At the Samsung Developer Conference today, Samsung has finally addressed the rumours of a foldable phone and shown off the concept albeit in a concept format. The foldable device is coming next year, but it looks kind of neat.
The foldable phone consists of two displays, a smaller more traditional style they’re calling a ‘cover display’ which sits in portrait orientation, and a larger 7.3-inch, foldable display Samsung call ‘Infinity Flex Display’ on the back which folds over and works in a landscape layout like a tablet.
The sticking point for many foldable devices has always been the screen fold which has apparently been solved by Samsung with a new polymer that’s 45% thinner and allows the screen to be folded ‘hundreds of thousands’ of times said Samsung Senior VP of mobile product marketing, Justin Denison.
The upcoming device has been developed in partnership with Google who announced support in Android for foldables this morning at their 2018 Android Dev Summit.
The experience within Android on the foldable will allow for seamless transitions of up to three apps between the front cover display and the tablet like display on the rear and back again. The seamless transitions will also include allowing apps to take advantage of the larger, tablet like screen size and experience of the larger display.
The device shown off was heavily masked in Samsung’s almost famous ‘black box’ cases used for shielding prototypes from prying eyes ahead of actual announcements.
The only solid information we have is that Samsung will be announcing the device next year, but beyond that we’ll havve to wait for the usual leak train to start chugging in.
Update: Apparently Samsung did share some additional specs on their foldable phone with CNet’s Shara Tibken:
And here are the @Samsung foldable phone display specs #SDC18 pic.twitter.com/tkGvmqJcdb
— Shara Tibken (@sharatibken) November 7, 2018
If you want to see the announcement you can check it out in the Keynote video here:
7.3″ screen is like using your old Nexus tablet as a phone. It would look ridiculous.
even for an industry that completely ran out of ideas about two years ago, foldable phones are like, the Grand Poobah of bad ideas
looking forward to see if i can fit six cameras on the notch on my 7.3″ foldable phone, smdh
It’s the Android version of a Nokia Communicator! How I wanted one of those back in the day.
I would have one of those thank you !