Has Samsung unfolded the future?

BitDepth#1186

LAST WEEK, at an Unpacked event in San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Samsung unveiled The Fold, its newest take on the problem of making smartphones bigger and more usable.

Was this a case of Samsung “jumping outside itself,” to use a colloquial term? A next step, too much, too far?

It’s hardly the first time that Samsung has challenged ideas about the right size for a smartphone device.

When it was introduced, the Note was dismissed as a “phablet,” a phone category that fitted somewhere between a phone and a tablet, and a category, some felt, that nobody had asked for.

As it turns out, nine iterations of the Note and ten years' worth of Galaxy smartphone development later, Samsung was proved right: some people just want a bigger phone and will adjust their expectations and lifestyle to accommodate one.

At Unpacked 2019, senior VP for mobile Justin Dennison described The Fold as not just “defining a category, it defies it.”

The new smartphone takes advantage of the latest in OLED screen technology and includes a new Samsung-designed hinge mechanism that the company claims will last for “hundreds of thousands” of uses.

The Fold also gives you two smartphone screens, two batteries and six cameras in a package you can just about fit into your pocket.

Folded closed, the face of the device sports a standard screen display that’s 4.3 inches on the diagonal. Open it and Samsung’s App Continuity software moves whatever you were doing on the smaller screen to the 7.3 inch display that comes to life when the hinge snaps open.

Recent updates to Android Pie include the software APIs that make this a seamless operation.

That bigger screen introduces a new three-app multi-tasking mode that looks capable of making multiple windows on a smartphone screen a usable reality.

Samsung has long had app multi-tasking on its smartphones, but on a smaller screen, that split screen wasn’t as useful as the company might have hoped. The Fold incorporates the triple-lens array that Samsung introduced with the Galaxy S10 lineup of devices, adds two front facing cameras in the unfolded mode and one on the active front when the device is folded.

To balance the device, and, presumably, to power that hefty screen, Samsung has added a second battery to The Fold, which makes it essentially two small smartphones' worth of device when it comes to pocketing it.

Samsung has not released weight or thickness specifications on the device.

That big screen will be great for productivity buffs, but most movies won’t make use of all of it and will leave two black bars at the top and bottom of the viewable area. It’s more than a little odd that Samsung’s most modern smartphone is actually optimised for media formatted for an old tube television. Fans of The Prisoner are going to love this.

On the downside, there’s no Micro-SD slot, though the device is slated to ship with 512GB of internal memory.

On the double downside, the price is set at an eye-watering US$1,980. That gets close to the price of three of the new S10e devices or a top-of-the-line smartphone and tablet.

Five years from now, we will look back on the design decisions that Samsung made to bring The Fold to market with appreciative, if rueful, nods. But if Samsung keeps working to bring science fiction into reality, we will then unscroll our new Fold 5 devices and get back to work.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there