Over the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing from the South Korean media that the Galaxy Fold is going through some more testing, on its way to launching officially – hopefully in the next month or so.
Now, apparently, it has completed one more test. The group of tech experts that have done the testing has reportedly told Samsung that the Galaxy Fold “is good to go”. Saying that the fixes do fix the issues that the Galaxy Fold suffered when it was in the hands of reviewers back in April.
This “group of tech experts” isn’t just a group of random people, but they are a group that was reportedly formed by “industry professionals and professors” at two of Seoul’s research universities. Meaning that they are unbiased, and will tell Samsung if there is actually something wrong with the phone still or not. It’s also unlikely that these are the same people that told Samsung the phone was good to go, a couple weeks ago.
Since delaying the Galaxy Fold back in April, Samsung hasn’t been all that forthcoming with updates as to when the phone would be launching. We’ve heard that it would come in May, then June, then July, and now we have no clue when it’ll be available. It almost feels like a Kickstarter smartphone at this point, which is pretty strange, given how large of a smartphone maker Samsung actually is.
The Galaxy Fold was originally supposed to launch on April 26. That was more than a month after the Galaxy S10 – which it debuted with. However, Samsung gave a few media outlets (we were not one of the selected few) a Galaxy Fold a couple of weeks before that launch was supposed to happen. Everything looked good for the first week or so. Everyone put out their reviews and pretty much praised the device.
Then, it happened. Just about every device that was out in the wild, broke. And they broke in basically different ways. There were a couple of cases that were similar but most of them were not. The most common one was from reviewers removing the “built-in” screen protector. Now this screen protector looked like the one that was included on every phone, which looked not great. It didn’t go to the edges either. So many thought that it would be okay to remove it. Nope. That killed the screen.
The other common case was people getting dirt and other debries caught in the hinge, underneath the display, and that ended up killing the display too. So Samsung had to make a few changes and make sure that neither of these things happened once this nearly two grand smartphone made it into consumers hands.
The Galaxy Fold is a first-generation product, with a ton (and we do mean a ton) of new technology included. So we knew it wasn’t going to be all that great at launch. Like most first-generation products. But after spending nearly $2,000 (after taxes are added in) on this smartphone, no one is going to want that screen to die, and that’s what happened.