Samsung’s first foldable smartphone will be available starting April 26th. The Samsung Galaxy Fold is a $1980 device that looks like a 7.3 inch tablet… until you fold it in half so that screen is hidden and you find yourself instead looking at a 4.6 inch secondary display (surrounded by some really big bezels).
Other phone makers have taken different approaches to foldables. And it looks like Samsung may be hedging its bets with a few different designs as well.
Bloomberg reports that Samsung may release two more foldable phones in the next year or so, and each could have a different type of design.
One is expected to fold in half like a flip-phone. Like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, this design means the primary display would be hidden when the phone is folded. But Samsung is considering putting a secondary display on the outside.
It seems likely that this sort of foldable wouldn’t be designed to let you switch between smartphone and tablet experiences. Instead you could have a large-screened smartphone that becomes easy to slide into your pocket when it’s folded.
Another design is said to look like the Huawei Mate X, with a single screen that folds outward so that it wraps around the front and back of the phone. This could let you use a portion of the screen in smartphone mode… and possibly use the back as a viewfinder while shooting selfies with the phone’s primary camera.
According to Bloomberg, the single-screen model would likely be thinner than the Galaxy Fold since it doesn’t require a secondary display.
There’s no word on how much these new devices will cost, but Bloomberg’s article indicates that they could launch later this year or early next year… if they hit the streets at all. Samsung may wait to see how the Galaxy Fold and other first-generation foldable phones do in the marketplace before expanding its lineup.
With aspect ratios getting more extreme, folding phones will become necessary or phones won’t fit in people’s pockets anymore. It is all so very stupid. Phone manufacturers turn a deaf ear towards their customers then wonder why their products don’t sell.
Sadly the new phones are folding on the long axis, and so, W2019 excepted, don’t offer any real benefit.
If smaller pocketable phones were popular with consumers, someone would be making a ton of money selling them. The fact that nobody is, is indicative that the claim there is pent up demand for smaller phones is wrong.
Samsung needs to design a lower price into it’s new folding phones. Apple priced itself out of the market with the iPhone X series phones costing over $1000. Now Samsung wants to charge almost double that for their new phones? I won’t buy one.
The current pricing is not indicative of where foldable phones will eventually settle in the marketplace. After all, the first digital watch on the market was $2,500, which is a lot more in today’s dollars.
Well, people will say that this is Samsung just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, which is kind of true in the sense that shipping a variety of products is the ultimate way to road test a bunch of designs — let the market decide.
Pretty cool if you can afford to do it — which, obviously, Samsung can.
I’d say its because the Samsung Galaxy Fold is shit, and they’ve just been upstaged internationally by the likes of Huawei…. so they’re in a mad-rush to try to compete.
While competition is great, you can’t quite say this qualifies as competing, when the device is prices above US$500. Where a US$900 price seems more fitting, considering the market conditions. Even Apple, the so-called untouchable, is struggling with market share above the US$800 price (see iPhone X, Xr, XS, XSmax). Apple’s best current performing smartphone seems to be the discounted 128GB iPhone 7 Plus, which makes sense as that offers the best value with a stupid free dongle in the box, at an affordable price.
I mean the smartphone market has been on the decline for 3-years in a row, and this expensive foldable phone is definitely not going to change that.
Samsung is certainly not expecting to compete with anyone with $2000+ phones. Quite the opposite, in fact. They are priced that high because they don’t expect to sell very many, and they want to target consumers predisposed to being early adopters and fans of company products because they’re more tolerant of devices with rough edges (metaphorically speaking).
It’s also way too soon after Huawei’s demo to be in a position to announce that they’re releasing a couple more foldable phones. It’s almost certain these were already in the pipeline, and while they’re no doubt smarting at the presses positive reaction to their competitor’s first effort, they know it’s way too early to draw any real conclusions as to the final convergent design of foldable devices. We’re still way before the equivalent of the first iPhone when compared to the evolution of traditional smartphones.