Dual-screen smartphone: ZTE Axon M review
Of course, even that isn't technically the first foldable phone. ZTE actually released a foldable phone back in 2017 -- but rather than one screen that folds in half, this one has two screens with a gap (and a hinge) in the middle. Our review found it was a bit of a hassle, but despite the flaws, the idea of a phone that can fold out to provide a bigger screen was genuinely useful.
Once upon a time mobile phones came in all shapes and sizes, with clamshells being a particularly popular form factor. Then along came the iPhone in 2007, and everything changed. In the last decade we’ve seen a smartphone boom with hundreds (if not thousands) of handsets, all following the basic form of that revolutionary Apple device: A flat rectangular slab with a touchscreen.
It’s funny how things come full circle, because ZTE is trying to jumpstart the next evolution of mobile phones by bringing back the clamshell design.
The ZTE Axon M, which hit the US late last year before reaching China and Japan last month, is not an attractive device on specs alone. It’s bulky, running on a nearly two-year-old Qualcomm CPU, with an average display surrounded by huge bezels.
But then you flip the device over to see a second display, which can be folded out to make one much bigger screen (albeit with a big black line in the middle). It makes the Axon M a fascinating device, and one that represents a forward thinking approach that consumers in the West may not associate with Chinese companies.
TWO SCREENS ARE MORE USEFUL THAN ONE
The selling point of this phone is simple: Two screens means you can do double of everything. You can combine the two 5.2-inch LCD panels into one large-ish screen or use them separately to run two apps side-by-side. (There’s also a third mode that mirrors the same content across both screens, but I didn’t see much use for that.)