It’s true—they don’t make phones like they used to, but the designs we see today are far from boring. 2025 was a fun year for phones, and 2026 is shaping up to be even more exciting.
Samsung Galaxy Tri-Fold
The Samsung Galaxy Tri-Fold is not the first foldable to fold not once, but twice—that would be the Huawei Mate XT. Samsung’s foldable is, however, the most important. This is the first that will be available in the US and more likely to eventually appear on more shelves outside of China.
The Tri-Fold opens up to become a 10-inch, widescreen tablet. It can run Samsung DeX directly on its own screen, so you don’t need to plug in a pair of AR glasses or dock to an external monitor. With a keyboard and mouse, it can more effectively serve as a PC than the Galaxy Z Fold 6 I already use as my computer.
All of this, and the Tri-Fold is still thinner than a Galaxy Z Flip 7 or a Razr Ultra when closed. Impressive work.
Clicks Communicator
Announced at CES 2026, the Clicks Communicator captured a lot of hearts. Here is a phone made for so many that miss the way phones used to be. It’s shaped like a BlackBerry and comes with a refined physical keyboard underneath a square-shaped screen. It has a removable battery and a microSD card slot. It has an LED light that glows different colors for notifications, and it comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The Clicks Communicator is designed to be a companion device to your primary phone, but it also has all the necessary hardware and software to serve as your primary. The screen’s aspect ratio is not built for streaming video, playing games, or swiping through vertical videos—so if you want a phone that feels halfway between a smartphone and a dumbphone, this may be it.
Ikko: Mind One
There are increasingly few small smartphones in the world, which is why it’s exciting to see a company create one that’s smaller than the palm of your hand. The iKKO: Mind One is a smartphone that’s around the size of a credit card. It’s more of a square than a rectangle, and the screen occupies so much of the front that there isn’t even a selfie front-facing camera.
The phone actually ships with just one shooter—a 50MP Sony sensor on the back, which you can flip it up to face the front.
There’s an optional keyboard case planned that turns the device into more of a Clicks Communicator-style device, which you can imitate by installing Niagara Launcher to approximate much of the same interface. And that optional case? It comes with a headphone port at the bottom.
Motorola Razr Fold
Book-style foldable phones have been around for over half a decade, so for some of us, they are neither new nor novel anymore. To the vast majority of people who have never owned one, they remain quite novel indeed. To you, I recommend reading up on all the ways that book-style foldables are better phones, since the perks aren’t always obvious.
The Motorola Razr Fold is the company’s first phone of this type, and hopefully Motorola is able to bring the price down like it did with its popular flip-foldable, the Moto Razr.
The Razr Fold also stands poised to become the most high-end foldable with a stylus, following the removal of S Pen support from the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and its continued absence from the Galaxy Tri-Fold. As someone writing these words right now using an S Pen on my Galaxy Z Fold 6, that’s a feature near and dear to my heart (and my professional well-being).
The Minimal Phone
This is not an upcoming phone, considering I reviewed the Minimal Phone in the first half of last year. But it remains on the market today, and on a list of fun phones, it’s hard to overlook something as unconventional as a phone with an E Ink display and a physical keyboard.
Unlike past experiments with putting E Ink on a phone, this time around, we saw more members of the mainstream tech press express interest in either reviewing or buying one. If this had come out a few years earlier, back when I was using a stylus with a Boox Tab Ultra C to do my job, and before I discovered book-style foldables, it would have been my dream phone.
7/10
- Brand
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Minimal Company
- SoC
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MediaTek Helio G99
The Minimal Phone is a smartphone running a full version of Android on an E-Paper display. The phone also packs a 35-button keyboard, expanding its appeal beyond those looking to reduce phone addiction and reclaim their focus. It also makes for a nice pocket eReader.
Fairphone 6
Even if you are quite happy with the shape of modern slab phones, there is still innovation on the market for you that we didn’t see a decade ago. The Fairphone 6 is the most user-repairable phone you can buy. It’s designed for you to be able to replace the screen, the battery, and even the camera using an included screwdriver. Yes, you heard that right—this phone comes with a screwdriver!
The Fairphone 6 came out this summer, but it didn’t launch in the US until the end of October. Here you can buy the phone from Murena, who will ship it with their privacy-focused Android spin known as /e/OS. So if you’re bored with the usual version of Android, here is another way to spice up your experience.
- Display
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6.31 inch P-OLED LTPO
- RAM
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8GB
Powered by /e/OS operating system, the Murena Fairphone (Gen. 6) protects your data at all times, while at the same time protecting the planet. Made by 50% fair and recycled materials, in fair conditions and with one of the lowest carbon footprints in the market.
I’ve covered phones for well over a decade now, and I’ve never been as excited about smartphone hardware as I am now. For the first time, it feels like whatever kind of phone I want to buy, in whatever shape, and with whatever features, there is a good chance that someone, somewhere, is making that phone happen.
