For decades, the phone has had a place in music and hip hop culture. From Stevie Wonder calling to say that he loved you to LL Cool J impressing the ladies with his early 90s-era car phone to Snoop Dogg hitting up his homies on the two-way and finally Drake’s feeling about the hotline bling, the phone has served not only as a method of communication, but a source of love, frustration, and other poetic musings by hip hop’s greatest legends.
While the iPhone and similar rectangular smartphones have almost exclusively dominated the market for the past decade, Samsung is looking to switch up the game as they announced this week that the Galaxy Fold, their foldable smartphone, is almost ready for release.
Speaking at a tech conference in South Korea, Samsung Display Vice President Kim Seong-cheol announced that “Most of the display problems have been ironed out, and the Galaxy Fold is ready to hit the market.”
So just exactly how does the phone fold? According to Venture Beat, the phone, which weighs about 200 grams, opens in portrait orientation- sort of like a book. The inside is coated with a film that gives it a photopaper-like appearance. It’s got a protective polymer consisting of a cover window, a shock-absorbent film, and a polarizer that’s 45 percent slimmer than the company’s previous thinnest, along with a flexible layer and backplane.
The main issue is how to make something that creases like a book not crease. The bendable screen and joints had been the major source of the company’s delays. (The phone had originally been slated for release in April, but was delayed due to these and other technical issues.)
The Galaxy Fold is now anticipated to be available in select markets (likely the U.S. and South Korea) in July and is anticipated to retail at approximately $1980.
Will 2020 rappers be rapping about folding their phones or will Soulja Boy still be inviting his crush to kiss him through the latest version of the iPhone? Only time will tell.
