Samsung Wants 1 Million Foldable Phones Made ASAP

Criticize Samsung all you want but one thing you can't say about it is that it lacks ambition. Whether that ambition can be matched by actual capability is a different question but that's not going to stop the Korean company from dreaming big. It has just revealed a prototype, not even an actual finished version, of a foldable phone and now Samsung is saying that not only will it deliver that phone in the first half of 2019, it also plans on delivering a million of them in that first rollout.

That's a very daring commitment to make on two accounts. The first is that Samsung has yet to even finalize the foldable phone, including its name, at this point. Although the excitement over the device was definitely high, some are only too eager to point out how Samsung's prototype might not even be close to the real deal yet. Some have even come close to calling that prototype a fake, a rehash of an old device the company showed off years ago.

But conspiracy theories aside, there's also the issue of production. AMOLED displays are already more difficult, and therefore more expensive, to make, much less foldable ones. Even with its production capacity, yields are not expected to be that great. A projected 1 million units sounds pretty generous in that light.

Then again, this is Samsung after all, and it's known for much boasting that sometimes doesn't exactly come out the way it intends. But even if 1 million foldable Galaxy Fs or Xs come out in the first half of 2019, it's not something that will probably sell as quickly anyway.

The price for this innovation is still unknown but Korean media have leaked months ago that it would be around 2,000,000 KRW. That would make it roughly around $1,770 and definitely way beyond even the iPhone Xs Max ballpark. Unless Samsung is able to prove that what you're really getting is more than just an oversized smartphone, most of that 1 million foldable phones might end taking up room in storage instead.