Samsung Galaxy Fold: the latest on the beleaguered foldable phone

After releasing it in South Korea and the UK, Samsung is finally ready to say when the Galaxy Fold will go back on sale in the US: September 27th. Samsung says it will be available both in an AT&T version and a standard unlocked version. It’s a smaller launch than the first time around, as it will only be available in “select” AT&T and Best Buy stores — plus Samsung Experience stores (it should also be available to order online).

The Fold has been slightly redesigned to make it more durable than the first version, as we detailed when Samsung unveiled the fixes to journalists earlier this month. Check out the video above for details on the changes, which includes a screen protector that doesn’t look like you’re supposed to peel it off.

Samsung revealed in July that it had made “improvements” to protect the Galaxy Fold’s screen, and now it’s giving us a firm release date for the foldable handset today. The updated Galaxy Fold will be available on September 6th in Korea, the company announced. The handset will also be available on September 18th in France, Germany, Singapore, and the UK, but Samsung hasn’t revealed an exact date for the US.

In the US it will arrive “in the coming weeks,” according to another press release. It has been rumored that it would launch in the US on September 27th, but we haven’t had that confirmed by Samsung yet.

Samsung has announced today that it has made “improvements” to protect the Galaxy Fold’s screen and will begin selling the folding phone soon. Four months after the company delayed the retail launch of the phone, Samsung now says the Galaxy Fold will be available for purchase at an unspecified date in September. Samsung has confirmed the price will remain the same as before: $1,980.

Here’s what Samsung says it has changed on the new version of the Galaxy Fold:

Samsung co-CEO DJ Koh says he pushed the Galaxy Fold to market “before it was ready,” leading to the device’s delay just days before it was supposed to ship out to customers. “It was embarrassing,” Koh told a small group of reporters, according to The Independent.

The Galaxy Fold, which would have been the first major release of a foldable smartphone, was supposed to come out in late April. But as reviewers started testing the phone in the weeks prior, several noticed that the screen could be easily destroyed, either by debris slipping in or by user error.

Samsung reportedly may be missing a July ship date for the delayed Galaxy Fold, according to a company official speaking to The Korea Herald, seemingly denying rumors from earlier in June that the company was looking at a July release.

“If we are running such a media event this month, we should be doing something by now,” said a Samsung official. “Nothing has progressed since the April delay.”

Huawei has delayed the launch of its highly anticipated foldable phone, the Mate X, from June to September.

The Chinese tech giant told CNBC and The Wall Street Journal that it was doing extensive testing to make sure the device was ready for consumers, and that the company was taking a “cautious” approach following the failed launch of Samsung’s own foldable device, the Galaxy Fold. The Fold debuted in April but shipment of the phone has been indefinitely delayed after devices reviewed by multiple outlets broke in a matter of days.

AT&T has become the latest retailer to cancel preorders for the Galaxy Fold, the company has confirmed to The Verge. The news came to light after Tom’s Guide received an email regarding the publication’s preorder device. In the email AT&T said that “Samsung delayed the release of the phone, which means we can’t ship your phone.” In April, AT&T said it expected the device to ship today, on June 13th.

Best Buy canceled its Galaxy Fold preorders last month, and Samsung also announced it would cancel any of its own preorders unless customers specifically told it otherwise.

Customers waiting for Samsung’s Galaxy Fold to ship may have just gotten another bad sign: Best Buy is reportedly canceling all orders for the delayed foldable phone due to the lack of a new release date from Samsung.

In an email sent out to customers, Best Buy noted that “with breakthrough designs and technology come many hurdles and the possibility to face a plethora of unforeseen hiccups. These hurdles have led Samsung to postpone the release of the Galaxy Fold, and Samsung has not provided a new release date. Because we put our customers first and want to ensure they are taken care of in the best possible manner, Best Buy has decided to cancel all current pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy Fold.”

In February, the tech industry got its first looks at the first wave of foldable smartphones, with two devices generating the most excitement: the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X. Fast-forward to May, and both devices have gotten off to disastrous fates pre-launch, with the Fold delayed for defective screens and the Mate X’s questionable future for Android support following President Trump’s executive order banning the US from conducting business with the company.

The Huawei Mate X emerged as the most formidable folding phone out of this year’s Mobile World Congress. My colleague Vlad Savov called its design the most refined and polished version of the device category with a form factor that felt sensible and realistic for everyday use. Now that the ban threatens to stunt the Mate X’s Android software support, preventing it from receiving updates to the OS and popular Google services, it’s hard to convince interested buyers that uncertain future is worth $2,600.

