• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Samsung, Huawei, set pricey outlook for foldable phones

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The unveiling of foldable phones by Samsung and Huawei may have launched the smartphone into a future of breathtaking innovation but it is one that millions of people at the lower rung may not be able to get their hands on in the very near future. Samsung’s phone set for release in April has a starting price tag of $1,980 (N716,760) and Huawei phone will cost anyone wanting to own one $2,700 (N977,400).

The Galaxy Fold demoed during Samsung’s Unpacked event in San Francisco and the Huawei Mate X launched in Barcelona at the Mobile World Conference (MCW) have all the features that will make any phone lover swoon with envy.

The Galaxy Fold for instance comes with 12 gigabytes of RAM and batteries on each side of the phone. It also has six cameras, with three on the back, one on the front and two inside. The three rear cameras have capacity of a 12-mega pixel wide-angle and a 12 megapixel telephoto camera and a 16 megapixel ultra wide camera. The two cameras inside are a 10 megapixel selfie camera.

The Fold does not have a microSD slot and it comes with 512GB of memory. Its fingerprint scanner is on the phone’s side, like the Galaxy S10E, instead of using an ultrasonic, in-screen fingerprint reader like the rest of the Galaxy S10 line up.

The Mate X also packs a big punch with its 8-inch flexible OLED panel which gives the user three screens. When it’s folded, it is a one 6.6 inch, notch-free, and bezel-starved main display combined with an elongated 6.4 inch rear display. The rear display lets the user take selfies with the main camera system.

“This phone is not only for today for 5G but also for future 5G,” says Richard Yu, head of Huawei’s consumer business group. “On all the benchmarks you can see the performance; the speed is the fastest for 5G in the world.”

As impressive as the features of these devices appear, the do not inspire so much confidence in terms of wide reach, at least in the short term. It could be argued that with time, as other smartphone manufacturers latch on to the foldable phone fever, the prices will have to come down.

To be sure, the first foldable phone released for commercial use was Flexpai Royole. Like Samsung and Huawei, the FlexPai came with a hefty tag price of $1,300 (N470,000).