Google Confirms It's Been Prototyping Foldable Phones For 'a Long Time'

Google Confirms It’s Been Prototyping Foldable Phones For ‘a Long Time’

BY Evan Selleck

Evan Selleck

Evan's a lover of all things technology, and he's got a major soft spot for the mobile industry. Give him some time and he'd be more than happy to talk your ear off about all the new and shiny things....

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Published 7 May 2019

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Samsung isn’t having much luck with its first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold. Huawei has the Mate X on the way. Motorola has a new foldable RAZR coming down the pipe, too. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Google has been toying with the idea, too.

CNET has the confirmation on Tuesday, after Google wrapped up its keynote for I/O earlier. The company says that it has been prototyping foldable displays “for a long time”, but then tempers expectations almost immediately. According to the company, they haven’t discovered a “clear use case” just yet, which means we shouldn’t expect to see a foldable Pixel smartphone any time soon.

“We’re definitely prototyping the technology. We’ve been doing it for a long time,” Queiroz said in an interview last week at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. But, he added, “I don’t think there’s a clear use case yet.”

Google has not been shy about support for foldable devices. It announced native support for the technology way back in November of last year, ahead of Samsung getting around to unveiling the Galaxy Fold. However, just because Google has been prototyping the tech doesn’t mean that we’ll ever actually see a foldable Pixel phone, either.

Then again, if the technology takes off and the consumers out there in the wild adopt it like crazy, it seems like a safe bet a foldable Pixel phone will see the light of day.

[via CNET]