Foldable smartphones are the next big thing in smartphones, at least, most companies think so these days. Samsung and Huawei have already stepped in with the Galaxy Fold and Mate X and it seems that Google has plans on joining the battle as well.
Google’s I/O 2019 developer conference brought to us a number of new things including the Pixel 3a phones and more info on Android Q. Moreover, in the conference, Mario Queiroz, head of the Pixel division said that the company has been working on foldable smartphones for quite some time.
We’re definitely prototyping the technology. We’ve been doing it for a long time. I don’t think there’s a clear use case yet. I think it needs to be more innovative than that.
This is actually something surprising to hear from Google as we’ve never seen them experiment with innovative technology for their smartphones, and with Samsung’s attempt failing miserably, this might actually prove to be a red herring for Google. Especially since Huawei is still banned from selling phones in the US.
There’s not much information other than that. We don’t know how far Google is along developing the prototype or how the device is going to work yet but what’s clear is that we won’t be seeing this new tech with Pixel phones anytime soon. Mario says that they have no current plans of putting it into the market in the near future so we’ll have to wait until 2020 or 2021.