Samsung plans to announce a new release date for its stricken Galaxy Fold smartphone soon, according to The Korea Herald. Co-CEO DJ Koh, who is responsible for Samsung’s mobile business, told the newspaper that the company “has reviewed the defect caused from substances [that entered the device], and we will reach a conclusion today or tomorrow [on the launch].”

That language suggests the company may have found a solution to the problem encountered by our own Dieter Bohn, whose Galaxy Fold review unit developed a bump under the screen after just a day of use. Samsung plans to improve the durability of the hinge’s exposed areas, according to the Herald, and will also reduce the gap between the screen’s bezels and its protective layer. Some reviewers inadvertently managed to cause screen malfunctions by removing that layer, which shipped looking like a regular disposable screen protector.

Samsung says it will cancel all orders for the Galaxy Fold if it has not shipped the device by May 31st and if it has not heard otherwise from existing preorder customers, reports Reuters. Samsung postponed the original April 26th release date indefinitely after early tech reviewers damaged their devices during ordinary usage. The company is yet to confirm a revised release date for its foldable smartphone.

“If we do not hear from you and we have not shipped by May 31st, your order will be canceled automatically,” reads the email sent to Galaxy Fold pre-order customers on Monday. Samsung later confirmed to Reuters that US regulations required it to send the notification.

What in the world is going on over at Samsung in the wake of the Galaxy Fold delay? The whole situation keeps refusing to normalize, and instead gets weirder nearly every day. The latest is that iFixit has decided to honor a Samsung request to pull its Galaxy Fold teardown off the internet, even though Samsung apparently didn’t ask iFixit to do so directly.

This oddity follows AT&T’s seemingly arbitrary decision to email a potential ship date for the Galaxy Fold despite the fact that Samsung hasn’t officially set a new release date. By requesting that iFixit pull the teardown, Samsung is apparently willing to risk the Streisand effect when it comes to people clamoring to see the innards of its device. Here’s part of iFixit’s statement on the matter:

Though it’s not technically the first time we’ve seen the innards of the now-delayed Samsung Galaxy Fold, iFixit’s teardown of the folding device is absolutely the most informed and detailed we’ve seen. Following up on its post speculating on the possible causes of the various screen breakages we’ve seen on review units, iFixit’s teardown analysis seems to reveal a fundamental design tradeoff Samsung had to make — one that may have doomed the phone.

It seems as though Samsung focused quite a bit on ensuring the mechanics of the hinge would be a sturdy and dependable mechanism for folding and unfolding a screen. Yet for whatever reason, the Galaxy Fold does not have enough protection against the ingress of debris. And because that screen is so incredibly delicate (as any OLED is if it’s not protected by something like Gorilla Glass), that was a significant risk.

After Samsung delayed the launch of the Galaxy Fold, there are a few hanging questions. What caused the screens the break, and what will Samsung do to change the Fold’s design? But for those who preordered the device and are not put off by all the drama about the screens breaking, the biggest question of all might actually be this: when it will finally ship?

AT&T has been emailing customers one potential answer — June 13th. That’s according to a bunch of screenshots we’ve been seeing on Twitter and Reddit. The screenshots themselves are certainly legit, but that doesn’t mean that the date is. Samsung tells us that it has not announced any updates on the timing. We’ve reached out to AT&T and at 9:30am ET on April 24th were told that the email are real and June 13th is, in fact, the date the company is telling its customers.

Samsung has confirmed reports from earlier today that it is postponing the release of its $2,000 Galaxy Fold foldable phone only days before it was originally scheduled to go on sale. “We want our customers to have the best experience possible which is why, after initial feedback, we have decided to delay the release of the category-changing Galaxy Fold to make sure it measures up to the high standards we know you expect from us,” the company said. “We plan to announce the [new] release date in the coming weeks.”

Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Fold won’t hit shelves until sometime in May at the earliest, but Samsung is giving itself plenty of leeway with its non-committal timeframe. In an email to customers who have already preordered the Fold, the company said they can expect a revised update on shipping details in two weeks (which would be May 6th). US carriers AT&T and T-Mobile are also slated to carry the premium device.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold doesn’t release until April 26th, but if you’ve been eagerly awaiting a glimpse under the hood, a pre-production version of the folding phone has already been disassembled and laid out piece by piece in photos. These were originally hosted on microblogging site Weibo, though the originals have since been removed.

Something that shouldn’t be much of a surprise: it takes a lot of parts to build a foldable phone. They’re all arranged in a manner that looks quite difficult to repair, though that likely comes down to the Fold being a first-generation product, which you might not guess when you’re holding the Fold’s sleek exterior.

Samsung has released an official statement addressing reports of display issues with the upcoming Galaxy Fold. There are two parts to the story, and unfortunately only one of those parts offers real answers.

