Why Samsung’s revolutionary folding smartphone is still worth your attention

It’s the 10-year anniversary of Samsung’s Galaxy brand, and if you need a reminder of just how far mobile technology has come in the last decade, we highly recommend that you take a look at the very first Galaxy smartphone: the GT-I7500. Boasting a 3.2-inch touchscreen with a crystal-clear 320x480 resolution, a whopping 128MB of RAM and a genuine 3.5mm headphone jack, the GT-I7500 was, remarkably, considered to be a cutting-edge phone when it was released back in 2009.    What a difference a decade makes. The devices we carry in our pockets today make those early touchscreen phones look primitive by comparison. Somewhere along the line, though, something strange happened. We began to lose interest in our phones.

We grew accustomed to the tech industry’s annual release cycle, with each yearly model promising a game-changing improvement, only to then deliver a slightly bigger screen, a slightly faster processor and a slightly better camera. Taken collectively, these developments have indeed amounted to a minor technological revolution. The thing is, though, they didn’t all come at once. Instead of great leaps, progress came to us in a series of short, shuffling steps.

Keynotes and conferences once treated as quasi-religious occasions began to feel wearily familiar. The days when we’d camp overnight to be first in line to get our hands on the latest devices became a thing of the past. In recent years, even the world’s most respected tech companies appeared to be stuck in a rut as they strained against the outer limits of an ageing form factor.

For years now, a quantum leap has felt long overdue. Something to transform the way we live and remind us of just how much more is possible. Something to make us feel the way we did when we first got our hands on a touchscreen phone. That sense of being dragged violently into the future, of years of progress compressed into the blink of an eye. And in the headline-grabbing, category-defying Samsung Galaxy Fold, Samsung believes that it has just the thing.

By now, you’ll no doubt have heard all about the Samsung Galaxy Fold. It’s perhaps the most talked-about smartphone in years; it’s certainly one of the most controversial. For a phone that promised to deliver the biggest revolution in mobile technology since the invention of the touchscreen, the Fold… how can we put this? It didn’t get off to a flying start. This April, with just days to go until the scheduled release date, screen-related issues began to appear in a small number of review units, and as a precaution the Seoul-based company decided to indefinitely postpone the launch

It would have been an unfortunate series of events for any product launch, but this? This was the most eagerly anticipated phone in recent memory. In the weeks and months leading up to its ill-fated postponement, the Samsung Galaxy Fold and its remarkable folding screen had achieved something that we were beginning to think was impossible. It had made us genuinely excited about smartphones again

That is, if you can even call it a smartphone. The Galaxy Fold doesn’t really feel like a phone at all, but the sort of thing that you might find pinned to a moodboard in the office of a tech company’s loss-making “moonshot” department. The spec sheet alone reads like it was imagined during a particularly feverish bout of blue-sky thinking: 12GB of RAM; Qualcomm's latest flagship processor, the Snapdragon 855; six(!) cameras… the list goes on.

But specs alone, no matter how jaw-droppingly impressive, do not equal innovation. Indeed, they don’t even necessarily constitute progress. From a normal user’s point of view, there’s an argument to be made that smartphones have already reached unnecessary levels of performance, and all that tech companies have been doing ever since is sticking more and more blades on the razor. Instead, what really sets the Samsung Galaxy Fold apart is its 7.3-inch folding screen: a genuinely innovative piece of technology that gives you the flexibility of a mini tablet in the form of a compact device that you can easily slip in and out of your pocket. It’s what makes the Samsung Galaxy Fold such a genre-bending oddity, too, and so difficult to put in a box: is it a phone? A tablet? A phablet?

Call it what you will, but this new form factor is undoubtedly the shape of things to come. In terms of everyday use, it’s completely transformative: if you’ve ever tried answering an email while also editing a document or doing anything else remotely multi-tasky using a standard single-screen smartphone, you’ll understand the limitations imposed upon you by screen real estate. After a day spent with the Galaxy Fold and its multi-active window functionality, which allows you to keep up to three apps active simultaneously, even plus-sized smartphones seem fiddly by comparison.

Perhaps the most significant thing of all, though, is the potential that the Samsung Galaxy Fold has to fundamentally change the way we interact with our devices. Because it requires a conscious decision to open the phone and use the main screen, it feels much harder to get sucked in to playing mindlessly with the Samsung Galaxy Fold. There’s a smaller screen on the front of the phone that can be used to make calls, respond to messages and even tackle simple web browsing, but if you want to use the phone properly, you have to make the active choice to open it up.

It’s a subtle psychological difference, but it makes the Samsung Galaxy Fold feel like a serious tool, rather than just a ridiculously overpowered Instagram machine. In our time with the Samsung Galaxy Fold, we found ourselves using it far less than we would a standard smartphone, but being far more productive when we did. At a time when it can feel as if we’re constantly glued to our screens to the detriment of our enjoyment of the outside world, this feels like the greatest innovation of all.

Strengthened considerably over the last couple of months, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s screen now feels ready to live up to Samsung’s bold claim that it wouldn’t just change the shape of the phone, but the shape of the future. We wait with bated breath to see what on earth our phones will look like in another ten years’ time.