The smartphone in your pocket hasn’t changed for years.
Sure, its camera and screen have gotten a few updates, and its processor is more powerful, but overall, it’s been the same black rectangle for as long as you can probably remember.
But Samsung is leading a charge among smartphone makers to develop a new class of smartphones that fold and flip open. Changing people’s habits, though, is tough. Especially when it comes to their most important gadget.
So to get the lowdown on how Samsung plans to make that happen, I traveled to South Korea to attend the company’s "Unpacked" event, where it debuted its Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5 phones. I also toured the company’s facilities, getting an up-close look at how the tech giant builds its newest foldables.
Samsung versus Apple
Samsung has been outfitting its phones with wireless charging, massive displays, and high-powered zoom on its cameras well before Apple (AAPL) was doing any of that. And the company is continuing that history with its latest foldables.
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The smartphone industry is ruled by both Samsung and Apple. According to Counterpoint Research, Samsung controlled 22% of the global smartphone market as of Q1 2023. That’s just above Apple’s 21% market share and well ahead of Chinese rivals including Oppo and Xiaomi.
In the US, though, Apple's iPhone reigns supreme, capturing 57% of the smartphone market, according to StatCounter. Samsung, meanwhile, has 27%.
But in South Korea, it’s a different story.
There, the company controls a whopping 63% of the smartphone market, while Apple has 31%. It’s a difference that’s as clear as day the minute you step off of your plane at Incheon International Airport. Everywhere you look, people are using Samsung smartphones.
It’s a stark contrast to the US, where if you’re the person with a green bubble, the telltale sign of an Android phone in your group chat, you might get some snide remarks from your friends.
Flipping and folding phones
Samsung’s foldable efforts were front and center during theevent. The $1,799 Fold 5 has a slightly slimmer front-cover display than your average smartphone but unfolds like a book to a massive 7.6-inch screen.
The Z Flip 5 starts at $999 and has a clam-shell design. Up front is a 3.4-inch cover screen. But when you unfold it, you’re met by a 6.7-inch display. Apple's iPhone 14 Pro starts at $999.
Building and getting these folding phones is different from putting together candy bar-style smartphones. And so, to see how Samsung managed to put together a pair of handsets that fold in half, I visited the company’s smartphone manufacturing facility in Gumi, South Korea.
Samsung repeatedly opens and closes it's foldables to test how well the screens hold up. (Image: Samsung) ·Samsung
Before I stepped up to the assembly line located on the third floor of one of a series of buildings on Samsung’s campus, I had to strap on a pair of blue booties. The line, which manufactures the printed circuit boards for Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, is set up in a semi-clean environment where workers monitor everything from the temperature and humidity to sound levels.
Custom-made robotic arms grab strips of printed circuit boards and place them onto conveyor belts where another machine lines them with a series of tiny components, some no larger than 2 millimeters.
These tiny electronics allow your phone to do everything from browsing the web to shooting photos, and Samsung’s machines place them in their exact spots in the blink of an eye. From there, the boards move through a giant oven that solders the components in place.
Once the boards move through this line, robots bring them to the second floor where they are placed into phone bodies. I watched as one of the lines put together Samsung’s Galaxy S23 while another built the Galaxy Z Fold 5.
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Each line does everything from pressing on the rear panels of new phones to testing their cameras and cellular connectivity.
Robots play a key role on the line. Arms move phones from one section to another, initialize the phones’ software, and ensure their displays and ports work correctly.
It’s a symphony of electronic beeps and mechanical whirring noises that ends when a robotic cart picks up a bundle of completed smartphones and moves them to the shipping area.
After a quick lunch in the company's cafeteria, I was off to see how it builds the basics of its devices, the bodies that hold everything in place.
I walked through an area where CNC machines milled pieces of aluminum to create molds for various parts of future phones and saw how the company strengthens its foldable displays to ensure they’re strong enough to withstand being bent over and over again.
Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 5. (Image: Howley) ·Howley
On the last stop on my tour, Samsung brought me to an area where it performs basic tests on the phones. That includes things like how well they work with various third-party chargers, making sure face recognition works across various genders and ethnicities, and how well they run while using Google’s Android Auto.
Are foldables in your future?
After spending a week in South Korea and touring Samsung’s facilities, it’s easy to see why the company believes it can make foldable smartphones the go-to design for the future. But does that mean it’ll actually happen? Will you eventually have a folding phone in your pocket rather than that same old rectangle?
It’s still difficult to tell.
Samsung and its Chinese competitors have embraced the form — and Motorola has reinvigorated its Razr branding with its flip phone-style Razr Plus. But the 800-pound gorilla that is Apple has yet to offer the slightest hint that it’s working on such a device.
But one might just be coming.
In 2021, Bloomberg journalist and Apple soothsayer Mark Gurman reported that Apple was developing a foldable iPhone to rival Samsung’s offerings. More recently, however, he said that Apple is looking to develop a foldable iPad before an iPhone.
While that’s far from a certainty, it’s looking more and more likely that Apple will, eventually, join the folding party. And if the world’s two largest smartphone makers are on board, that boring old rectangle in your pocket just might not be too long for this world.
To watch the first full episode of NEXT and find out more about Samsung’s quest to take on Apple, click here.
Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.
