Samsung seems to be interested in creating flip phones running Android. Even though the flip phone market has been decreasing rather rapidly over the last few years, as smartphones have become more and more popular. The company has released a couple of flip phones running Android in China already, and now they are looking to put out a more high-end flip phone which is codenamed “Veyron”. This smartphone sports the model number SM-W2017, and is sporting a 4.2-inch Super AMOLED display, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. There’s a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera with a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. This is all powered by a USB Type-C port located at the bottom of the device.
It also looks to support a fingerprint sensor on the backside of the device, along with the heart rate monitor. It’s rumored to be sporting NFC, which would mean that it would likely see support for Samsung Pay. Making it one of the few smartphones outside of their Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lines that sports support for Samsung Pay – should also support Android Pay, but this may only be available in China, which would mean no Android Pay anyways.
Flip phones may not be the most popular style of smartphones these days, but one thing is for sure, Samsung is selling enough of them to continue making them. They’ve already released at least two different models in China, and now they are working on a third. Which means that there is definitely a market for them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t continue spending money and R&D on making these. As you can tell by the images below, it does say “Powered by Android”. A bit interesting, given the fact that Samsung has been working on their Tizen platform and has released a few smartphones running that OS as of late. The UI does look a bit different than the Tizen that we see on many other smartphones from Samsung, like the Galaxy S7 and even the Galaxy Note 7. Of course, what is shown there could be a theme that was installed on the device.
