HIGHLIGHTS
- Samsung launched the Galaxy Fold in India at a price of Rs 1,64,990 earlier this year.
- The Galaxy Fold comes with a futuristic design that houses two displays
- The Galaxy Fold is arguably the most innovative smartphone to have been launched in 2019
When it comes to the smartphone industry, “innovation” is a rather liberally used term. It’s one that gets thrown around in abundance at phone launch events and is found sprinkled generously in the marketing material of almost every new smartphone. But once in a while, there does emerge a device that truly deserves to be called innovative and for us in 2019, that was the Samsung Galaxy Fold. While it’s safe to say that most smartphones launched this year were mere incremental upgrades over their predecessors, the Galaxy Fold, in contrast, stood out as a device unlike anything else that we’ve seen before.
Bordering on the futuristic, the Galaxy Fold was launched in India at Rs 1,64,990 and announced as Samsung’s first foldable smartphone. Despite being a device for today, it was launched with the promise of being a smartphone for the future, one that could catapult not just Samsung, but the whole smartphone industry towards a new and exciting future.
While the jury’s still out on whether the Galaxy Fold was a commercial success for Samsung, there is no doubt that it was an overwhelming success in terms of innovation.
And the reason for this is quite simple.
Thanks to its foldable screen, the Galaxy Fold has been able to employ a design script that’s substantially different from what we’ve seen on countless smartphones since Apple announced the first iPhone back in 2007.
Unlike the rigid metal and glass slabs that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the past, the Galaxy Fold comes with a primary 7.3-inch Infinity Flex Display on the inside, which can be closed like a book from the middle to completely change the form factor of the device in a matter of a second.
From looking and working more like a tablet one second to turning into a conventional 4.6-inch HD+ display totting smartphone the very next one, the Galaxy Fold’s shape-shifting abilities almost feel unreal to be true when you first lay hands on the device.
But apart from just making it interesting, the Fold’s foldable display also helps make the device more manageable to carry and as a bonus also helps improve battery life of the phone by ensuring that the user increasingly depends on the energy-efficient secondary display on the front of the phone for checking notifications and even firing up basic applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook on the device.
And in all of this, what impresses the most is how Samsung’s managed to make this dual-display arrangement feel extremely natural and the transition of data between the two panels quite seamless. From using the outer display to unfolding the Galaxy Fold like a book, all functionality on the smartphone feels seamless.
For example, if a user is watching a video on the outer display on the device and then opens the Fold for a bigger more expansive experience, the phone automatically starts playing the video on the larger panel and that too in full-screen.
While on the other hand when you close the Fold’s primary panel and move to the front display, the phone automatically recognises it as a command to close the application and returns your device to the home screen on the front display.
Now considering that foldable phone tech is still at a nascent stage in its development cycle, the very fact that Samsung’s managed to give attention to such minute detail and has been able to bring to us in 2019 a smartphone that’s essentially one from the future is commendable in itself.
While it’s true that the Galaxy Fold has its fair share of issues, and in its current form may not make for the most advisable buy for the average buyer, it will be disingenuous to not mention that its problems are actually a consequence of technology bottlenecks ones that are expected to be fixed in the coming iterations of the Fold line-up of phones.
For now, the Galaxy Fold is definitely the most innovative smartphone to have been launched in 2019 if not one of the best overall phones we saw this year.
