Samsung Galaxy Fold (2019)

The first Galaxy Fold broke in reviewers' hands in April 2019, days before it was due in stores, and didn't go on sale until September. Samsung kept the Fold line going, but the launch made my list of failed products.

What it was

The Galaxy Fold was Samsung's first foldable phone, with a 7.3-inch screen that folded shut and a cover display on the outside.

Samsung Electronics unveiled it on February 20, 2019, as "a new foldable device creating a new mobile category." It said a new polymer layer made the Fold "flexible and tough, built to last."

DJ Koh, President and CEO of Samsung's IT & Mobile Communications Division, ran the business that made it.

The Verge reported that the Fold would launch in the US on April 26, starting at $1,980, through AT&T and T-Mobile. Europe was to follow on May 3.

What happened

By April 17, 2019, nine days before the Galaxy Fold's US launch date, reviewers were reporting broken screens.

The Verge's Dieter Bohn wrote that a bulge appeared in his screen two days after his review unit arrived, and that it "eventually pressed sharply enough into the screen to break it." CNBC said its own unit was "completely unusable after just two days of use."

Some other reviewers had peeled off a layer that "looks exactly like a removable screen protector," The Verge wrote in its review. It was part of the display.

Samsung told The Verge it still planned to launch on April 26. On April 22 it delayed the release and said it would announce a new date "in the coming weeks."

By June 13, Best Buy and AT&T had both cancelled their Fold pre-orders, The Verge reported.

On July 25, Samsung said it had made "necessary improvements" and would sell the Fold from September in select markets. Samsung confirmed the price would stay at $1,980, The Verge reported.

Sales began in Korea on September 6 and in the US on September 27, five months after the original US date.

Samsung released the successor, the Galaxy Z Fold2, in 2020, and launched the Galaxy Z Fold8 worldwide from August 7, 2026.

Why it failed

The first Galaxy Fold's launch failed because several of its review units broke within days, and Samsung's mobile chief later said he had pushed it through before it was ready.

What Samsung said

Samsung's first statement said it would "thoroughly inspect these units." A few reviewers, it said, had removed the display's top layer, which it called "part of the display structure."

On April 22, Samsung said its initial findings showed the display issues "could be associated with impact on the top and bottom exposed areas of the hinge." In one case, it said, "substances found inside the device affected the display performance."

Samsung's July 25 list of changes extended the top layer beyond the bezel, "making it apparent that it is an integral part of the display structure and not meant to be removed." It added caps at the top and bottom of the hinge and metal layers under the display, and reduced the space between the hinge and the body.

"I pushed it through before it was ready," Koh told reporters in Seoul, and called it "embarrassing," as The Independent reported in early July 2019. He also said, "Some issues we didn't even think about, but thanks to our reviewers, mass volume testing is ongoing."

In the same piece, Stephanie Choi, Samsung's head of global marketing strategy, pointed to the brand philosophy, "do what you can't," and said the Fold's problems were "unfortunately sometimes part of this process."

Samsung's 2024 history of the Z Fold series doesn't mention the delay. It credits the Fold's inward-folding hinge with protecting the display.

What reporting showed

Layer removal didn't explain every broken screen. The Verge said it "wasn't the issue with our review unit," and CNBC said it "didn't remove that layer" either.

For the reviewers who did remove it, The Verge noted that "the review unit packaging didn't have any warning on it." The same piece quoted iFixit's teardown, which found the phone's spine "flanked by massive gaps that our opening picks hop right into." Bohn called those gaps only his "current working theory" for how debris got into his unit.

In July, Bohn described the review-unit failures as "a catastrophic result for a device that was seeded to a very small number of reviewers."

The Independent tied the rush to competition. It noted that Huawei and Xiaomi had both announced foldables since Samsung first teased the Fold in November 2018, and wrote, "Such pressure resulted in the rushed launch of the Galaxy Fold before adequate testing had been undertaken." None of the Samsung quotes in the piece names a rival.

The Verge had written in April that Samsung was "trying to win the race to market with the first mainstream foldable device."

In June, Huawei delayed its own foldable, the Mate X, and said it was taking a "cautious" approach after Samsung's launch, The Verge reported.

What later analysis found

Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, an analyst firm, wrote in 2020 that the first launch "was essentially botched by durability issues." The firm's disclosures page, last updated in April 2026, lists Samsung Electronics among its past or current paid business relationships.

In December 2025, Counterpoint Research still named "improved durability" and "optimized hinge and panel structures" among the key enablers of foldable growth in 2026.

The stage it reached

The original Galaxy Fold never got past the introduction stage.

My product life cycle guide defines that as a product on sale, or nearly, that few people beyond early adopters have tried. At the US relaunch, Samsung stressed "limited quantities" and wouldn't ship a Fold direct to anybody, The Verge reported.

The Verge's re-review called it "a science experiment, just one that you could theoretically buy."

Koh told reporters at CES in January 2020, "I think we've sold 400,000 to 500,000 Galaxy Fold smartphones," Gulf News reported.

The Fold also made one of the stage's common mistakes, announcing dates it couldn't hit. April 26 in the US and May 3 in Europe both passed, and Samsung's "in the coming weeks" took three months.

As with Apple Maps, the launch failed and the product line kept going. Foldables were still a small part of the phone market in 2025. Counterpoint put them at 2.5% of global smartphone shipments in the third quarter.

The lesson

I'd get new hardware to people who don't work on it, and have no reason to be careful with it, before the ship date is public. Samsung's April 26 date had been public for nearly two months when the Fold's review screens started breaking.

When people do the obvious thing with a product and it breaks, I think that's a design fault, not a user one. Samsung's first statement pointed at the reviewers who removed the screen layer. Its July fix changed the layer.