Why does it seem like wide-screen video has become passé? The latest and greatest Samsung phone, when fully opened, is square!
After I started watching some old TV shows on my phone, and my wife and I were seriously considering going to streaming apps only for the first time, I started noticing something. At first, it was only the STARZ channels, but now it seems to have spread to HBO/max and Showtime. They'll show a movie in wide-screen format, but it will be letterboxed with black bars at top and bottom within a 4:3 picture—which is then surrounded by black bars on the left and right on my wide-screen TV!
Now, when I start the cable company's app on my Apple TV device, and tune it to the same channel, the same movie takes up the full width of my TV screen. It isn't contained in a 4:3 picture.
Maybe the networks are trying to get people to drop their cable providers and use their streaming apps only? That's the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. If it isn't that, then the cable company is just doing something stupid—oh, wait, that kind of makes sense, too.
By the way, as for those old TV shows like Columbo and Babylon 5, at first I thought it was kind of quaint the way they only took up the middle 1/3 or so of my phone screen. Now, I've gotten used to it and don't really think about it, except when I think that a wide-screen TV picture will take up the full width of my phone, too, but not my TV.
As for the folding phone, I guess being able to fold a screen like that is novel, and that may attract some, but I have never liked the idea of a phone that opens, even when flip-phones were all the rage back in the '90s. More moving parts means more things that can break, and I'm already a klutz.
