Leaked images of new Samsung foldable surfaces: It’s a flip phone
The new folding Samsung phone. There's no logo, but you can clearly see this is the Samsung skin.
We know Samsung has more foldable form factors planned after the Galaxy Fold, and it looks like one of them has popped up on Chinese social media. The pictures show a Samsung phone about the same size and shape as a Galaxy S10, but it folds in half like a flip phone. This would be Samsung's answer to the 2020 Moto Razr.
We don't actually see a Samsung logo in the pictures, but the device is using Samsung's skin of Android with Samsung icons, Samsung Pay, Samsung's navigation buttons, and hole-punch camera design that's centered in the top of the display, just like Samsung's latest devices.Advertisement
The inside bezel seems like it's getting the same treatment as the Galaxy Fold. While normal slab smartphones are entirely covered by glass and the bezel is just the edges of the display, on the Fold (and apparently on this device), the bezel is a physical piece of plastic that sits on top of the display. One picture shows that the bezel sticks up above the display just a little bit, just like the Fold, allowing you to snap the phone closed without having the display touch itself. The physical plastic bezel also serves to cover the perimeter of the display, blocking dust, fingers, and anything else from getting behind the delicate, flexible display. On the Galaxy Fold, with its giant 7.3-inch display, the bezels don't look too out of place. This normal-sized smartphone gets the same size bezels, though, and on this smaller device, they are a lot bigger than the usual smartphone bezels.
While most 2019 smartphones came with an in-screen fingerprint reader, the Galaxy Fold didn't. Instead, Samsung opted for a side-mounted fingerprint reader. We don't get a clear look at the right side of the device, but in the picture that shows the front display, you can make out what looks like a volume rocker and power button. The power button doesn't stick out as much as the volume rocker, though. This is consistent with what another side-mounted fingerprint reader would look like—they are wide, flat, touch-sensitive areas that don't stick out as much as a normal button. Of course, this is pre-release software, but we don't see an in-screen fingerprint reader icon on the lock screen, which is another piece of evidence backing up the side-mounted fingerprint reader option. There's also probably a number of conflicts with in-screen fingerprint reader technology and the flexible, bending, moving display.
The phone folds up into a cute little square, and we can see a display of some kind on the cover, along with two cameras and what would be the main, "rear" cameras when the phone is open. We can't be totally sure how big the cover display is, but it looks small. In the picture, it shows only the time, date, and battery level, and there's enough light bleed that you can sort of make out the shape of the display. The glow around the letters looks to be only as big as the camera array.
The 2020 Moto Razr wowed us with its fancy hinge design that allowed the phone to fold but didn't crease the display. We don't get a clear picture of the display mechanism here, but there are hints that it is similar to the Galaxy Fold. The closed picture shows the spine of the hinge peeking out of the top of the device, which is exactly what the Galaxy Fold hinge looks like. We can't see a crease in any of the pictures, but the pictures are pretty blurry, and it's possible that the phone just hasn't been closed and creased at the time of these pictures.
Lastly we have the bottom, where we can see a bottom-firing speaker, a USB-C port, and no headphone jack. The Galaxy Fold was announced alongside the Galaxy S10, so maybe this foldable will get a similar announcement next to the Galaxy S11, which should be sometime in February.
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