A Folding Phone Can Help With Electric Adventures, But App Developers Need To Step Up
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Why Buy An Expensive Folding Phone/Tablet?
To keep expenses down in a six-person household, we do what hermit crabs do with their shells: swap every so often. Instead of doing what’s normally thrifty for one adult, and keep a paid-off phone for years, I upgrade as often as possible and hand the last phone down to the kids. This keeps me from having six device payments while not letting anybody’s phone get too old and crappy to work properly, and I do it with one device payment (plus protection plans on all lines to cover premature failures).
As if on schedule, the oldest phone in the house recently started having big problems at right about the same time as my phone was paid off, so it was time for me to head to the Verizon store to freshen up the phone population.
But, this time I did something pretty different: I bought a Google Pixel Fold, a phone that costs as much as a fairly nice laptop. Why? Because one thing that has been bugging me on trips is having to lug too many devices along.
My camera bag is already packed to the gills with a mirrorless camera, several lenses for it, batteries, a drone, accessories and batteries for it, GoPros and accessories, and some audio recording equipment. So, to bring a laptop along for editing, I need a second bag with the laptop and accessories. Between everything else that needs to come along on a trip, there’s often no room to fit the laptop bag in, meaning my only choice is to cram it in somewhere and risk breaking it.
But, phones are more powerful than ever. The original iPhone had hundreds of times more processing power than it took to go to the moon, design the F-117 “Stealth Fighter,” and fight the Vietnam War (on both sides). Compared to the computers that I’d use to do basic photo editing on the tiny images the first 1990s digital cameras produced, today’s phones are unimaginably more powerful (and have better cameras built in). So, surely I should be able to use a phone to edit images and short videos, right?
After messing around with Adobe apps on my S21+, I figured out that the only shortcoming was screen real estate, and that’s something folding phones solve, while still fitting in the same pocket or purse.
I Almost Don’t Need My Canon Camera
After buying the phone, I had an unplanned opportunity to get out on the road and practice capturing some scenic photos with the phone. Here’s one I snapped real quick near White Sands National Park: