One of my first real 5G experiences was chatting with my wife on a foldable phone in early 2020. When I opened a Samsung Galaxy Fold and set it on a table at a coffee shop in Seoul, the high bandwidth and low latency made me feel like she was right there with me, having coffee, even though she was 7,000 miles away.
New folding phones and improvements to 5G could soon bring this experience to the US, if Samsung and the carriers play their cards right. Samsung is poised to announce its Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 on August 11, and the fate of 5G—especially T-Mobile’s 5G—rides in part on their success.
Price is going to be the biggest question around “bringing more people into the fold,” to quote Samsung Electronics president TM Roh. A $2,000 phone, like the Fold 2, just won’t sell a lot of units. But the current chipset shortage could force Samsung to keep prices higher than it would otherwise prefer. Exciting 5G consumer applications might be the key to getting consumers to pony up.
The muddled condition of 5G in the US, where it’s sometimes better and often worse than 4G, has been holding back development. But as I talk to carriers about what’s coming with T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G and Verizon and AT&T’s upcoming C-band, they keep reminding me that it’s about the floor, not about the peaks. It’s about always having at least 25Mbps, not sometimes having 2Gbps. And foldables with big, beautiful displays are the perfect devices to showcase what a baseline of 25Mbps can do.
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To give foldables and 5G a boost, Samsung and the carriers should heavily promote—and subsidize—three 5G-only experiences:
- High-quality, razor-sharp video calling on a big screen, like I saw in Korea. That requires a fast, stable connection.
- 4K and HDR video streaming, paired with a really good display. Samsung needs phones that can bring out the shadow details in shows like Loki, where I found that the difference between 1080p and 4K HDR let me identify details about the production design of the show’s fake PCs. T-Mobile and Verizon are both promoting 4K streaming on their new high-end service plans.
- Google Stadia cloud gaming. Samsung has been developing a stronger relationship with Google—Roh highlighted it in his blog post—and Stadia wants 25Mbps down for a top-notch experience.
Samsung’s current Fold campaign seems to be mostly about the S Pen and creativity, which is great, but it isn’t going to drive 5G adoption. However, six months from now when discounts kick in, a lower-priced Fold could be the flagship device for Verizon’s C-band launch, if the carriers and Samsung find (and fund) applications that can only work well on 5G.
What’s the killer 5G experience for a foldable? Tell me in the comments.
Oh, and in case you missed it, here’s what reliable leaker Evan Blass says the new phone looks like.
What Else Happened This Week?
- T-Mobile finally released a mid-band coverage map, showing how it’s covering even smaller US cities with relatively high-quality 5G.
- The FCC is cleaning up after former chairman Ajit Pai, who gave a ton of money to ISPs under what’s looking like false pretenses.
- OnePlus’ market share shot up as the company took advantage of both LG’s demise and Samsung’s chipset shortage. Several other sites have reviewed (and liked) the new Nord 2 phone, which isn’t coming out in the US; we’re waiting for the N20 variant.
- Dish got sick of T-Mobile and decided to switch partners to AT&T for its Boost/Ting/Republic subscribers and future Dish 5G network. No, we don’t know when Boost subscribers will be forced to switch over. I don’t have a high opinion of Dish; I still think it will build as little of its own network as possible and mostly rely on AT&T.
- The upcoming AT&T 3G shutdown will kill the cellular internet access on older Amazon Kindles next February. This is just the tip of the iceberg; a huge number of industrial devices and sensors will need to be upgraded from 2G/3G to 4G/5G over the next few years. The transition makes it extra-urgent for the carriers to get their low-cost, low-bandwidth industrial 5G plans in place so customers can upgrade to a network with 20 more years of life rather than 10 or so.
