So this is the week the folding phone future showed up and immediately face-planted, and I have to say, I did not see that coming quite this fast or quite this literally.
Samsung's been sending Galaxy Fold review units out to reporters ahead of the April 26th launch, and within a day or two several of them had screens that were flickering, bulging, or just straight up dead. Some of it sounds like a design problem nobody caught (a layer near the hinge that looks exactly like the plastic screen protector you'd peel off any new phone, except on this one it's actually part of the display, so peeling it ruins the thing). Other units apparently broke just from normal folding and unfolding over 48 hours of use. For a phone that costs $1,980, that is not a rounding-error problem. That's "call your editor and reconsider the whole review" territory.
I want to be clear I'm not gloating, or not only gloating. I like the idea of a folding phone a lot. I've been carrying an iPhone 8 for two years now because I genuinely cannot justify replacing a phone that still works fine, and the idea of a device that's a phone in your pocket and a small tablet when you want it is the first "new phone shape" pitch in a decade that's actually made me curious. But there's a difference between "this is new technology and new technology has rough edges" and "we shipped consumer press units of a $2,000 device that some of them broke within two days of normal use." Samsung has known how to make hinges and glass for a very long time. This isn't their first product.
The thing that gets me is how predictable this was, in hindsight, once you think about what a foldable screen actually has to be made of. Glass doesn't fold. So you're using a plastic polymer instead, which is softer, which means it's way more vulnerable to a fingernail, a bit of dust getting under the hinge, or just repeated mechanical stress at the crease. Anyone who's ever put a cheap plastic screen protector on an old phone and watched it get a permanent crease line in about a week could have told you plastic display material was going to have a hard life being folded ten times a day. I'm not saying I could engineer a better hinge. I'm saying the failure mode isn't exactly a surprise once you know what's under the glass isn't glass.
I'll also say: I don't think this kills foldables as a category, and I'd bet money Samsung fixes this in a later revision or at minimum patches whatever's going on with that top layer before it ever gets to a regular customer's hands. But it's a rough few days to be the person whose job is Samsung's launch PR calendar right now, and it's a rough time generally to be a company betting its "innovation" narrative on a device that costs almost four figures more than the flagship next to it on the shelf.
Small unrelated thing from this week that I want on the record here since I keep a blog specifically so I remember what happened when: both Zoom and Pinterest went public yesterday, April 18th, and both had genuinely strong first days on the market. I don't have anything especially insightful to say about either IPO, I just think it's funny that "video call software" and "mood board website" both had a better week on Wall Street than Samsung had in the tech press, and that felt worth noting next to each other.
Anyway. I've got a drawer in my desk with three phones in it that I kept "just in case" after I upgraded, going back to an old Nexus 5 with a screen that's basically spiderwebbed from a sidewalk drop in 2015. None of them fold. All of them still turn on. There's something to be said for boring reliable glass rectangles, even if I'd still take the Fold if someone handed me one for free and promised not to watch how I use it.