The history of flip phones is a medium-to-long and vaguely intriguing one. A story that saw the flippy-flappy ones appear from almost nowhere in 1996 to become the most coveted comms device on the planet, then fall into clichéd disrepute in the early 2000s. Many manufacturers continued to produce a wide range of flippers, though, such as the glorious Motorola V3 razr (of which I owed a few) and the Sony Ericsson w508, but eventually, popularity waned in the early 2010s, with the death knell ultimately being sounded by the arrival of the smartphone with its distinctly unflappable touchscreen display.
That’s about 20 years ago now (an awful fact that makes me feel very old), but in recent years the flip has seen something of an unlikely resurgence in popularity. Whether that’s the nostalgia-drenched likes of the new Nokia 2660 Flip , or the move to merge the past and the present in the shapely form of, first, Samsung’s Z Flip range, closely followed by Motorola’s revived razr , Oppo’s N3 Flip , and Huawei’s Mate Xs 2 , to name the more famed manufacturers. But whether it’s the desire for a digital detox or to revel in a fuzzy fusion of fondness for phones past and phones of the here-future, there is now, arguably, a flip phone for all.
And, as of the tail-end of July 2024, the latest model to carry the Z Flip name became available from the hallowed halls of South Korea’s Samsung , the Z Flip6 – a shining culmination of the flipping best of the flip technolog.