There's no foldable iPhone yet, but it feels inevitable that Apple will eventually give its smartphone a flexible makeover. There are a couple of ways it could go about it, and one recently published design obviously thinks that Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip is the model to emulate.
This design for the "iPhone Flip" was made by #iOS beta news (via BGR), and you can watch the full video below showing off the design from all angles. It uses the same horizontal phone to make a normal sized iPhone smaller, rather than the vertical fold which allows a phone to be opened out into a tablet.
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While the Z Flip does have an external cover screen, it's very small, designed only for notifications unlike the larger display on the front of the Samsung Galaxy Fold. This concept gives you a reasonably sized external panel that displays the iOS 13 Today view, letting you scroll through your chosen widgets without opening the phone.
Parts of this design are lifted from the upcoming iPhone 12. We're speaking of course of that rear quad-camera block, featuring a LiDAR depth sensor in the bottom right corner as the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max are rumored to.
More unusual is the interior selfie camera, which is a single punch-hole notch. This is exactly what the Z Flip does (and Samsung's other flagships like the Galaxy Note 10 and the Galaxy S20), but is a move Apple is unlikely to make in the next few years.
This concept sticks with Face ID for an unlock method for the time being, which requires some kind of notch in order to fit in the extra infra-red scanning system that Face ID needs. Unless we start to see Apple adopting the sub-display fingerprint scanner or some kind of side-mounted sensor, we can't see this happening.
While we wait for the iPhone Flip or any other Apple foldable to become a reality, we have the iPhone 12 to look forward to. It's expected to be announced in September, with the range consisting of four models across three different sizes. All four iPhone 12s will include 5G connectivity and Apple's new A14 chipset, with the iPhone 12 Pros also gaining a LiDAR depth sensor in the rear camera array and potentially 120Hz refresh rate displays.
