Foldable phones have been among the best phones for more than half-a-decade now, so it’s no longer surprising to see a device with a display that closes shut for easier portability. But now Samsung is about to bring another dimension to the best foldable phones with a triple-folding device — a development that I find pretty exciting.
I love phones with big displays, and you’d imagine that the Galaxy Z Tri-Fold, as some people are calling the rumored device, would offer a tablet-sized screen that’s also easier to tote around. Indeed, rumors tip this phone to have a 10-inch panel when you’ve fully unfolded it. As someone who has spent hours doomscrolling the best streaming services on a Galaxy Z Fold 5, this is a real draw for me.
But while I might be excited by the bigger display, I am also well aware of the risks. One of the biggest potential issues has to do with the piece of hardware that makes a foldable phone foldable: the hinges.
Double the hinges, double the potential weak spots
The hinge in a foldable phone is one of the most crucial parts — it’s the part that allows all that folding after all. And it’s also the part that is easiest to damage, as well as being one of the most likely parts to fail.
If you remember, the Galaxy Z Fold 4 from a few years ago had some issues with the old hinge design that led to noticeable damage to the display. We also saw several reports of durability problems for the Galaxy Z Fold 6.
The reality is that, once you add any moving part to a device, you are inviting it to fail. On top of that, because the hinge is so crucial to a foldable phone, once one thing goes wrong, it usually starts a cascade of issues that have disastrous results. It’s why each subsequent release of a foldable phone usually touts hinge improvements among its new features.
The risk literally doubles with a triple-folding phone, as there’s two hinges that can potentially suffer damage. And from the rumors surrounding the Galaxy Z Tri-Fold, it sounds as if the phone will feature two inward-folding hinges in a similar way to the Galaxy Z Fold series. That also means there should be a cover display on the outside, for fold-free phone use, should you ever need it.
How Samsung can minimize the risk
So with two different hinges, it now becomes a question of what Samsung can do to mitigate the risk of either one failing. To do so, we first need to understand exactly what the threats are. The most obvious is wear to the hinges, especially if dust gets in. And Samsung’s latest foldable, the Galaxy Z Fold 7, only features an IP48 rating, meaning finer bits of dust can still get into the device. Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold, in contrast, gets a more thorough IP68 rating. It would be more reassuring if Samsung could follow Google’s lead.
Still, Samsung’s current hinge display is certainly durable. The company confidently claims that the Galaxy Z Fold 7 can survive 500,000 folds. We’ve seen people try to bend the phone constantly, and so far, it’s taken a fair amount of direct pressure to actually snap the phone.
I also hope, considering some of the leaked designs, that Samsung is aware of the risk of people bending the phone in the wrong direction. Thankfully, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 can withstand being bent in the wrong direction, so I am not too worried about this being a possibility at this point.
Galaxy Z Tri-Fold outlook
Outside of the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate Design — and good luck on finding that triple-folding phone outside of China — this is new territory for phone makers. And that means a lot of possiblity, but also a lot of risk from a new design.
For that reason, I wonder if it might be a better idea sit out the first version of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Tri-Fold. That gives Samsung a chance to find all the possible pitfalls and solve them, just as it did with the original Galaxy Z Fold release.
How about you? Would you buy a trifold phone right away, or would you instead wait for a while to see how Samsung can improve upon it?
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