Economies of scale mean that once a product becomes popular, it also costs less. But this causes a catch-22 – it’s hard for an expensive product to become popular. At the moment this is the problem facing foldables, especially the horizontal variety.
Last week’s poll shows that the OnePlus Open is a very promising phone. It may even be the best in class that markets outside of China have seen. And yet… well, the pie chart speaks for itself, 40% of voters are interested in the Open, but it seems too expensive.
To be fair, it costs less than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold5 (unless you’re getting one of the Samsung deals, which is fairly frequent, but OnePlus also has a deal). $100/€100 seems paltry anyway when you’re looking at a $1,700/€1,800 price tag. Alas, this isn’t a problem that will be solved overnight – even years after the first foldables hit the market, prices are still fairly high.
Apart from that, there was a group saying ‘I don’t want foldable voters’. For some that means any foldable, although we don’t think people will look at a large horizontal foldable and buy a smaller flip foldable as an alternative.
Those aside, few think there are better horizontal foldables on the market right now. OnePlus (and, let’s be honest, Oppo) deserve praise for the impressive hardware they’ve built. And OxygenOS 13.2 manages to impress with new foldable-focused features, even coming from the foldable version of One UI that Samsung has been polishing for years.
If you missed it, check out our OnePlus Open review, we also have a video review.
