Everything You Need to Know About Samsung's Foldable Smartphone

For many of us, it felt as if it was just yesterday that Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone, the first properly ‘smart’ phone by modern definition. Since 2008, the technology has been developing at an extremely rapid pace and their integration into our lives are becoming deeper and deeper than ever.

Just when a lot of people were starting to think that smartphones couldn’t become any more different than they were back then: A rectangular slab of glass, metal, and plastic. Everything running by the electronic tempo of the sophisticated hardware hidden underneath the casing. Just a decade later and we're looking forward to the the Samsung foldable phone release date - a revolutionary breakaway from the monotony in design.

It’s difficult to blame them, however. While functionalities and new features have been continuously added, the design - specifically, the shape of the device - hasn’t changed much. We now have edge to edge screen (At least, phones that are very close to being edge to edge), and a whole lot of other. But most smartphones up until now feature just the old, rectangular shape the iPhone pioneered.

Up until now there’s a new design philosophy emerging: A foldable smartphone. And it is gradually picking up momentum and excitement within the industry and beyond, with everyone waiting with bated breath the Samsung foldable phone release date.

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What Is A Foldable Phone, Really?

A foldable smartphone is pretty simple in concept. Its name already suggests what it can do: Fold up and still function fine. Yes, we already have such ‘foldable’ phone back in the 90s and the early 2000s. But in the age of smartphone, you fold up the screen itself, not just into separate, independent parts being the screen and the clunky, physical keyboard. 

For most smartphones, if you try to do this feat, what you’d end up with is a broken one. But with a foldable smartphone, armed with a slew of new, cutting edge technologies, this is a feat entirely achievable.

The foldable phone by Samsung - first of its kind - Samsung Galaxy Fold as an example, Instead of a rigid LED display and a completely solid metal casing, this foldable phone of Samsung has an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) display, a screen made out of special, flexible polymer, fitted with custom specialised equipment. And lastly, a pretty advanced hinge design to aid with the folding and unfolding process of the phone.

As said, the foldable phone by Samsung is jam-packed with pretty insane equipment and techs. But the most amazing thing about the phone has got to be the screen panel and probably the most famous of all: The extremely flexible OLED display. Probably this is the feature that most people would be looking forward to experiencing at the Samsung foldable phone release date

OLED - The Key to Flexible Smartphone

In the past, the biggest challenge to making a foldable smartphone is the screen. LED is a rigid panel and requires backlights to work, there’s no easy way to fold it in half without breaking it. That’s not a problem for OLED. Instead of relying on backlights, OLED works by streaming electricity through a mesh made out of organic compounds.

These compounds light up on their own accord depend on the characteristics of the current flows through them. That’s why OLED panels are thinner and more flexible. But another key advantage of OLED is that they can recreate very vivid and considerably brighter colours than traditional LED panels.

Samsung has a pretty good advantage over other manufacturers, considering they’re the larger maker of OLED panels in the world. The beautiful curve to either side of the Samsung Galaxy S10 was made possible by OLED tech. Even the iPhone XS and XS Max both use the OLED panels manufactured by Samsung. There are other players in the OLED panel industry, like Sony and LG with a pretty impressive portfolio of TVs casted out of OLED panels.

OLED tech has been around the industry since 2011. But manufacturers are taking a sweet time injecting it into consumer-grade products. That foldable phone of Samsung was the boldest move ever made when it comes to tech since its conception, and the Samsung foldable phone release date will mark a golden milestone in the company's history.

Flexible Components

Of course, in order to make a foldable smartphone, it’s not just the screen that needs to fold. Everything else under the hood, the hardware and even the casing itself needs to follow the screen in the folding process. And it’s just now that companies figured out how to do this.

First thing first, the popular material in smartphone’s screens - glass - need to be eliminated. Glass isn’t flexible, they crack very easily. That’s why companies have been developing a type of polymer in place of glass to create a screen. Printed circuit boards and especially Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) batteries don’t react well when they’re bended, either, and can actually catch fire. Even the casing itself, often made out of Aluminium and plastic, need to be re-engineered. They can technically bend, yes, but they’ll buckle and snap in half after a while.

With these problems alone, you can actually imagine just how extensive the research and development for a foldable smartphone needs to be. For Samsung to go from concept to the Samsung foldable phone release date is a major obstacle in innovation.

Enter the Samsung Galaxy Fold

The Samsung Galaxy Fold - the foldable smartphone solution of the South Korean-based tech giant was unveiled in February during a pretty impressive event. It was truly impressive at first sight: The folding screen was a first for many, and the sophistication down to the hinge design wowed the audience.

Though many of us have imagined what a foldable smartphone could look like, it was still an awe-inspiring moment when the Infinity Flex display folded seamlessly from a tablet to just a fraction of its original size.

