ORIGINAL ARTICLE: After foldable smartphones, Samsung could be now ushering in a new era of foldable laptops. The company reportedly has a foldable laptop dubbed “Galaxy Book Fold 17” in the pipeline. The ’17’ in the name hints at a 17-inch display when unfolded. A recent tweet by noted leaker Ice Universe suggests the device is already in development. The said tweet doesn’t reveal any information about the device itself except for the Galaxy Book Fold 17 moniker. It appears to be a screenshot from an official Samsung website as the font largely matches what the company uses across its website. Perhaps it’s from an official webpage that isn’t public yet. Nonetheless, Samsung has been making advancements in foldable display technology and it appears to be all set to take a huge step forward with a foldable laptop soon.
A foldable Samsung laptop could be on the way
Samsung showcased a variety of foldable devices at SID 2021 (Society for Information Display) in May. The company then took those concepts to the Korea Display Industry Exhibition 2021 (also referred to as IMID — International Meeting on Information Display) last week. And as you might have guessed, both events featured a 17-inch foldable laptop from the Korean brand (see the featured image above). Samsung says it’s a 17.3-inch display when unfolded, with a 4:3 aspect ratio. You can use it as a monitor or perhaps a large tablet if you want to. When folded in an ‘L’ shape, the device can be used as a 13-inch laptop. It will function something reminiscent of the Flex Mode on the company’s foldable smartphones. One part of the screen will be facing you and will show you all the information. The other part will lie flat and act as input, with a large touchscreen keyboard and trackpad. The concept device also showed it to use an under-display camera (UDC). But it can’t be said just yet whether the end product — if one ever arrives — will feature the UDC tech. Interestingly, Samsung Display is officially referring to this 17.3-inch foldable laptop as the Flex Note. So the name Galaxy Book Fold 17 comes a bit surprising. Perhaps the company has settled on this name to streamline its Galaxy Book laptop lineup. That said, there’s no way to verify if the Samsung Galaxy Book Fold 17 foldable laptop exists in real or it’s still just a concept. But if it’s real, you can expect to hear more about it in the coming weeks and months. Meanwhile, you can see the concept device in the video below (at around the 46-second mark).
