This is it. The moment the world has been waiting for, the first foldable smartphone from a major brand is official. We are talking about Samsung’s foldable smartphone which the company showed off back in November 2018. Not only it is official, it has a got a name, an associated sticker and availability too. Called Samsung Galaxy Fold, it will cost a hefty $1,980 when it becomes available on April 26, 2019 (May 3rd for Europe). Yikes. What kind of blasphemy is this? The price of smartphones has been skyrocketing and a novelty like certainly does not help to cool the pricing.
Billed as the world’s first Dynamic AMOLED Infinity Flex Display, Samsung Galaxy Fold features a 4.6-inch HD+ Super AMOLED cover display and a 7.3-inch QXGA+ Dynamic AMOLED, with the former sporting an aspect ratio of 21:9 and the latter, 4.2:3. Under the hood, there’s a 7 nm processor 64-bit octacore processor (though no specifics were offered at this point), backed by a whopping 12 GB LPDDR4x RAM and 512 GB of UFS 3.0 storage. With the enormous amount of storage, Samsung didn’t think expandable storage is necessary and as such, there’s no provision of microSD card slot. But hell, it’s 512 GB! It should be suffice for most power users.
Beyond the novelty of a foldable display, Samsung Galaxy Fold is a camera galore, boasting no less than 6 cameras. Yes. You heard that right. Six! It has a Cover camera with a 10 MP selfie camera with f2.2 aperture found, a three-camera set on the rear, featuring a 16 MP Ultra Wide Camera (f2.2, a 12 MP Wide-angle Camera with dual pixel AF, optical image stabilization (OIS, f1.5/f2.4) and a 12 MP Telephoto camera (f2.4) that’s consummated by PDAF, OIS, 2x optical zoom AND a front dual-camera setup comprising of 10 MP selfie camera (f2.2) and a 8 MP RGB Depth Camera (f1.9). The device is kept juiced by a fairly high capacity battery with fast charging, wired and wireless, coming in at 4,380 mAh and with support for Wireless Powershare.
Here are a few things you need know about this foldable smartphone:
• Samsung invented a new polymer layer and created a display around 50 percent thinner over the typical smartphone display, allowing the Galaxy Fold’s display to be flexible and tough – withstanding 200,000 folds.
• It has a specially engineered hinge with multiple interlocking gears, hidden away for a seamless elegant look.
• It has a fingerprint scanner on the side, where the thumb naturally rests
• There are actually two batteries with the batteries and components evenly distributed to achieve a balanced feel in your hands.
• There are four color options: Space Silver, Cosmos Black, Martina Green and Astro Blue.
• The device’s OS support multi-active window, allowing 3 active apps to run simultaneously on the main display.
• The device promise app continuity which means, seamless transitions between the cover and the main displays.
• Samsung said it has worked with Google and the Android developer community to ensure that apps and services were available for the device’s unique experience.
• It will have notches in a rather awkward places.
Out-of-the-box, the Samsung Galaxy will run on Android 9.0 Pie, overlaid with built-for-Galaxy_Fold Samsung UI, of course. We shall dispense with a specification table because, what you have read is about it. No details on network support, nor are there details on the sensors and connectivity. But really, the flexible, foldable display has somehow overshadowed those tiny bits of details. For those keen, you can sign up on Samsung Galaxy Fold product page to hear more about the device.
All images courtesy of Samsung.
