Consumers who pre-ordered the Samsung Galaxy Fold over at AT&T have received an e-mail recently, notifying them that the phone will ship on June 13, making many people believe that is the new release date for the phone, following its delay. Well, it seems like that date was only a placeholder.
AT&T has removed shipping dates from Galaxy Fold pre-orders, and it did the same for the Galaxy Fold listing on its website, while the phone is listed as “Out of Stock” at the moment. This more or less confirms that the June 13, mentioned in AT&T’s e-mails, was just a placeholder, which is not surprising considering that the date was shown publicly just a day after pre-orders opened, so that was possibly a date for the arrival of the second batch of devices.
If that is not enough of a confirmation for you, the source actually received a tip from a user who pre-ordered the Galaxy Fold over at AT&T. That screenshot clearly shows that the June 13 date has been removed completely, while it was there until recently, as you can see in the provided image.
So, what does this mean? Well, it means that we’re back to square one. Samsung did start collecting early review units in order to investigate the device properly, and it will take a bit of time for the company to know exactly what went wrong and fix it. The phone was supposed to on sale tomorrow (April 26) in the US, which means that Samsung already manufactured quite a few Galaxy Fold units.
Considering the phone’s display issues, which we wrote about quite a few times thus far, the company had to postpone the phone’s launch, and it will take a while for them to alter all of the units it manufactured, as it seems this problem is hardware-related. This is actually quite a large problem for Samsung, but at least the phone did not make its way to the hands of people who purchased it, as the company definitely wants to avoid a scandal similar to the one it lived through with the Galaxy Note7.
In case you’re wondering what went wrong with the Galaxy Fold in the first place, well, it seems like the problem is display-related, but we don’t exactly know what, yet, at least not officially. Folks over at iFixit have their theories, but we’ll wait for Samsung’s official explanation.
These issues started soon after early review units were shipped out, and the problem is two-fold, it seems. Some reviewers tried to remove a protective layer from the display, as they thought that it’s a screen protector, while it turns out it’s a part of the display, and you will damage the display if you remove it. That is their fault, not the phone’s fault. Well, unfortunately for Samsung, that’s not the only issue.
Displays on some Galaxy Fold units started malfunctioning on their own. In one instance, white lines appeared on the display, and it didn’t take long for it to stop responding to interactions. In a separate case, the display started flickering, and then shut off completely. These are only two examples, while quite a few of them appeared lately. Samsung acknowledged the problem, and will probably publish an update on the issue soon, along with a new release date for the device.