But in the months that followed, the Fold received nothing but troubles. Many members of the public got their own chance of having and experiencing the foldable phone of Samsung by itself, and the complaints and troubles started to flow in. Some found a pretty worrying crease where the screen folds after a few cycles of folding and unfolding. Then there are those whose screens straight out break for numerous reasons.

Overall, while the concept was good on paper, the Fold did not prove to be at all reliable or even usable in the long term in practical usage. For everything that Samsung has been promising when it launched, the actual result was quite disappointing. Many fittingly described it as a masterpiece that’s simply not yet ready when it was first launched. We do hope that when the unique Samsung foldable phone release date comes up in the upcoming months, there will have been a great many improvements done to the design.

If you’re interested in having a Samsung foldable phone unboxing experience by sacrificing your bank account, you should look through this brief summary of everything that this phone is, first.

The Specs Sheet

Aside from the marvellous engineering that definitely had gone into the project, many items on the specs sheet are familiar.

Screen

The screen panel when completely unfolded is an expansive 7.3-inch dynamic OLED touchscreen. The panel has a native resolution of 1536x2152 (QXGA+), roughly 362 pixel-per-inch density capable of displaying graphic using the brand new HDR10+ format. While the inner, unfolded out screen within the phone is quite impressive.

The screen is treated, as said, with a type of special polymer. Which is the reason why, when you unfold your phone in a very quiet place, you could hear the phone creaked rather disconcertingly. But don’t worry, that’s all part of the design.

The cover screen - or the screen that you would use it with while folded is ridiculous small. This screen is only 4.6-inch across, yet the Super AMOLED tech behind it, a usable screen resolution of 720x1680 (HD+) for its size along with an aspect ratio of 21:9 made up for the limitations of the tiny screen real estate.

Software

Samsung also adds the Fold into the expanding list of foldable phone Android by equipping it with a modified version of Android 9.0 (Pie) with Samsung’s exclusive One UI skin overlay on top.

Hardware

The hardware is just as substantial, with a powerful and efficient System-on-Chip (SoC) casted with the new 7nm architecture: Snapdragon 855.

Every other hardware values are also top of the line, including 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage out of the box. In combination, this foldable smartphone is not just on top of its game in term of engineering sophistication, it’s also one of the best performing smartphones on the market at the moment.

Camera System

The Fold is also lauded for its beautiful camera setup in a stacked, three lenses configuration. The camera suite includes a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens (f/1.5 - f/2.4), below that is a 12-megapixel telephoto lens for long-range photography (f/2.4), and lastly at the very bottom, a 16-megapixel ultra-wide angle lens (f/2.2).

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The interesting thing about the camera system is that it has two front facing camera. The first one at the front cover of the phone when it is ‘closed’: A 10-megapixel (f/2.2) sensor.

And when it’s opened, there are two lenses built into a notch at the upper right-hand corner of the expanded screen that includes a 10-megapixel (f/2.2) selfie camera, and an 8-megapixel RGB depth sensor (f/1.9) for depth sensing operations, AR effects, and filters more realistic and accurate.

Samsung Foldable Phone Release Date

Samsung foldable phone launch date is expected to be in September this year, but before this, many people have had their chance of holding and experiencing it. Particularly, many YouTubers, the press, and influencers were sent tech demo units. Quite a lot of shenanigans occurred, most of them ultimately led to a broken screen unit. With that said, there probably will be improvements made to the phone to make it more reliable and durable in the hands of the public.

If all goes well, the Samsung foldable phone release is set for September of 2019. However, this is still mostly speculation and can be changed. If you’re on active look-out for it, the Samsung foldable phone release date might be at somewhere to the end of September.

What will be the foldable phone price in India? Unfortunately, the phone is stellarly expensive at a staggering 140,790 Rs. as the nominal expected price point. The actual price of the handset may differ from this point, however, do expect that the foldable phone Samsung price is still going to be prohibitively expensive.

In fact, it will be the most expensive phone Samsung has ever sold, and certainly one of the most premium (If not, the most premium) phone in the market when it finally comes out. If you have a limited budget, you may not be able to meet the foldable phone Samsung price that the company’s charging.

While September is the global launch, it is unknown what the strategies of the company are when it comes to the Galaxy Fold. But do expect that the Samsung foldable phone release date in India could be much later than other major markets in the world. Considering the fact that it took several months for the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active to materialise in the Indian market. We have all of the good reasons to believe of a several months gap between the launch and official Samsung foldable phone release date in India.

Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy Fold is certainly a pioneer of a new category of smartphone that could help us imagining just what the future could look like. Upon the Samsung foldable phone release, a lot of new information will be known about it including the pricing and possibly the Samsung foldable phone release date in India. For now, though, the only thing we can do is window shopping and wait for the foldable smartphone to come out into the light.