Samsung has been time and again accused of infringing on Apple’s intellectual property. Not just allegations, both companies have fought several bitter legal battles in courts across countries. However amidst all that, we all tend to forget one key aspect about Samsung — how the company just loves to play with different ideas and technologies.
It’s another thing, though, that most of the prototypes designed and developed by Samsung never make it to the consumer market. The only exception was the Samsung Galaxy Round that was launched three years ago as a concept phone. As you probably remember, the Galaxy Round happened to be among the first smartphones to flaunt a flexible display.
Around the same time, another South Korean tech giant LG also came up with their own smartphone with flexible display, the LG G Flex. It had a somewhat bigger display than that of the Galaxy Round.
However, between Samsung and LG, only the latter seemed to have the cojones to make their device available worldwide. Samsung explained its decision not to follow suit by saying that the Galaxy Round was only a concept phone meant to test the market.
Now, a new report has surfaced on The Investor that claims to have heard about Samsung and LG planning to launch foldable smartphones in 2017. Citing input from Hyundai Securities analyst Kim Don-won, the report says that both these companies to launch their new products as early as in 2017.
“The year 2017 will be the first year of foldable smartphones for the mass market. Following the launches by the Korean firms, other global rivals such as Apple and Google are also likely to unveil their own versions in 2018,” Kim Dong-won claims.
The analyst further states the launch of these new foldable handsets is aimed at gaining some kind of leverage on an increasingly saturated worldwide smartphone market. While we can not independently verify these claims, Kim Dong-won’s analysis seems to be close to facts considering that Samsung’s chief of mobile division Koh Dong-jin recently confirmed that his company was already working on a foldable smartphone.