Worst might be a bit dramatic but I personally have never seen the point in folding phones. They dont fold out big enough to become a tablet but cost twice as much as buying a regular phone and a tablet separately.

Nah. The worst possible thing they could be is the second worst thing.

The worst thing to happen to smarohones was when Androids stopped coming with slide-out physical keyboards.

Fuck Apple for many reasons, but the onscreen keyboard is the most egregious and unforgivable of those reasons.

I used to be a fold hater until I got one..now I've had 3 folds and never going back to a boring slab phone AND a mini tablet , my fold 7 is a all in one that fits in my pocket and weighs the same as a mini tablet minus the extra phone. My gf got my old fold and now lives off it as she runs 3 apps at once on it. Before she lugged around a s23ultra and and 13inch tablet.

The secret is to buy last year's model used at 1/3 the price of new and the haters are people who never actually used one especially for multi tasking multi windows which is why they don't understand them. I was one til I did.

I love mine, had a folding for for 5 years now. Currently using a Razr. They work great, display works for about 2-3 years is my experience. It's usually cheaper to buy a new one than repair as the display assembly is a new chassis with the hinge.
I don't use a case, the display is protected by closing it, but Motorola included one and they include the protective screen cover (mandatory). As flexible display technology improves, I expect they will last longer.

A whole group of folding phone haters has emerged, normal people just don't buy the thing they don't want. Theses people go on crusades blathering on about their opinion, of which I couldn't care less about. They seem to be triggered by the area where the display bends ( I don't notice it) but it is there and I can feel it, how fragile the device is but I see people with broken displays on regular phones all the time, and the price ( they can't afford one? ). I assume they just need a proper hobby.

Huh? It's the one real smartphone innovation I've seen in the last decade or so. A phone that can become a tablet would be very useful.

Worst is definitely losing the sd card slot.

I've been using a Galaxy Flip for years. Never going back to the big slab. Rumors of screen life are pure internet bullshit.

I got an "open box" OG Pixel Fold for $350 last November. Everything else new or refurb in the price range was just another rectangular slab. I like the squarish aspect ratio for chess and reading but 16:9 video comes with black bars coving 1/3 of the screen. I dislike the taller foldables that came after and I assume it'll be much more than 2 years before the new passport shaped foldables are available as refurbs for less than $500 so if/when this one conks out I'll be back to using a slab phone as a hotspot for an ipad mini.

My biggest gripe is a lack of low-end phones with massive screens that aren’t high-end.

Both my parents are octogenarians with declining vision. I just want to get them into an iPhone whose screen they can actually see easily, but without going into that low-functionality “assistive access” mode.

Because it doesn’t help if the interface doesn’t allow you to tell apart two different phone numbers for the same person. Like, literally - it just shows the label, not the phone number, and when both numbers have the same label…