Technology

Let me just say that I love the idea of a folding phone/tablet device. I was a Courier fanboy when Microsoft floated that intriguing but abortive concept device, and I&m all for unique form factors and things that bend. But Samsungfirst real shot at a folding device is inexplicable and probably dead on arrival. I&d like to congratulate the company for trying something new, but this one needed a little more time in the oven.

I haven&t used it, of course, so this is just my uninformed opinion (provided for your edification). But this device is really weird, and not in a good way. Ita really thick phone with big bezels around a small screen that opens up into a small tablet. No one wants that!

Think about it. Why do you want a big screen

If itfor media, like most people, consider that nearly all that media is widescreen now, either horizontal (YouTube and Netflix) or vertical (Instagram and Facebook). You can switch between these views at will extremely easily. Now consider that because of basic geometry, the &big& screen inside this device will likely not be able to show that media much, if any, larger than the screen on the front!

(Well, in this devicecase, maybe a little, but only because that front displaybezel really is huge. Why do you think they turned the lights off Look where the notification bar is!)

Itlike putting two of the tall screens next to each other. You end up with one twice as wide, but thatpretty much what you get if you put the phone on its side. All you gain with the big screen is a whole lot of letterboxing or windowboxing. Oh, and probably about three quarters of an inch of thickness and half a pound of weight. This thing is going to be a beast.

Power users may also want a big screen for productivity: email and document handling and such is great on a big device like a Galaxy Note. Here then is opportunity for a folding tablet to excel (so to speak). You can just plain fit more words and charts and controls on there. Great! But if the phone is geared toward power users, why even have the small screen on the front anyway if any time that user wants to engage with the phone they will &open& it up For quick responses or dismissing notifications, maybe, but who would really want that That experience will always be inferior to the one the entire device is designed around.

I would welcome a phone that was only a book-style big internal screen, and I don&t think it would be a bother to flip it open when you want to use it. Lots of people with giant phones keep book-like covers on their devices anyway! It would be great to be able to use those square inches for the display rather than credit card slots or something.

The Courier had tons of great ideas on how to use two screens.

There are also creative ways to use the screen: left and right halves are different apps; top half is compose and bottom is keyboard; left half is inbox and right half is content; top half is media and bottom is controls and comments. Those sprang to mind faster than I could type them.

On the other hand, I can&t think of any way that a &front& display could meaningfully interact with or enhance a secondary (or is it primary) display that will never be simultaneously visible. Presumably you&ll use one or the other at any given time, meaning you literally can&t engage the entire capability of the device.

You know what would be cool A device like this that also used the bezel display we&ve seen on existing Galaxy devices. How cool would it be to have your phone closed like a book, but with an always-on notification strip (or two!) on the lip, telling you battery, messages and so on And maybe if you tapped once the device would automatically pop open physically! That would be amazing! And Samsung is absolutely the company that I&d say would make it.

Instead, they made this thing.

Itdisappointing to me not just because I don&t like the device as they&ve designed it, but because I think the inevitable failure of the phone will cool industry ambition regarding unique devices like it. Thatwrong, though! People want cool new things. But they also want them to make sense.

I&m looking forward to how this technology plays out, and I fully expect to own a folding phone some time in the next few years. But this first device seems to me like a major misstep, and one that will set back that flexible future rather than advance it.

As rumored, Samsung showed off a prototype of a folding display today. Folded, ita smartphone. Unfolded, ita tablet. Neat!

Less neat: The company sort of went out of its way to not really show very much. A prototype was onstage for about 45 seconds, and it was deliberately backlit to be intensely silhouetted. They &disguised the elements of the design& to keep secret whatever secret sauce they have.

Finding that clip of the prototype folding/unfolding means digging through Samsungtwo-hour developer keynote, so we went ahead and GIF&d it up for you.

Herewhat it looks like going from phone mode to tablet mode:

And from tablet mode back to a more pocket-friendly phone mode:

While this isn&t the first folding phone we&ve seen , it also won&t be the last. With Google officially adding support for folding displays into Android as of this morning, it sounds like they&ve got reason to think a number of manufacturers are dabbling with this concept — enough of them, at least, to make it worthwhile to wire these changes into the main Android codebase.

If you want to see the relevant bit of the Samsung keynote for yourself, it starts juuuust before the 1 hour and 25 minute mark in the stream embedded below:

Ford is buying electric scooter startup Spin, Axios reports.The deal, according to a source close to the matter, &the total consideration in the deal was close to $100m.& Axios had previously reported the price tag was around $40 million.

Spin currently operates its scooters in Coral Gables, Fla., Washington, D.C., Charlotte, N.C., Durham, N.C., Lexington, Ky., Denver, Colo., Detroit, Mich. and Long Beach, Calif. In addition to operating throughout specific cities, Spin is live on five college campuses.

Spin was one of the three companies that initially deployed its scooters in San Francisco back in March. Along with Bird and Lime, Spin was forced to remove its electric scooters from the city until the city determined a permitting process. Since failing to receive a permit to operate, Spin has been one of the more quiet scooter startups in the industry.Though, next week, Spin is meeting with the city of San Francisco to appeal the denial of its permit to operate electric scooters in the city.

As of June, Spin had a contract with electric scooter manufacturer Ninebot, owned by Segway, to purchase 30,000 scooters a month through the end of this year, according to a source. Itnot completely clear why Ford feels the need to acquire Spin — let alone any electric scooter company — instead of just forming partnerships with scooter manufacturers to launch its own service.

That same month,Spin was in the process of finalizing a $125 million security token.The idea with Spinsecurity token offering is to raise money from accredited investors, who will then be entitled to a portion of the revenue from Spinelectric scooter operations, according to a source close to Spin. With STOs, investors can buy tokens that are linked to real-world financial instruments. In the case of Spinoffering, the tokens are linked to its revenue.Spin had previously raised $8 million in traditional venture funding.

In recent years, Ford has also purchased commuter shuttle service Chariot, as well as Autonomic and TransLoc.

In February, Spin officially entered the electric scooter space after first deploying stationless bikes in South San Francisco and Seattle.Spin had previously only operated a bike-share platform.Last August,Spin brought its stationlessbike-share program to South San Francisco after launching in Seattle earlier that year. Then, in January,Spin unveiled its stationless electric bike. However, Spin is now solely focused on electric scooters, according to a source close to Spin.

Over the last year or so, shared electric scooter services have gone from being non-existent to almost everywhere, operated by nearly everyone you would and would not expect. That includes Bird, the Santa Monica-based scooter startup worth north of $2 billion, Lime, another electric scooter unicorn that recently formed a partnership with Uber, UberJUMP, Boosted Board co-founder Sanjay Dastoornew startup Skip, Lyft and so many others.

I&ve reached out to Ford and Spin and will update this story if I hear back.