Galaxy Phone - Got To Know When To Fold 'em

Posted February 22, 2019

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In 2007, Nokia (you remember Snake) had 49.8% of the global phone market.

Six years later, they had 3%.

What happened was Steve Jobs.

In 2007, Jobs released the first iPhone.  

It was a new piece of tech crushing an old piece of tech.

Who wanted a Nokia phone when you could get an iPhone.

Now, Samsung has just released the Galaxy Fold.

This $2,000 (you read that one right), smart phone is as much a game changer as the iPhone was (well, maybe not as much, but close enough).

It has a standard 4.6in phone screen on the front, but open it up like a book and you reveal a single large 7.3in screen that literally folds in half. No lines, no wrinkles, no visible crinkles.

In other words, it combines both a smart phone and a tablet in one. The screen folds in half, and according to Samsung, without a crease.

The phone has been in development for 10 years.

Samsung is planning on releasing the new phone on April 26th, the tenth anniversary of the launch of the first Samsung smart phone, the S-5.  

In the US, you can get the phone through both ATT and T-Mobil. There's also a 5G model in the pipeline.

They key to the phone, as says Samsung, is the hinge.  The phone can tolerate up to 200,000 folds.  (As I recall, an earlier iteration of the iPhone could only tolerate one fold). The phone has software that will immediately transit your content, whether it's Facebook, Instagram or video to the larger (or smaller) format and do it seamlessly.

For those of us in the video business, this could be a real advantage. Editing on a smartphone is possible, if a bit annoying because everything is so small.  I personally prefer to edit on my laptop, but this means dragging the thing around with me all the time.  (How fast we spoil!  I am old enough to remember when CMX video editing suites were the size of a NASA misison control room). 

In any event, with the Galaxy Fold you have both the small format for the shooting and larger format for the editing.

For video makers this should work out pretty well. But will there be enough consumers to carry the $2K price tag?

We will soon find out.

The Fold could be either the iPhone/Nokia killer or the Airbus 380 no one wants plane.