tablet when folded out.

Samsung, having now finally tried this in one of its own secret labs, has now realised that of the two prototypes it gave the market to decide between (namely the Z fold and Z flip), neither were winners, and that the winning candidate was actually prototype #2512 that's sat in a drawer with wacky 3d-printed hinge mechanisms from 2019.