Two Thousand Euros, One Crease

Samsung announced the Galaxy Fold in early 2019 as a new product category: not a phone, not a tablet, but something that folds in half and tries to be both. Closed, it’s a narrow smartphone with a small outer display. Open, it becomes a roughly tablet-sized screen—the inner panel unfurling via a hinge that Samsung spent several years and presumably a significant amount of money engineering. The price for all that engineering: around €2,000.

The pitch is that the daily decision between phone and tablet becomes unnecessary. One device, two modes, a hinge in the middle. What the pitch leaves out is that the hinge—by definition—creates a crease down the center of the display, a permanent reminder that this is a thing that folds. You can see it. You feel it under your thumb. Whether that bothers you probably depends on how much you care about screens versus how much you care about the concept.

The Galaxy Fold is interesting in the way that first-generation anything is interesting: as a statement about where a company thinks the future is, not as something you should actually own yet. When the device launched, multiple reviewers broke theirs within days. Samsung pulled it back, redesigned the hinge protection, and shipped it later. These are not confidence-inspiring facts about a €2,000 object, and the Bixby AI assistant baked into the software was—as with every Samsung device—something most owners turned off before the end of the first day.

Still. Something about a screen that folds in half and opens to show you more is genuinely compelling in a way that raw specifications can’t capture. The form changes the relationship to the device. Whether that relationship is worth two grand is a separate question, and for nearly everyone the answer is obviously no. But the question itself is interesting. That’s more than you can say for most phone announcements.