A field guide to the wacky future of folding phones

Remember when people used to joke that every new phone was the same rounded rectangle? Those days are officially gone. Now, phone manufacturers are dealing with each other with designs that go completely off the rails because you can build a phone in many different ways when you have screens that can be folded.

We have hardly seen the first wave of collapsible phones, and there are almost as many different forms as phones. How should we call them? Before each phone was effectively a phablet, we had all the categories: folding phones, candy bars, sliders, spinners, the original brick phones and, of course, the infamous cue.

So, we thought it was time to start this conversation. Here at The Verge we put our heads together to create this wholly official list of 100% of the best absolutely positive names that you could use to describe each type of foldable phone we've seen so far, and some that do not yet exist .

Clearly, a waiter will bring us the bill in one of these. I hope the small lid that contains a credit card has not been broken yet.

Examples of the form: Samsung Galaxy Fold

Something we could all accept to call it: a booklet phone [19659007] Salvador Dalí would be proud, or very confused.

Examples of the form: Royole Flexpai, one of the DragonHinge prototypes of TCL

Something we could all call it: a folding tablet

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I wish I had one of these Back at school instead of a three-ring binder full of notes and assignments. Also, it would have been nice to have Google and Wikipedia and … am I old?

Examples of the form: Huawei Mate X, the folding prototype of Oppo

Something we could all accept to call it: a phone in the matchbox

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For the inhabitant of the vault more demanding.

Examples of the form: Nubian Alpha

Something we could all agree to call it: a bracelet

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Do not fix it if it's not broken.

Examples of the form: Patent image similar to Motorola's RAZR (the actual device may be totally different)

Something we could all accept to call it: a folding phone, of course

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In a textbook example of "have your cake and eat it too," LG managed to make part of the conversation about bending phones without actually announcing one. Because he announced this elegant publication, a second screen is added to a normal phone. You can probably expect others to follow LG's example. Does LG have any better ideas?

Examples of the form: The dual-screen LG attachment for the LG G8 ThinQ

Something we could all accept to call it: is not a folding phone

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Uh Yes, that would be a affirmative. LG has better ideas. LG, please take your stylish roll-up TV screens and build an elastic tablet the size of a digital newspaper directly from Minority Report stat.

Examples of the form: One of the LG patent images

Something we could all accept to call it: a rolling tablet

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The screens go inside to protect them with little or no gap. It evokes memories of the golden age of hand games.

Examples of the form: One of the LG patent images, one of the DragonHinge prototypes of TCL

Something we could all accept to call it: a book phone

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Unlike the Boy Mini ", this really looks like a phone when it's flattened, a very long phone that does not fit in a pocket, but where you're going, you do not need pockets.

Examples of the form: Lenovo prototype CPlus, one of the TCL DragonHinge prototypes

Something we could all accept to call it: a slap bracelet phone

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We also consider "The Money Clip" and "The Scarf." Either way, it's more a status symbol than a practical telephone.

Examples of the form: One of the DragonHinge prototypes of TCL

Something we could all accept to call it: is not flexible enough to fit in a pocket

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The screen it stretches to become taller. Humanity has barely managed to build flexible phones and, honestly, this does not seem so plausible with current technology.

Examples of the form: LG patent image for an elastic phone

Something we can all agree to call it: an accordion phone

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Well, I'm pretty sure that the screens still can not do this. But if we are daydreaming, we could also dream big. Let's say it's also a holographic screen? I'm imagining it by projecting Aladdin and Jasmine onto this magic carpet at this moment.

Example of the form: One of the LG patent images

Something we could all accept to call it: a torcible phone

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The honest truth? We could not find the correct name for the Xiaomi folding phone prototype above. "The Konmari" arouses joy, but it is not quite right. First fold the clothes, yes, but also roll.

I guess that's an opportunity for you to value, dear reader. What do you say?