Allison Johnson, reporting for The Verge:

Samsung is officially announcing the Z TriFold, its much-anticipated foldable with not one, but two hinges. It’ll launch first in South Korea on December 12th, with a US launch planned for the first quarter of 2026. There’s no US price just yet, but it’ll cost KRW 3,590,400 (about $2,500) for 512GB of storage when it launches back home, so you should probably start saving your pennies nickels for this one.

The TriFold’s inner screen measures 10 inches on the diagonal, with a 2160 x 1584 resolution and a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate that goes all the way down to 1Hz. That’s a lot of screen. You can run three apps vertically side by side on it, and even use Samsung’s DeX desktop environment in a standalone mode without a separate display. On paper, the TriFold’s outer screen looks a lot like the one on the Z Fold 7. It’s a 6.5-inch 1080p display with a 21:9 aspect ratio.

I’m generally a purveyor of foldable phones — especially ones that open up like a book, as opposed to the ones that flip open — but I really don’t know how to feel about the Z TriFold. Terrible name aside, the device is essentially a tablet computer, but with none of the benefits of the standard Galaxy Z Fold. This device is too thick at 12.9 millimeters for any practical use and is too large to use out and about as a phone. It’s really more of a “tablet that folds for storage,” and I’m not sure how compelling a use case that is. I think it’s a gimmick.

With rumors of a foldable iPhone in full swing for next year, I’ve been thinking about the potential use cases for foldable iPhones. Up until recently, I’ve thought of the iPad as a unique but quirky device that doesn’t fit nicely in the age of foldable devices, but this year’s update to iPadOS has made me reconsider that view. The foldable iPhone will still run iOS, and thus, will carry all of its limitations. By contrast, iPadOS is now a capable — albeit still undoubtedly hamstrung — operating system, and it positions the iPad as more of a secondary Mac than just a larger iPhone.

So where does the foldable iPhone fit into all of this? For those who mainly use the iPad as a content consumption device, I can see a two-in-one device being a great fit. The same might apply to students if the foldable iPhone supports the Apple Pencil, but the Z TriFold doesn’t support Samsung’s S Pen stylus, so I’m doubtful Apple Pencil support is on the table. That covers most but not all iPad use cases, but at the rumored price of about $2,000, many customers will just opt for the standard iPhone and a much cheaper iPad anyway.

Again, I still like the idea of foldable smartphones. I think they have great practicality — the foldable iPhone would cover most iPad use cases! — but they’re just too expensive and don’t offer any new functionality that two cheaper devices couldn’t accomplish. That problem applies to both Samsung’s Z TriFold and the rumored foldable iPhone. I’m certainly bullish on some kind of foldable form factor being the future of mobile computing, but that time certainly isn’t now, and Samsung’s latest confusing contraption is more proof of that.