The best is the enemy of the good, the saying goes. There will be horns all over the cabin of my dream car, exclaimed Homer in one of those episodes that have become cult films. simpsons. Why not fit an entire tablet into a phone-sized device, Google asked earlier this week when introducing the all-new Pixel Fold.
Here is the same idea expressed in three different ways. Why do things simply when you can do them the complicated way, one might add. The Pixel Fold is a sleek 5.8-inch diagonal screen phone that’s 12mm thick. Just unfold it to get a small digital tablet with a 7.6-inch screen which is more like 6 mm thick, without taking into account the camera that comes out of it at the back.
An expensive idea—US$1,799 for the Pixel Fold, or CA$2,400—and technically attractive that has yet to find its audience. She won’t find it in Canada, given that Google will only sell the Pixel Fold in four countries: US, UK, Germany and Japan.
Two pixels are better than one
Regardless of where, however, sales of such devices have still not succeeded in the exercise of selling a screen that unfolds like a sheet of paper. Indeed, with the Pixel Fold, Google is entering a market for foldable screen phones that is already represented in North America by Samsung and Lenovo-Motorola, and elsewhere in the world by Chinese manufacturers like Huawei.
To stand out, Google boasts of the slimmed down size of its newcomer. Its camera is the best to be embedded on this kind of phone-tablet hybrid, adds the Mountain View company. And because the Android system to date has done very poorly on a tablet screen, Google is adding interface elements that make the Pixel Fold more pleasant to use in widescreen format: a small pop-up menu on the bottom of the screen, a multitasking mode with the possibility of dragging and dropping elements from one app to another, and the possibility of using it with its screen folded halfway to place it on a table or desk.
Because Google is the main developer of the Android system, it also takes the liberty of suddenly launching the update of at least fifty applications among the most requested by its customers to ensure that they all use the pixels that make up the larger of the Pixel Fold’s two displays.
These same applications are also designed to look good on the screen of the all-new Pixel Tablet, a digital tablet promised since last winter by Google and which arrives in stores this month. This one has an 11-inch screen, impeccable mechanics and a magnetic base that turns it into a very versatile countertop photo frame.
Google sells the Pixel Tablet for $700, with a stand in the box. The American giant also presented a smartphone with a slightly lower-end 6.1-inch screen, the Pixel 7a. This one takes the components of the Pixel 7 for short, including the most recent processor created internally at Google and named Tensor G2, and most of its characteristics, in a slightly more modest format. Its retail price is $600.
Anyone who’s ever done the math will know that buying a Pixel 7a and a Pixel Tablet will cost $1,300 at most. The Pixel Fold will cost, remember, $ 2,400 where it will be marketed by Google.
It’s unclear what Homer Simpson would say about this business strategy.
From Xerox to Google
This desire to create phones with larger than life screens is not new. At the turn of the 2010s, the Philips company presented the prototype of such a phone which made an impression. Pulling on the corner of its display made it unroll and expand, much like taking parchment paper out of its box.
The device, it goes without saying, never really saw the light of day.
But like so much in the consumer electronics industry, the concept of the foldable, rollable, or at any rate malleable display was born in the labs of the Xerox company, at a time when the company was a pioneer in this sort of thing.
We owe to its research center in Palo Alto, California, nicknamed at the time Xerox PARC, several notorious inventions. Most of them take us back to the very birth of personal computing, somewhere between the 1960s and 1980s. The personal computer, with a graphical interface controlled by a mouse and which gave birth to the first Mac, then Windows system, is probably the most notorious of the lot. PARC also gave birth to the laser printer and the Ethernet protocol, the famous network cable still needed today to create local computer networks or to connect to the Internet.
In 1974, a Xerox PARC employee created the first flexible screen, which was quickly referred to as electronic paper. But this technology could never be produced in large quantities. It is rather a not-so-flexible monochrome screen that was subsequently derived from it, by researchers at MIT, in the suburbs of Boston.
This screen gave birth to the E Ink display technology found on e-book readers today. Readers no more foldable than the others…