At its current developer conference in California, Samsung finally unveiled the foldable phone we’ve been hearing about all these years. If you can call turning off the lights an unveiling. All anyone got was a glimpse of the ‘Infinity Flex Display’ that seems to just bend over and turn from a square-ish tablet into a candy bar phone with a narrow screen on the front — a thick candy bar at that.
Samsung wanted to be the first to launch a foldable phone and make a statement about its ability to innovate, but a Chinese company called Royale just beat it by a whisker, not that they could compete with Samsung in the actual market. The company’s president of mobile business, DJ Koh, spoke of the foldable phone as recently as August during an Unpacked event saying that he wouldn’t like to lose the world-first title for foldable phones — not after having raised expectations with a video of the concept as far back as 2014.
The foldable phone isn’t ready for market yet, but it’s time for developers and partner companies to be on board as all the software will need to be realigned to work with a foldable form factor. Google is already supporting the innovation and that’s enough for many, but for others, there’s more than enough room for skepticism. And plenty of questions.
Since no one got a real look at the folding phone, it’s not clear whether it will be thick and unwieldy or difficult to use or even cumbersome to fold and unfold. Will two screens, one more familiar looking on the outside and the tablet-like one on the side, make sense to use together? Will there be interesting and compelling use cases? Could you, for example, see the notification for a Netflix film on top and touch it to unfold the device and begin watching on the inside screen? For that matter what will be it be like to use touch on a polymer surface instead of glass?
There’s also the question of whether enough developers will create apps for the foldable format in time for a 2019 launch. If one looks back to the Edge models of Samsung’s flagships, there were barely any new applications other than the ones available at launch and some, such as the coloured lights indicating calls from favourite callers, also disappeared in time. There’s little doubt that the foldable will be expensive and who knows how difficult it is to manufacture in the first place and developers need to be sure of mass adoption before they start to support a new thing with software efforts.
But there’s also little doubt that Samsung will stick with what it’s started and a lot of other companies will jump in as well. That includes Huawei, LG, and Xiaomi. For now Samsung says there will be more innovations in the foldable space. With today’s smartphone having settled into a throughly tired look and feel though, a new direction is more than welcome.