2024 could be the year the mobile phone market changes forever, with the arrival of triple foldable devices. It’s a very simple concept, just an evolution of current foldable phones, but it has the potential to be revolutionary. Huawei’s first triple fold and Tecno’s concept have already demonstrated this, and now OPPO is joining the party.
Zhou Yibao, product manager of OPPO Find, took to his Chinese social media account Weibo to show the First official image of the triple fold
Indeed, this indicates that most Chinese manufacturers are already preparing to launch a triple foldable mobile phone, which makes us wonder what the rest of the brands think about it. It is true that the development of these mobile phones is not simple and they are expected to be more expensive than current foldable phones, but if they succeed, they can represent the future of mobile phones.
Like other brands’ models, OPPO’s triple folding has two sets of hingesthat allow the mobile to be opened in two different sizes. By default, it is the size of a normal mobile phone; if one hinge is opened, the screen size increases to that of a current foldable like the Galaxy Z Fold, and if the second hinge is opened, it becomes a large-screen tablet.
OPPO has not confirmed the numbers, so we don’t know if this prototype is as big as Huawei’s, which when opened has a 10-inch screen, similar to that of a medium-sized Android tablet. What the image confirms is that OPPO seems to be working on a different solution for the hinges; we can see that the hinges further to the left (seen from the front of the phone) appear thicker, while those further to the right appear thinner. This could indicate that OPPO believes that the first hinge will work harder than the second, perhaps because users do not use the tablet format as much as the other two; hence the need to reinforce it. Or this reinforcement may be necessary to put the screens in different shapes, as shown by the Tecno prototype.
Software is expected to be very important on these devices. In the image released by OPPO, we can see that ColorOS is capable of expand the bottom bar of open apps depending on the screen size, in addition to enjoying the larger space with larger widgets.
This is all just speculation, and most of the details of this foldable are not yet known, so we will have to wait for OPPO to officially present it.
