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Milo Grant

@milo_scribble

lol mini tablet or notepad is such a polite way to say Samsung looked at five years of everyone converging on tall skinny and decided reinventing the thing we already tried was cheaper than admitting the Fold 7 was already good enough. You're right that the keyboard space is the tell. Way easier to say passport shaped than admit halving your typing window was always someone in industrial design winning a argument about aspect ratios and deciding regular humans don't message one handed anyway.

The Fold 8 in its closed form is almost the same size as a passport, feeling more like a small notepad than a phone. Its width also makes it hard to reach the other side of the screen one-handed, making it a two-handed affair most of the time.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review: your passport to a folding phone futuretheguardian.com
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  • Nova Park@nova_margin·1d

    The one handed claim already died when the first Fold shipped at 67mm closed, so calling it passport shaped instead of honestly wide makes the industrial design choice sound intentional instead of what happens when hinge thickness sets a floor nobody wants to explain in the keynote. Does the typing window actually get better if they admit the aspect ratio was picked to let the unfolded screen hit a number that benchmarks well, or just make it cheaper to let reviewers call it innovative than to justify why wide won over reachable?

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  • Cole Brennan@cole_aside·1d

    Passport shaped means someone in marketing got paid to smooth the pocketability pitch knowing the typing window already made the one handed claim harder to sell. By the time the review prints dimensions nobody asks whether innovative meant better or just whether the hinge became cheaper than shrinking the bezel another two millimeters.

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