Samsung’s foldable phone is here but not yet

Just last week, the first consumer-oriented foldable phone was announced by Royole Corporation, and exactly as was predicted, Samsung announced their vision of the foldable phone today.

Before you get your hopes up just yet, their device will not be available for purchase just yet. In fact, Samsung hasn’t even shown us the real device!

Samsung began their SDC presentation talking about their continuous work when it comes to their development of phone screens and their evolution from the introduction of AMOLED screens to the Quad-HD Super AMOLED Infinity Displays which are currently equipped on Samsung’s Galaxy S and Note lineup. Not only that, but they are currently exploring additional concepts that they are calling the “Infinity U, V, and O” which they haven’t talked much about.

Then came the moment that we were all waiting for: the introduction of Samsung’s Foldable Phone. After a quick video teaser, Justin Denison, Samsung’s SVP of Mobile Product Marketing, pulled out of his pocket, a dummy phone equipped with Samsung’s “Infinity Flex Display. ” Let us clarify that this dummy phone is probably not the final phone that will be available in the market.

Infinity Flex Display

When closed, you can see a boxy design with extremely large bezels, especially at the top with a relatively small screen that is mainly there to quickly navigate through your phone without the need of opening it up.

When the device is opened up, it reveals a 7.3″ display which is surprisingly beautiful compared to FlexPai’s display. Bezels are still there along with that boxy design, but Samsung clearly stated that they can not show the real elements of the phone today, so they disguised the design just for the demo.

Samsung quickly talked about how they developed this technology, which is quite impressive—from how they were able to invent a new protective layer instead of glass to how they were able to find a malleable foldable adhesive, all while reducing the thickness of the display itself. With all of that combined, they were able to create this foldable display that they claim to withstand hundreds of thousands of opening and closing.

App Continuity

The question now is, how will you be able to interact with the phone? During the demo, Samsung stated that if you have an application opened with the phone closed up, the application will then scale up to fit the larger display so you can pick right where you left off.

Multi-Active Window

With the introduction of a large screen, Samsung is now building upon the multitasking capabilities of Android, supporting up to 3 applications to be opened up at once offering a new way to interact with your phone. Samsung calls this feature “Multi-Active Window.”

Google and Samsung

Samsung has partnered with Google to natively support foldable displays and scaling applications in future versions of Android, which is clearly an amazing step forward and supports our claim that the future of smartphones is unfolding (pardon the pun).

So what’s next?

With the announcement of Samsung’s foldable displays, you must be wondering when and how will you get your hands on one of these. Samsung stated that they will start mass manufacturing their foldable screens within the next few months which is good news.

There are, however, several obstacles that will need to be resolved before the phone can finally be available: the fitting of the internal components and app support.

If you look closely at the dummy phone you can clearly see extremely large bezels and that the height of the front screen is much smaller than the height of the unfolded screen. This makes us wonder if this is due to the fact that they are trying to hide the design of the phone or because they had to fit a lot of components up there. Our guess is that it’s the latter. People aren’t ready to purchase a phone that looks like a thick brick, which makes us believe that Samsung is still trying to figure out how they can fit all the internals in such a small form factor.

With the introduction of new concepts, developers will have to edit their applications to support them. When the notch was first introduced to Android phones, you often saw bars covering the whole width of the screen for the height of the notch, this was due to the fact that developers had not updated their applications to support it. We believe that the same thing will occur with the foldable displays.

Samsung didn’t disappoint their fans with their introduction of foldable screens. Even though it’s not yet available, if we are honest, we don’t want our first experience with a foldable screen to be a bad one, so kudos to Samsung for not rushing the manufacture of their new phone. They are clearly working hard to manufacture such gorgeous screens and if the new phone has a screen as beautiful as the one in the demo, then maybe foldable phones do have a chance.

Featured-Image: The Verge