Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this. There are some folding phones that fold vertically. They’re for convenience and fold out to the same size as a normal candybar phone. The Z Fold folds out horizontally and doubles the screen size. Speakers are fine – not audiophile territory, but not bad at all.
I have the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3. I absolutely adore this phone. It’s thick, but I watch a lot of shows on my phone and having a tablet sized screen to watch them on without having to carry a separate device is amazing. They’re not for everyone, I think, but if the flaws in current foldable technology aren’t a problem for you and you have the right use cases, they’re great.
What a wild ride of a read that was. Reminds me a bit of when I first got to college. Glad things started going well for you.
I doubt you’ll get any disagreement on your take for the controller. It was definitely an odd and experimental one, though I do remember thinking it was really cool looking when it came out. I was also 6 and not the best judge of functionality.
That having been said, the cartridge decision was in line with Nintendo’s recent plays at the time that had paid out for them in a big way, and that they continue to follow today. They had made a gamble on the Game Boy a few years prior that absolutely blew up in their favor. When the Game Boy came out, the Game Gear was it’s competitor and Game Gear had a color screen and a lot more screen real estate. Nintendo made the choice to focus on power efficiency (up to almost a half a day of playtime on four double-A batteries versus the Game Gear with about three and a half hours of play time on six double-A’s) and production cost reduction. Some of those design philosophies carried forward to the N64.
Additionally, something a lot of people seem to be unaware of these days is how absolutely stark the difference in loading times was between something like the PS1 discs and the N64 cartridge. I grew up on the SNES and N64 and when I first played a PS1 game the load times made me not want to touch a Sony console for quite a while.
Anyways, that’s my two cents. No disagreements here that cartridges held the N64 back in some ways but the tradeoffs made it an amazing system and miles above the competition for me, personally. Good gameplay and quality of life will always beat more power in my book.
Check out ENV – Some of my favorite lyric-less music. There are a couple of playlists on YouTube with their albums. Firefrost is a good song to start with.
And then you get to the Atlas passive tree and we’re straight into a Lord of the Rings second breakfast meme.