Every Fold review seems to have one compulsory item.

The crease.

There it is. The crease is visible. The crease is less visible. The crease is deeper. The crease is shallower. The crease catches light at 37.5 degrees while somebody holds the phone under studio lighting like they are inspecting a fucking diamond.

Yes lah. There is a crease.

After actually using a Fold every day, I can tell you something very exciting about it.

I mostly don’t give a shit. 

And I don’t think people who actually use folding phones give much of a shit at this point. I have used Fold 4. Fold 5. Oppo Find N5. Honor Magic V5. Now I am using Fold 8. Oppo’s Find N5 was the best in terms of being almost crease-free. Fold 4 had the most visible crease among those I have used. But really, it makes very little difference in real-life use.

Fold 5 I think this one.

Not because it is invisible. It isn’t. If I purposely tilt the screen, look from the side and hunt for it, of course I can see it. But when I am actually reading, typing, looking at photos, checking drawings, scrolling rubbish on social media or doing whatever else I bought the bloody phone for, my brain simply stops noticing it. And who looks at stuff on their phones from weird angles anyway.

Which is why I sometimes find Fold reviews quite funny.

Reviewers have to review something measurable. Thickness. Weight. Benchmark. Camera. Hinge. Crease. Battery. All fair. All useful.

But owning one for months is a completely different thing.

You stop reviewing the phone and start developing habits around it.

And that is the part I think many Fold reviews miss.

The outer screen and inner screen are not just the same phone in two sizes.

I use them differently.

The outside screen is the normal quick phone. Messages. Notifications. Music. Quick search. Check something. Reply something. Take a photo. Done.

Then I open it and the whole behaviour changes. Longer reading. Browsing. Maps. Photos. Documents. Spreadsheets. Comparing things side by side. Anything where a normal phone screen suddenly feels a bit too cramped.

And because it is Android, I can arrange the two experiences differently instead of being forced to pretend one layout must work everywhere.

That is the fun part.

I fiddle with the home screens. Different layouts for outer and inner display.  Landscape. Portrait. Widgets. App placement. Status bars. Animations. How things open when I unfold the phone. Then I change something again because apparently I have nothing better to do. Like having 4 different wallpapers. Outer lock screen. Outer main screen. Inner lock screen. Inner main screen.

How do you like my wallpapers? 

Some people buy a phone, move all their apps over and never touch the setup again for three years.

I cannot live like that. 😂

And suddenly this reminded me of something I wrote sixteen years ago.

In 2010 I reviewed the Nokia N900. Reading that old post now is quite funny because half the specifications sound prehistoric. 600 MHz processor. 256MB RAM. A 3.5-inch screen. I was apparently VERY EXCITED about all this.

But the interesting part is that the things I loved most were not really the specifications.

It was multitasking. Customisable home screens. Plugins. Extensions. Applications. Messing around with repositories. Changing how the device behaved. Making the phone mine.

Basically, I liked the N900 because it invited me to poke around.

Sixteen years later, that is still one of the reasons I like Android.

Android is polished enough now that you don’t need to mess around with anything. You can take the phone out of the box, sign in and use it like a normal human being.

But if you are the sort of idiot who looks at a perfectly working interface and thinks, Hmmmm. Can I move this? Change that? Make this screen behave differently? What happens if I do this? — Android still lets you play.

And a Fold multiplies that.

Now you have two screen states to play with. Two layouts. Different app behaviour when folded and unfolded. Different ways of multitasking. Different little annoyances you can spend an unnecessary amount of time fixing.

Wonderful.

This is also why judging a Fold purely as a normal phone that happens to bend misses the point.

If you use it exactly like a slab phone and only open it occasionally to watch YouTube, then yes, you may reasonably ask why the hell you paid so much money for it.

But once the larger screen starts becoming part of your normal workflow, going back feels strange.

I notice this especially when I need to read something while referring to something else. Or look at a drawing. Or browse a proper desktop-ish webpage. Or compare information without jumping back and forth between apps like a madman. Of course it helps to have a bigger screen when you are growing older. *cough* eyesight HAHAHAHA!

Just about the same screen size as an iPad Mini (5, I think).

None of these things sounds revolutionary.

That is the problem with reviewing mature technology. The biggest improvements are often not the dramatic things you can show in a thumbnail with a red arrow saying GAME CHANGER!!!

They are small conveniences that quietly become habits.

And once they become habits, you miss them when they are gone.

Is the Fold perfect? Of course not.

I have complaints. Every device has irritating shit. There are things Samsung can improve, things Android can improve and things developers still handle badly on a big folding screen.

But if you ask me what I want fixed first, I am not going to stand under a fluorescent lamp, tilt the display sideways and scream:

THE CREASE!!!

That is not how I actually use the phone.

Maybe that is the biggest difference between a review and ownership. A reviewer has to notice everything. There is this long checklist to tick. More things to add. More things to talk about.

An owner eventually notices only the things that matter.

And after all these years — from Maemo and the N900 to Android and a Fold — apparently what still matters to me is quite simple.

Give me a device that works. Good battery life. Good camera. Multitasking.

Then give me enough freedom to fuck around with it.

Good enough already lah liddat.