Royale Flexpai maybe the first foldable phone on the market but it is the Samsung Galaxy Fold that gives us a true vision of the future.
The long awaiting phone appears to live up to the hype offering a truly amazing interpretation of the foldable phone with what appears to be flawless execution. Sadly this high-end tech will be reserved for the most affluent of buyers and tech enthusiast as the phone has a launch price of 2000-Euros, which is about £1750, or if you are US based, you can pick it up for a bargain $1980. You have a couple of months to save up though, it will launch on the 26th of April in the US and the 3rd of May in Europe.
Samsung has adopted a dual screen approach to this new technology with a small 4.6-inch screen which will sit on the outside of the phone and then the much larger 7.3-inch Infinity Flex AMOLED screen when the device is unfolded.
The smaller 21:9 screen has a resolution of 840 x 1,960, and the main foldable screen is 1,536 x 2,152, with both featuring the same 420 dpi density which is quite high for a tablet.
Samsung added that the larger polyimide-based display panel has been tested to withstand 200,000 folds, which equates to over five years of usage if you fold it 100 times a day. As a fidgety person, this is something I would like to test.
The phone will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 powering it, you would expect nothing less at this price. This will then be complemented by 12GB LPDDR4X RAM and 512GB UFS3.0 storage which is apparently twice as fast as other smartphones that use UFS 2.1 chips.
The dual screen approach needs plenty of battery so Samsung has cleverly split a 4,380mAh battery across both sides of the phone.
The Galaxy Fold also does wireless charging as well as Wireless Powershare — you’ll be able to use it to wirelessly charge other devices, including the freshly announced Galaxy Buds.
After so many years of companies obsessively making their phones slimmer the foldable format means we are going back to thick phones. This will sit at 17mm thick when folded, unsurprisingly that’s double what most normal phones measure.
They have not skimped out with the cameras either, this phone features six of them.
You have a main triple set consisting of a 16MP f/2.2 123-degree ultra-wide shooter, a 12MP f/2.4 telephoto camera with optical stabilisation, and a 12MP dual-pixel wide camera also with optical stabilisation plus variable aperture — f/1.5 and f/2.4. Then there’s a dual selfie camera set on the tablet screen side: you’ll be using the 10MP dual-pixel f/2.2 wide camera, which is assisted by an 8MP f/1.9 RGB depth camera.
With App Continuity, this Android 9 device lets you switch between both screens while staying in the same app. There is also Multi-Active Window which allows you to run multiple apps on the display at once, with one large window and two smaller ones.
The main omission from this phone appears to be 5G. It isn’t much use yet, but if I am dropping close to £2k on a phone then I would want it to be as future proof as possible.
Overall though, I am impressed with the phone, it sets a new standard for phone design and it will be great to see what competing brands have to offer next week at MWC.
Full specification:
| SoC | Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 1x Kryo 485 (CA76) @ 2.84GHz 3x Kryo 485 (CA76) @ 2.42GHz 4x Kryo 485 (CA55) @ 1.80GHz Adreno 640 |
| Display | Main Display: 7.3″ 2048 x 1536 Foldable Dynamic AMOLED (4.2:3) Cover display: 4.6″ 1680 x 720 Super AMOLED (21:9) |
| Dimensions | 17mm thick when folded |
| RAM | 12GB LPDDR4X |
| NAND | 512GB UFS3.0 |
| Battery | 4380mAh (16.86Wh) |
| Front Camera | Cover Camera: 10MP f/2.2 “Selfie camera” Front camera: 10MP f/1.9 4K video recording Front camera: 8MP, f/2.2 Dual Pixel PDAF “Live focus” |
| Primary Rear Camera | 77° Regular Angle 12MP 1.4µm Dual Pixel PDAF Tri-stack CMOS Sensor (Embedded DRAM), 4K60, 1080p240, 720p960 high-speed recording Adjustable aperture f/1.5 or f/2.4, OIS, auto HDR, LED flash |
| Secondary Rear Camera | 123° Wide Angle 16MP 1.0µm f/2.2 |
| Tertiary Rear Camera | 45° / Telephoto lens 2x zoom 12MP 1.0µm f/2.4, OIS |
| SIM Size | maybe? |
| Wireless | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2×2 MU-MIMO, BT 5.0 LE, NFC, GPS/Glonass/Galileo/BDS |
| Connectivity | USB Type-C, 3.5mm headset |
| Features | it folds |
| Launch OS | Android 9.0 |
| Launch Price | $1980 / 2000€ |