At Samsung Unpacked, the company to greater lengths to avoid a major shortcoming of the Samsung Galaxy Fold.
At nearly $2000, Samsung introduced its first device that has a ‘fold-able’ screen, the Galaxy Fold. A closer look at the official images of the device revealed a minor setback and a major one.
The outer screen is wildly tiny while the fold gap is quite obvious – giving the impression of 2 phones stacked together.
Experts said the fold gap is the thing Samsung went to painstaking lengths to avoid talking about at its Unpacked keynote. This is not peculiar to Galaxy Fold, it’s an issue facing all folding phones.
This is the Galaxy Fold… folded. Just look at the outline of the device. The image comes from the reveal video, which is the single piece of media that shows this angle. (Even then, it’s only for two seconds.) In it, you can see a clear, and frankly glaring, gap between the two parts of the phone where it hinges.
The gap makes the Fold an even stranger device than it first appears and gadget experts are already pointing this out.
“Samsung’s designers could implement a deeper hinge that can house the bend without creasing it; until I saw the gap, that’s what I thought they had done. Or, they could wait for displays to advance to the point where they can get something very close to a flat fold. In reality, future devices will probably utilize a mix of both of those to produce the device Samsung, with some expertly curated demos, basically pretended it had built,” said Engagdet’s Aaron Souppouris.
The consensus is that Fold’s main selling point is also its main limitation. A smartphone that’s as expensive as a laptop — or buying high-end phone and a tablet.
“Hopefully, the Galaxy Fold will spark creativity in hardware designers and lead to someone perfecting this idea in the future. But at this early stage, I’m not buying it,” Souppouris concluded.
