I wasn’t very happy about it last year when I had to say “I told you so” to Samsung fans, but it was inevitable. Believe me, I would have loved to see Samsung release a fantastic foldable smartphone last year with a smart design and solid build quality. But as I have explained several times over the past year, that’s not what Samsung does with first-generation mobile products. It rushes them out and screws them up. Badly. I’ve seen it happen time and time again, and that’s why I was able to state definitively that the Galaxy Fold would be a piece of junk more than a year before it was even announced.
Here’s the easiest way to explain it: when it comes to innovation, Samsung’s mobile division is a YouTube commenter shouting “FIRST!” The company is far more concerned with beating rivals to market than it is with building an innovative new product that customers are going to love. As a result, the company regularly releases new devices that are poorly thought-out, poorly designed, and poorly constructed. That’s why the Galaxy Fold started breaking literally within hours of review units being delivered to media last year. As you’ll recall, the Galaxy Fold was such a piece of junk that Samsung had to cancel the phone’s release and take six months to redesign it. Thankfully though, the magic happens once Samsung starts to slow down and refine its products. Remember how bad the company’s early Galaxy S phones were? Now take a look at the Galaxy S10 and other recent models — they’re incredible. We’ve seen it happen time and time again, and now it appears as though the company is following the same trend with the upcoming Galaxy Fold 2.
Don’t expect anything too impressive when Samsung releases the Galaxy Fold 2 in the coming months. After all, it took the company six or seven generations to get the Galaxy S right, and it has only gotten better from there. That said, all the reliable rumors we have read so far indicate that the second-generation Galaxy Fold smartphone will be a dramatic improvement over the first. We’ve even seen some leaked photos that supposedly showed us Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 2 design, though it was never confirmed that the phone in those photos was indeed the real deal. Now, however, the first official image of Samsung’s upcoming new foldable phone has leaked from CES 2020.
Korean-language tech news site AJU News has posted a leaked image that is believed to be from an official Samsung presentation that was shown behind closed doors at CES. The image shows the word “Bloom” in large letters next to a phone that fits the description of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Fold 2. Gadget blogs have been quick to jump to the conclusion that this new foldable phone will be called Galaxy Bloom when it launches, but it’s unclear if Bloom is the official name or just a codename that Samsung uses internally.
As we’ve heard from reliable sources, Samsung’s second-generation Galaxy Fold will be totally different from the first-generation model. Instead of folding open along a vertical hinge, the device will open like a clamshell phone similar to what Motorola is doing with the new Razr set to be released later this year.
The leaked image above shows a render and earlier leaks were believed to be a prototype device, so it’s still unclear what the Galaxy Fold 2 — or Galaxy Bloom — will look like when it debuts next month at Samsung’s Unpacked event on February 11th. It certainly has potential though, because the Fold 2 looks incredible in the concept video we covered recently. The actual handset could end up looking a lot like the real thing Samsung will unveil at next month’s press conference, and it would be a huge improvement over the first-generation model. We just hope that most of our readers took our advice and skipped the first Galaxy Fold, which was released just 4 months ago after a long delay.
