Women's pants are practically non-existent. I was elated to finally find a phone that can fit in my damn pants. Been on the Z Flip line ever since and I'd be heartbroken to see it go.

Plus whipping it open and closed to answer and disconnect calls is fun AF.

It's not though, it's about 1.5 times as thick. And it feels way smaller in your pocket than slab phones do.

If my phone was twice the thickness it'd still be thin. I'd trade space for some extra battery any day, and/or for this.

Women's pants generally aren't deep enough. So the length of the phone absolutely makes a difference over the thickness in terms of that.

Source: My pants. It had been a frustrating saga over the ever increasing size of smartphones when women's pants pockets weren't expanding to match. Stumbled into the Z Flip line and was hooked. It finally did solve the problem for many of us

That's actually not the case with the newer folding phones. The Z fold 7 is only 10% thicker (8.9mm) when folded than the s25 ultra (8.2mm), for example. The clamshell flips do run a bit wider at 13mm but they've really come a long way and I'm sad to see the market for them dying.

But it's not though? Early generations, sure. But we're at the point now where dropping a folded phone really does not have much of a difference in chance of breaking in than dropping a regular candybar phone.

You're right in that technically it causes wear. In that regard, I suppose the fold mechanism would fail eventually. So it's not going to be your daily driver for the next 10 years. But no phone is. Modern folding phones absolutely do well for the normal life of a phone (4-5 years maybe??).

Ime, battery has been the first thing to shit the bed of any given phone (folding or not). Yes, you can get them replaced, but that's become either a complicated and/or expensive process nowadays. Your battery is going to become unusable before your screen breaks simply from wear alone.

I've had mine for 3 years and it's a little blurry at the fold. My wife's is way better than mine but she uses hers less. I've not seen this catastrophic screen issues I've heard about.

The first generations had weak hinges, but those were solved several generations ago. I have no idea what you think is killing screens.

Nope, unfortunately. But Motorola is supposed to be moving to using GOS for their future phones, I'm hoping they might be convinced to release the hardware trees for the older phones so they can be backported.