Phones can't replace laptops. But tri-foldables could, and Samsung might give it a shot

I remember when small phones were all the rage. This happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after the chunky monsters of the 1980s and mid-1990s had run their course.

Then, large phones came back with a vengeance. Smartphones blessed us with the touchscreen miracle and they have dominated the world ever since; their reign is not yet over.

Maybe you think phones today are perfectly sized – the compact category houses mostly devices with 6.3-inch displays, while serious flagships go up to the 6.9-inch threshold.

It seems that 7-inch slab phones are the next thing on the menu, as we already told you, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

I stumbled upon this piece of fascinating information:

• Samsung doesn't think the Galaxy Z TriFold is big enough, so it's designing a crazier foldable

Apparently, even the Galaxy Z TriFold – a 10-inch monster (when unfolded) – might not be big enough. And that's where things get interesting, because this stops being about phones and starts being about whether a phone can actually become a computer.



I hope they make this one gigantic… and I'm not being ironic here.

The uncomfortable truth…

… is that phones have already replaced (almost) everything except computers.

In one of the most successful consolidation stories in consumer tech history, smartphones have eaten entire device categories like MP3 players, GPS units, calculators, clocks, voice recorders, scanners and even flashlights (yeah, LOL).



Sure, all of the above gadgets still exist and they're more often than not much more polished than before. I enjoy listening to lossless music audio files on high-end digital audio players (DAPs) as much as the next guy, but 90% of the time, I'm perfectly fine with terrorizing my eardrums with Slayer on Spotify from my phone while on the subway.

Dedicated cameras are also mostly gone from normal users' drawers. Unless you're a professional (meaning that you take pictures for a living, not that your mom brags to her neighbors about how cool the sunset pictures you take are), you can get by with a (flagship) phone's camera in the majority of cases.

The one category that didn't get absorbed properly is the computer.

Where do phones still fall short?

Screen size is the first wall that smartphones today hit. Even 6.9–7 inches is still "hand territory", not "workspace territory". Compared to 14–18 inch laptops (and 24-inch desktop monitors), even big phones like the Galaxy S26 Ultra or the iPhone 17 Pro Max are tiny.

Phones are good (and even great) for media consumption but super mediocre for creation. What's more, the touch input is still a compromise and the lack of a mouse is a bummer.

Typing long text, detailed editing or heavy multitasking is not fun on a phone. Sure, we've all done it to a degree, but it always feels like something substantial is missing.

The DeX experiment

Samsung DeX is probably the closest thing we currently have to a phone turning into a real computer, and it actually works better than most people expect.

You plug a phone into a monitor or use it wirelessly, and suddenly you get a desktop-like interface with resizable windows, taskbar-style navigation and proper multitasking.

I think this is where DeX can become crucial in the context of foldables and tri-fold concepts. A larger unfolded screen makes the whole setup feel more like an actual computer.

What do we need?

For the whole thing to become a viable solution, we need responsive and lightweight input.

As I said, touchscreens are fine for scrolling, tapping and quick actions, but they are not built for long-form writing or precise control.

On a flat display, your hands also end up covering part of the workspace, which becomes annoying.

A trackpad or mouse changes everything, but phones do not naturally come with either, so you are always improvising. Even Samsung DeX feels noticeably better the moment you connect proper peripherals, which says a lot about where the real bottleneck is.

The problem is that carrying a full keyboard and mouse setup defeats the whole "mobile" promise that foldables are trying to sell. That is why a super-thin and folding keyboard with an integrated trackpad could be the answer here.

Sure, this will drive up the price additionally, but some people will inevitably decide that it's better to spend $2,500 on a 14-inch folding Galaxy computer-phone that fits in their (jacket) pocket than two separate gadgets.