Finally! A flip phone that actually makes sense and it’s not the Galaxy Z Flip 7

And yes, that is the perfect size for watching videos with almost no black bars, so you are getting a much bigger viewing area.

Considering that watching videos is basically everything people do online these days (okay, I might be exaggerating a bit!), this makes a ton more sense.

And honestly, the rest of this phone doesn’t matter as long as it nudges flip phones into the right direction/aspect ratio.

There is one other big advantage!

I would be fine with just this more practical size, but turns out such a design has one other advantage — battery life.

The battery size on traditional flip phones is tiny because of these narrow dimensions and with the wider format of the Pura X, you get a swett nearly 20% increase in battery size.

The Pura X has got a 4,700 mAh battery compared to a 4,000 mAh cell on the Galaxy Z Flip 6. Not bad, right?

Wait... It has a telephoto camera too?!

Yes, we have had seven generations of Flip phones and Samsung still hasn’t figured out how to put a telephoto camera, and this Pure X phone somehow has a triple camera sensor that includes a 3.5X telephoto camera.

But…

So far so good, and that would have been the perfect package if…

• You could buy the phone outside of China (you can’t)
• It could run Android apps (it doesn’t)
• It had a reasonable price (it’s more than $1,000 in China, add some 20% on top of that for an eventual launch in the West)
• It had a decent processor (it uses a Kirin chip, which are slower than modern ones)

Is that a dealbreaker? Well, of course it is! You cannot buy the phone unless you live in China!

Some adventurous folks might think to look at Chinese phone resellers to get that Chinese version of the phone, but we advise against that as for most people, it’s just too much hassle getting everything to work right.

Pioneering spirit

These days, I realize I really miss this pioneering spirit with new form factors and curious tweaks that make so much sense.

Samsung, Google and Apple seem to have fallen into a certain trap of their own success and a great deal of complexity, and they are giving us few reasons to get excited.

At least that’s how I feel.

The Pura X reminds me of so many cool devices. It reminds me of the Microsoft Surface Duo, but it’s actually made much better, it seems.

We need this occasional jolt of excitement in the smartphone space and I hope our familiar phone makers take notes and please copy this design, just… don’t bore us to death until you finally decide to take at least some risk!