Your next smartphone may flip open to reveal its screen and fold up when you are ready to put it away — just like the old-school clamshell phones from the 1990s.

The question is: Is that something we even want anymore?

Tech companies like Samsung, Motorola and Huawei sure hope so. Many of us realized a few years ago that the smartphones we had were already very good — and their successors were only slightly better — so we have been holding on to our phones longer and longer before upgrading. That hurts those companies’ bottom lines.

So in an effort to come up with something new and exciting that will make us spend our dollars, phone makers are bombarding us with so-called foldables. They include Samsung’s $1,380 Galaxy Z Flip, which was unveiled on Tuesday, and Lenovo’s $1,500 Motorola Razr, which was released last week.

There’s something off about all of this. For years, tech companies experimented with new phone designs driven partly by consumer surveys, which brought us handsets with bigger screens, longer battery life and sharper cameras — things we really wanted. But folding phones are not something most of us have asked for.