First, Samsung notes that it intends to “thoroughly inspect [the review] units in person,” referring to the devices that seemed to have had screens break without a direct, obvious cause. Our review unit developed a bulge that appeared to be the result of something in between the screen and the hinge, ultimately breaking the screen. So we don’t have a clear answer there yet.

Look closely at the picture above, and you can see a small bulge right on the crease of my Galaxy Fold review unit. It’s just enough to slightly distort the screen, and I can feel it under my finger. There’s something pressing up against the screen at the hinge, right there in the crease. My best guess is that it’s a piece of debris, something harder than lint for sure. It’s possible that it’s something else, though, like the hinge itself on a defective unit pressing up on the screen.

It’s a distressing thing to discover just two days after receiving my review unit. More distressing is that the bulge eventually pressed sharply enough into the screen to break it. You can see the telltale lines of a broken OLED converging on the spot where the bulge is.

Samsung has been pretty closed off about letting anyone actually try out the Galaxy Fold in real life, but apparently, those rules don’t apply to robots — specifically, Samsung’s specialized stress testing machines, which the company showcased in a new video highlighting the Galaxy Fold’s bending abilities.

The video is pretty mesmerizing on its own — there’s something almost soothing about watching all the phones fold open and shut in perfect synchronization, but more importantly, the stress tests are giving us what might be the best look yet at what the Galaxy Fold actually looks like when its folding.

Phone case companies are already starting to figure out what a case looks like for the coming wave of foldable phones. Spigen is one of the first to work out a design, and it’s shared mock-ups of three products it plans to release for Samsung’s Galaxy Fold.

The cases all share similar designs, with front covers protecting the top and bottom bezels of the 4.6-inch outside display and cutouts for the triple-camera system on the back. There’ll be three models — the Tough Armor, Ultra Hybrid, and Thin Fit — with varying degrees of protection, ranging from a thick plastic case to a translucent wrap. All cases will be priced around $20, and largely made out of plastic and silicone materials, like PC, TPU, and PU.

Samsung is planning to hold another press event in early April for its foldable phone. The Galaxy Fold maker revealed its plans in an interview with The Verge at Mobile World Congress today, and hinted at a high-end luxury launch akin to what we saw with the Apple Watch Edition in its 2015 debut.

“At the beginning of April we’ll have a full press event,” says Kate Beaumont, director of product, services, and commercial strategy at Samsung UK. The press event will provide a closer look at the handset, and will be held a few weeks before the product is expected to hit stores on April 26th, priced at $1,980 (£1,800).

Samsung first teased its foldable phone back in November, and at the company’s Galaxy Unpacked event today, it’s further detailing its foldable plans. Samsung’s foldable now has a name, the Samsung Galaxy Fold, and the company is revealing more about what this unique smartphone can do. Samsung is planning to launch the Galaxy Fold on April 26th, starting at $1,980, through AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, with a free pair of Samsung’s new wireless earbuds. There will be both an LTE and 5G version of the Galaxy Fold, and Samsung is even planning on launching the device in Europe on May 3rd, starting at 2,000 euros.

Samsung is using a new 7.3-inch Infinity Flex Display that allows the phone itself to have a tablet-sized screen that can be folded to fit into a pocket. The main display is QXGA+ resolution (4.2:3), and when it’s folded, a smaller 4.6-inch HD+ (12:9) display is used for the phone mode. Samsung is using 512GB of Universal Flash Storage 3.0 (eUFS) for fast speeds, alongside a Qualcomm 7nm octa-core processor and 12GB of RAM. Samsung has even built two batteries for its Galaxy Fold, that are separated by the fold but combined in the Android operating system to represent a total of 4,380 mAh.

The torrent of Samsung leaks these past few weeks has mostly been about the company’s smartphones, but now we have a revelation about the still-mysterious foldable Samsung phone as well: it’ll be announced under the title of Galaxy Fold. Word about this comes from prolific leaker Evan Blass, a thorn in Samsung’s side, who began 2019 by revealing every last detail about the Galaxy S10 family of devices ahead of tomorrow’s launch. He’s had some help along the way, mind you, as Samsung has managed to leak a whole bunch of stuff itself, culminating today with a TV commercial airing prematurely in Norway.

Opinions about the Galaxy Fold branding will surely differ. It’s marginally better than the most unimaginative (and nondescript) Galaxy F alternative, but it’s also grammatically wonky and, to my ear, a little too close to the Ford Galaxy to be a truly exciting name. In any case, we’ll know a lot more about Samsung’s first foldable device after the company’s gala event to launch the Galaxy S10 series tomorrow.