I laughed out loud the first time I saw a folding phone. The contraptions, which debuted when the Samsung Galaxy Fold hit the market in 2019, are smartphones with bendable screens. You can fold them in half and put them in your pocket. That first Galaxy Fold was huge, heavy, cost nearly $2,000, and looked like it would snap in half the first time you used it. When folded, the tiny display on the front was not enough screen. When unfolded, the device became a creased tablet and too much screen.

But after spending a few days with the latest iteration of that very gadget, which Samsung announced last week, I think the future of smartphones is more interesting than we thought.

We’ve all been beholden to smartphones for more than a decade. Although they’re wonderfully capable pocket computers, smartphones are also a source of work stress and a place for doomscrolling, all wrapped up in a piece of hardware that hasn’t evolved in a meaningful way in years. The new iPhone that will debut later this year, for example, will undoubtedly look and work a lot like last year’s iPhone. This lack of innovation is why people have been saying for about a decade that the smartphone era has run its course. Soon, they say, we’ll be wearing augmented reality glasses instead, or AI pins that we talk to.

Despite rumors of its demise — including those coming from AI maximalists like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg — the smartphone will continue to be your most important gadget for a long while. That doesn’t mean you’ll continue to carry around the same boring slab of glass you’ve had in your pocket since the late 2000s. Foldables, an unfortunately named category of devices with shape-shifting abilities, are finally becoming an appealing alternative. In a lot of........

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