Samsung has announced it is just about ready to take orders for the Galaxy Z TriFold, the grotesque foldable monstrosity the company made official last month. Starting on January 30th, you’ll be able to order one in black, starting at a mere $2,899. Why, that’s only a few hundred dollars more than the trade-in value of my (admittedly quite old) 2004 Lexus SUV. What a deal!
What do you get for this nearly $3,000 phone? Features include: a 10-inch, 120Hz OLED display when unfolded; 3.9mm thickness at the Z TriFold’s thinnest point (or 12.9mm when folded); a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor; a 200MP camera; and gobs of AI features you may or may not ever use. Internally, it sports a lot of the same hardware as the Galaxy Z Fold 7, a great foldable that earned an 8/10 in IGN’s review last year. Could it unseat the Z Fold 7 as IGN’s favorite foldable? Only time and testing will tell.
Samsung brags that the phone’s main display has undergone “a 200,000-cycle multi-folding test,” which it says is “equivalent to folding the device approximately 100 times a day for five years.” Of course, durability is about more than how many times the phone can fold and foldables have been a bit of a step back when it comes to dustproofing. Samsung claims an IP48 ingress rating – which means it can resist solid objects larger than a millimeter. Small solids like you’ll find in dirt and sand still seem to be a crunchy issue for the phone in YouTuber Zack Nelson’s rundown of the phone on his JerryRigEverything channel last month.
Anyway, if you’ve got the money and the sort of gentle disposition that would keep the TriFold in ship shape long enough to justify its cost, then rejoice friend, for you’ll be able to order it straight from Samsung in but a few days.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
