While Samsung announced that the Galaxy Fold is fixed, and will be going on sale again in September, T-Mobile has announced that it will not be carrying it this time around.
When the Galaxy Fold was announced back in February, only AT&T and T-Mobile were going to carry the phone. Now that T-Mobile has dropped out, it means that customers are going to have less choices for where they can buy this smartphone and it also likely means that less people are going to buy it. Seeing as many still buy their phones from carriers here in the US.
The Vergereached out to T-Mobile to see if they would be releasing the Galaxy Fold in September, and this is what T-Mobile’s PR said:
“T-Mobile will not carry the Galaxy Fold because we already offer customers a wide range of the latest smartphones. Please reach out to Samsung for any further inquiries.”
That is pretty telling. T-Mobile is basically throwing shade at Samsung, in saying that they won’t be offering the Galaxy Fold because they already have a wide range of phones available on its network. Which is true, but T-Mobile was going to be offering it in the first place, so still a bit strange that it is not going to carry it now.
What is actually happening – most likely – is that T-Mobile doesn’t want to take another chance on the Galaxy Fold. Even though Samsung has supposedly fixed it, there’s still the chance that customers could face many issues with this phone. And given the fact that this is not a cheap phone – priced at $1980 – when customers have an issue, it’s not going to be cheap to fix, nor are they going to be pleasant to deal with. You can’t blame them, but this is probably a good move by T-Mobile.
Those that are on T-Mobile, don’t worry, your Galaxy Fold will still work on T-Mobile’s network. It just won’t be available in T-Mobile stores. So you can buy your Galaxy Fold from Best Buy or Samsung’s own website and then put your SIM card in the phone and you’ll be good to go.
It should also work on Verizon and Sprint, unless Samsung has made some changes to the bands since the Galaxy Fold was originally announce in February. But again, the only carrier actually selling this phone right now, is AT&T, which is telling.
It’s telling because AT&T will sell anything. Remember the Fire Phone? Or the Facebook Phone? Yeah, most people don’t.
The Galaxy Fold’s new release date isn’t actually confirmed yet, but Samsung did say that it is going through some final testing now and expects it to be launching in September. It will be announcing specific dates for different regions as we get closer to September. It really looks like Samsung is looking to bury this phone right now, seeing as it announced it at night after a pretty busy news day. And it is also launching in the same month as the new iPhones. Remember, Samsung started releasing the Galaxy Note line in August, to beat the iPhone. So pretty surprising that the Fold will launch in the same time as the new iPhones.