01 Birds of a Feather
In the smartphone era, despite the industry being more consolidated and less diverse than the feature phone era, there are still many niche products behind the facade of homogeneity, such as the earlier Meitu phones and gaming phones. Foldable phones and AI phones, as new players in the smartphone market in recent years, have to some extent taken on the role of successors.
However, since Samsung brought foldable screens to the wider consumer market in 2019, their revolutionary design was once considered the future of smartphones. But as time passed, the halo of foldable phones gradually dimmed. Although sales figures are still growing and improvements are being made in areas such as creases, hinges, and software adaptation, it cannot hide the awkward fact: end consumers generally view them as a separate category rather than the successor to smartphones.
Therefore, foldable screens have not created a wave of replacements that would phase out traditional slab phones, and the market response has not met expectations.
Although AI phones are "younger," from market feedback, they seem to be following the same path as their predecessors at this stage.
In the past two years, various brands of AI phones and large models have emerged, with Apple joining in. However, based on Photon Planet's previous inquiries at various stores, consumers have shown little interest in AI phones so far, focusing more on basic performance, imaging capabilities, and appearance design.
This directly affects the attitude of store staff - they are not enthusiastic about promoting AI features, and their sales tactics remain unchanged. In other words, AI is currently more of an added value feature rather than a decisive factor, and has not significantly disrupted the mainstream slab phone market.
Therefore, the foldable and AI phone submarkets bear quite similar fates. Despite continuous technological innovation and marketing efforts, sales have not fully met expectations, and market penetration remains limited. TrendForce predicts that global foldable phone shipments will reach about 17.8 million units in 2024, accounting for only about 1.5% of the overall smartphone market. Considering the substantial investments phone manufacturers have made in foldable screen supply chains and large models, the story may be heading towards an unsustainable conclusion.
The reason behind the huge disconnect between phone launches and the end market is the eternal truth of the business world - user needs are the ultimate determining factor in the market. Phone manufacturers cannot forcibly cover what users consider "good" with their own definition of "good." In simple terms, don't try to teach users what to do.
A simple example: while Kindle and other e-readers can store thousands of books and provide a more convenient reading experience, many people still prefer the rustle and real page-turning sound of "outdated" paper books.
The same applies to foldable screens. Some manufacturers habitually compare foldable phones with slab phones, indulging in self-admiration, questioning why users are still unwilling to pay when foldable phones have caught up with flagship slab phones in terms of thinness and price.
Little do they know that slab phones have evolved over many years to reach a satisfactory balance in design, functionality, and user habits. Although foldable screens have broken through traditional form factors, if they cannot disrupt this balance, they are destined to remain a niche product in the market.
Even the "iPhone moment" that led the touchscreen smartphone trend succeeded not simply because of slide-to-unlock, but due to the seamless integration of hardware, software, and ecosystem. This means that a revolution in the smartphone market cannot be achieved by a single technological breakthrough.
02 AI Foldables: A Happy Accident
Sometimes you have to admit that doing business requires some luck, as does technological innovation.
For phone manufacturers, when holding a coin in hand, not knowing whether it will land heads or tails when flipped, how should they proceed? Go left or right? Compared to choosing one or the other, stacking them together is the so-called "compound innovation," which is clearly the safest choice to avoid wasting resources.
Foldable screens and AI, one representing hardware structural innovation and the other symbolizing software intelligence, seem unrelated but intertwine like a blind cat stumbling upon a dead mouse, potentially producing a mutually beneficial "chemical reaction."
Foldable phones, in pursuit of thin and light designs, often compromise on hardware compared to traditional flagship slab phones. For example, in imaging, limited by the folding structure's space constraints, foldable phones usually cannot accommodate larger image sensors and more complex lens assemblies. This leaves foldable phones with few selling points in the consumer market beyond "folding" and "office work."
Typically, for a product, what's important is not its ability to detect errors or correct them, but its error tolerance. Increasing a product's error tolerance necessarily increases its redundancy, often resulting in a "bucket" rather than an exquisite cup.
Foldable models, in a sense, are also "bucket phones" with balanced configurations across the board, but apart from folding itself, they struggle to offer standout features in screen quality, imaging capabilities, or performance that surpass flagship slab phones. Even in the office niche market where foldables have made inroads, phone manufacturers find it difficult to meet increasingly complex and specialized office needs with just the large screen advantage and some built-in office tool applications in the OS.
In this context, AI acts as a "magnifying glass" - AI's transformation of office scenarios needs no elaboration, and through AI, the previously "neither fish nor fowl" foldables that struggled to find their positioning will inevitably become more vertical, thus penetrating deeper into the business and office market.
On the other hand, foldable screens have the "space" that current AI assistants and applications urgently need.
This is not merely a physical expansion, but also an extension of AI application functions and experiences. At the current stage, intelligent assistants like vivo's Blue Heart Little V and OPPO's Little Bu Assistant, as "entry points" for activating phone AI capabilities, are usually presented in floating windows.
While this design improves intelligent interaction experience to some extent, in practice, the floating window of the AI assistant often occupies a corner of the screen, not only limiting the view but also increasing operational complexity, as users frequently need to switch between applications, text, and the assistant window.
This constraint also exists in broader AI applications. For example, when users try to copy greetings generated by Wenxin Yiyan into a WeChat dialog box, they still need to go through a complex operation process, interrupting the user's operational fluency.
On foldable screens, this problem is solved. Foldable screens provide more space for AI assistants and applications, requiring no switching and without interfering with the normal use of other applications. Taking Samsung's new AI foldable product as an example, its dual-screen dialogue mode allows both parties to view real-time translation results enhanced by AI through the main screen and external screen respectively.
This means that foldable screens and AI can, to some extent, complement each other's shortcomings and strengthen each other's advantages - the expansion of screen space by foldable screens gives AI phones the "space" they urgently need; AI, as an efficiency weapon, opens up a gap for foldable screens to penetrate the vertical office market.
Similar cases have also occurred in the PC sector. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the addition of a Copilot key next to the right Alt key on Windows PC keyboards, providing direct access to the Windows Copilot service powered by Microsoft AI - the last time the Windows PC keyboard changed was in 1994.
This also means that under the tide of the AI era, increasingly powerful AI applications are deconstructing the past relationship between hardware and software - hardware is no longer just a passive carrier, but will couple with AI to become an important part of enriching intelligent experiences.
03 Conclusion
From the current situation in the phone market, AI + foldable screens may become a new story shared by phone manufacturers.
Although this product of intense development may still not break into the mass market, the office track it can cover has great potential as a vertical market. Looking at the consumer electronics industry, from Apple's MacBook series, iPad Pro and Vision Pro, to Meta's Oculus and Microsoft's HoloLens, they have all viewed office scenarios as a driving force for hardware sales.
It's like in the early days of Windows, when the usage rate of Solitaire was once higher than Word and Excel. But by 2024, when Solitaire is gone and Spider Solitaire is gone, Word and Excel have survived to the end.