Samsung bets $1,980 on a crease
Dieter Bohn had not touched the protective layer. On April 17, 2019, the lead product editor at The Verge pressed his finger to his Galaxy Fold review unit and felt something move — a bubble, soft and wrong, forming under the flexible plastic of the 7.3-inch display. He hadn’t removed the adhesive film Samsung had warned reviewers to leave in place. The screen had simply decided, on its own, to delaminate. Within the week, the device was a brick.
Bohn was not alone. Steve Kovach at CNBC watched his unit’s left half flash blinding white and go dark; Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman removed what looked like ordinary shipping plastic — an honest mistake, but a fatal one — and his display crumbled within hours. YouTube reviewer Marques Brownlee made the same error. By April 22, Samsung had postponed the launch of the phone it had spent eight years developing, and was calling in every review unit it could reach.
The Galaxy Fold had been announced on February 20, 2019, at Samsung’s Unpacked event in San Francisco, alongside the Galaxy S10. The headline number was $1,980 — roughly twice the price of a flagship iPhone at the time. Folded, it was a 4.6-inch phone. Open, it became a 7.3-inch Dynamic AMOLED tablet, the display creasing along the hinge in a way that plastic OLED made possible but glass never could.
Samsung had been working on flexible displays since May 2011, when its Advanced Institute of Technology demonstrated a prototype AMOLED panel that folded without visible creasing. Eight years of patents followed — dual-screen hinges, interlocking panels, ultra-thin polymer layers — before the Fold became something a consumer could actually hold. The Royole FlexPai had technically beaten Samsung to market, launching in China in late 2018, but it was a developer prototype in a consumer-sized body. The Galaxy Fold was meant to be different.
After the recall, Samsung spent five months reinforcing the hinge, adding protective caps at each end to block debris from reaching the display layers, and strengthening the adhesive on the protective film. The phone relaunched in South Korea on September 6, 2019, and in the United States on September 27. This time the screens held.
The Fold’s sales were modest by flagship standards — but it proved two things at once: that the market would pay premium prices for a new form factor, and that Samsung could absorb the engineering and reputational cost of getting there first. The Galaxy Z Flip followed in February 2020, folding vertically like a clamshell instead of outward like a book, and aimed at a much broader audience. Motorola relaunched the Razr as a foldable the same month. By 2021, Samsung was shipping four times more foldable devices than it had the year before, and the technology had become its own product line, the Z series, entirely distinct from the S series that had defined the company for a decade.
The slab phone had dominated every pocket since 2007 without a serious challenge to its geometry. The Fold didn’t kill the slab — it still hasn’t — but it proved that the rectangle’s reign was not inevitable.
Sources
- Galaxy Fold Review Units Failing — Android Police — Specific details of the April 2019 display failures: Bohn, Kovach, Gurman, Brownlee, what happened to each screen, and the timeline of Samsung’s recall decision.
- Samsung Galaxy Fold Full Specs — GSMArena — Official specifications: 4.6-inch cover screen, 7.3-inch main display, Snapdragon 855, launch price $1,980, September 2019 release dates in Korea and the US.
- Samsung Fold Development Timeline — Trusted Reviews — Samsung’s foldable research from the 2011 AMOLED prototype through the “Foldgate” crisis; sourced the 2011 flexible display demonstration and the April 2019 postponement.
- Samsung Foldable Six-Year Legacy — SamMobile — Significance of the original Galaxy Fold for Samsung’s product line and the fourfold growth in foldable shipments by 2021.