Samsung’s foldable phone is finally official—meet the Galaxy Fold

After years of teasing, Samsung on Wednesday took the wraps off its first foldable smartphone: the Galaxy Fold.

The device will start at a whopping $1,980 and arrive on April 26. It'll hit Europe on May 3 and start at €2,000. Samsung says it will sell both LTE and 5G-capable variants, but has only confirmed AT&T and T-Mobile as carrier partners in US. The electronics giant detailed the Android phone-tablet hybrid at an event in San Francisco, where it also unveiled its new flagship Galaxy S10 phones.

As the company hinted at its developers conference last year, the Galaxy Fold consists of two OLED displays: a 4.6-inch, 21:9, 1960x840-resolution panel that serves as a more traditional smartphone display, and a foldable 7.3-inch, 4.2:3, 2152x1536-resolution panel that behaves more like a tablet.

OLED panels are known in part for their flexibility, which in this case allows users to close the Galaxy Fold like a book. Samsung says it uses a hinge system with “multiple interlocking gears” to create the fold, which the company claims is—and indeed appears to be, at first blush—hidden from view. (At least on the inside—the hinge is definitely visible between the smaller display and the smartphone-like back on the outside.)

The smaller display sits on the outside of the device for one-handed use. When the phone is fully unfurled, the larger, foldable display can be used like one of Samsung’s Android tablets. This setup differs from other early foldable phone designs like that of the Royole FlexPai, which uses one big bendable outer display.

The Galaxy Fold doesn’t fold completely in half, however, so there is a small gap in the center of the device when it is closed. When it is folded, the smaller screen is surrounded by enormous bezels. The larger display, meanwhile, looks more like a modern tablet, with a noticeably elongated notch in its top right corner.

So many displays...

The inside display uses a plastic cover—not the traditional, inflexible Gorilla Glass—which will likely make it relatively prone to scratches, though the book-like design should give it at least some protection from scuffing. For its part, Samsung says the display used here is "about 50 percent thinner" than the typical smartphone display. Effectively having two devices in one makes the phone itself relatively thick, though Samsung has not provided specific dimensions as of this writing.

Samsung is pitching the Galaxy Fold as a "luxury device," and the specs it shared onstage sound appropriately high-end. The company says the Galaxy Fold runs on a "state-of-the-art 7nm processor"—most likely Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 SoC in the US—and 12GB of RAM. It has 512GB of UFS 3.0 storage, which should allow it to read data quicker than most other handsets.

Powering the multiple displays are two batteries that combine for a 4,380mAh capacity. Samsung says there are six cameras in the device in total: a 10MP camera above the smaller screen, three rear cameras—a 16MP ultra-wide camera, a 12MP wide-angle camera, and a 12MP telephoto camera—on the back of the "cover," and both a 10MP selfie camera and an 8MP RGB depth camera in the notch above the larger display.

Beyond that, Samsung says the Galaxy Fold is capable of wirelessly charging a second device while charging itself. The phone itself supports WPC (i.e., Qi) and PMA wireless charging, and it works with Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 standard when powered with a wire. There's a fingerprint scanner on the side and stereo speakers, and the device is compatible with Samsung's DeX hardware, which lets it serve as a pseudo-desktop. The whole thing will come in a silver, green, black, or blue finish. There's no sign of a headphone jack or microSD slot, however.

The future?

Apart from potential durability concerns with a device that's constantly being opened and closed, one of the big questions here is how well Samsung and Google have optimized Android for the foldable form factor. Google has already said it's working on this, and onstage, Samsung showed off a few software features unique to the Galaxy Fold. The company gave the example of using Google Maps on the smaller display before unfolding the device and having that map open up in the same spot on the larger display. Samsung also says that the larger display is capable of running three apps simultaneously. The Fold will ship with Android 9 Pie.

The appeal of foldable phones is fairly obvious: you get the portability of a smartphone and the more luxurious reading, gaming, and video-viewing display of a tablet, all in one device. Many more are expected to arrive in the coming years. As one of the world’s leading display manufacturers, Samsung is in as good a position as anyone to make a foldable smartphone work, and the company has talked about creating this class of device as far back as 2011. There’s a chance we’ll look back at the Galaxy Fold as the first serious entry in an entirely new category for mobile computing.

Still, there are reasons for skepticism: how much support third-party app makers lend to the foldable design is up in the air, and Android has historically been a lacking tablet OS. Either way, at nearly $2,000, this is going to be a niche product to start. Exactly how well Samsung has executed on its admittedly ambitious ideas is something we’ll have to test for ourselves before making any verdicts.

Listing image by Samsung