We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, Samsung is terrible at being first and last year’s Galaxy Fold is the latest in a long line of examples that illustrate why. The company is far more concerned than it should be with beating its rivals to market with new products, so it regularly rushes to make a new product quickly instead of taking its time to build a product that’s actually good. That’s why its first-generation mobile devices are almost always terrible, and then they get better and better in future generations. The Galaxy Fold is the most recent and perhaps best example of the trend, considering the phone’s design was such crap that handsets started breaking literally within hours of being shipped to reviewers. Samsung had to cancel the phone’s release and delay it by about half a year while the company rushed to fix major flaws that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The end result was still just as ugly as the original, but at least the release version didn’t start falling apart as soon as it reached buyers’ hands.
With the first-generation Fold now behind us, we can look forward to a second-generation model that’s better in every way. After all, was Samsung lacks in innovation it more than makes up for in iteration. A huge leak from over the weekend revealed that Samsung plans to unveil the Galaxy Fold 2 alongside the new Galaxy S20 series at a press conference on February 11th. And yes, that’s Galaxy S20, not Galaxy S11 — Samsung is reportedly skipping all the way ahead to S20 this year since it’s 2020, and possibly also so that Samsung doesn’t release an “11” series in the same year Apple releases its iPhone 12 series. We know from leaks that the new Galaxy Fold 2 will feature a much different design compared to the original, and now a new video gives us a glimpse at what’s in store from Samsung next month.
Remember when everyone wanted an iPhone with a bigger screen so Apple increased the size of its iPhone displays from 3.5 inches to 4 inches? The problem was the screens were only taller as opposed to taller and wider, so adding that tiny bit of height didn’t really accomplish anything. It wasn’t until Apple released the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in 2014 that people finally got what they wanted.
The situation with the Galaxy Fold is similar. Yes, the phone unfolds to reveal a display that’s much larger than a normal phablet screen on paper, but the bizarre aspect ratio means that there isn’t much real benefit from that extra canvas. With the Galaxy Fold 2, Samsung appears to have come up with a much better design that’s similar to the upcoming Motorola Razr revival that should be released later this year. Instead of being a normal-sized phone that folds open along a vertical hinge, it’s a square(-ish) phone that folds open along a horizontal hinge. The result gives us an aspect ratio that’s closer to a normal phone, but bigger.
Leaks last month showed us tiny, obscured photos that were said to be a Galaxy Fold 2 prototype, and it looks like Samsung’s second-generation design is much better than the original — just as we expected it to be. Now, YouTuber Waqar Khan has taken that leak and others into consideration to create a video that showcase’s the phone’s leaked design. It’s probably not an exact recreation of Samsung’s upcoming new foldable smartphone, but it should give us a very good idea of what to expect from the finished product. Check out the full video, which is embedded below.
