Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Hello, I’m Dai Wakabayashi, and I cover Google in San Francisco for The New York Times.

For the most part, writing about smartphones over the last few years has been pretty boring. Can you get that excited about a phone going from two cameras to three?

But this was an interesting week for smartphone news, illustrating both the promise of developments (pun alert) unfolding before us and the challenges of trying to do something new and different.

A few days after Motorola (supposedly) started selling its foldable Razr phone, Samsung showed off its latest attempt at a bendable smartphone. The early reviews of Samsung’s Galaxy Flip Z seem cautiously optimistic, with some reporters praising the glass screen and the sturdy-seeming hinges. I am more excited for these phones than my colleague Brian X. Chen, who made the levelheaded argument that these handsets were probably not ready for prime time and seemed like more trouble than they were worth.