At its current developer conference in California, Samsung unveiled the much-awaited foldable phone. The company just offered a glimpse of the ‘Infinity Flex Display’ which bends over and turns from a squarish tablet into a candy bar phone with a narrow screen on the front.

Samsung is not the first to launch a foldable phone and make a statement about its ability to innovate; a Chinese company called Royale just beat it by a whisker, not it could compete with Samsung in the actual market. The company’s President of mobile business, DJ Koh, spoke of the foldable phone in August during an unpacked event saying that he wouldn’t like to lose the world’s first title for foldable phones.

The foldable phone isn’t ready for market yet, but it’s time for developers and partner companies to be on board as every software will have to be realigned to work with a foldable form. Google will support the innovation, but for others, there’s more than enough room for scepticism. And plenty of questions.

Many questions

It’s not clear whether it will be thick and unwieldy or difficult to fold and unfold. Will two screens, one more familiar looking on the outside and the tablet-like one on the side, make sense to use together? Will there be interesting and compelling use cases? Could you, for example, see the notification for a Netflix film on top and touch it to unfold the device and begin watching on the inside screen? For that matter, what will it be like to use touch on a polymer surface instead of glass?

Doubt remains whether enough developers will create apps for the foldable format in time for a 2019 launch. If one looks back to the Edge models of Samsung’s flagships, there were barely any new applications other than the ones available at launch. There’s little doubt that the foldable will be expensive and not many know how difficult it would be to make this in the first place. Also, developers need to be sure of mass adoption before they start to support a new thing with software efforts.

But it is doubtful if Samsung will stick with what it has started and whether of other companies will jump in as well. That includes Huawei, LG, and Xiaomi. For now Samsung says there will be more innovations in the foldable space. With today’s smartphone having settled into a thoroughly tired look and feel though, a new direction is more than welcome.

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