You gotta know when to fold ‘em, and Samsung does. (This looks like fun!)

I am never an early adopter.

My first cell phone looked like a WWII walkie-talkie. It was so old-school it was almost rotary. It was a hand-me-down from a colleague who was upgrading to a new-fangled flip phone. This was around 1998. I only used that phone for keep-it-in-the-car-for emergencies. After about a year, I got a flip phone.

I laughed at my boss when he got a Palm Pilot. Palm Pilot! We didn’t have LOL back in that day, but I was LOL-ing over the product’s name. It sounded like…. Well, never you mind what it sounded like to me. Anyway, after a not-so-long-while watching him use his Palm Pilot, I went and got one. From the point on, I couldn’t live with out it. Until everything you could do on a Palm Pilot, you could do on a smartphone. So I got a smartphone.

I swear to God that my husband and I purchased the very last fat-box TV for sale anywhere in the city of Boston. We liked the picture better than what was on the flat screens, and were afraid that if we hesitated too long we wouldn’t have be able to find a TV we liked. So we went ahead and got fat boy. How much longer did it take us to get a big old flat screen? Not all that long.

I’m trying to think of something I was an early adopter of. Maybe the New Beetle, which I bought the first year it came out. That may not strictly count, as the Beetle was such a throwback product. But when I first had my Beetle on the road, people would notice. I went to a party – mostly boomers – and everyone who knew how to drive stick lined up to take it for a spin around the block. And then those Beetles were everywhere. My one time in the vanguard. And it wasn’t about early tech adoption. It was about early nostalgia adoption.

Anyway, while I’m never in the first wave of adopters of anything, I’m never in the last wave either, preferring to catch a second or third wave.

So, no, I won’t be first in line for phone that has an “origami” fold-out screen that turns into a tablet.

We think of a smartphone screen as a rigid piece of glass that’s limited by the size of the device itself. But Samsung’s Infinity Flex Display folds, unfolds and refolds to pack up into a smaller form. (Source: WaPo)

Earlier this week, at its developers conference, Samsung offered a sneak peek of the smartphone-of-the-future, which is expected to be commercially available some time in 2019.

In an interview, the CEO of Samsung’s mobile division, DJ Koh, told me the folding phone is no gimmick. “In terms of productivity, always a bigger screen is better,” he said. “If we made a much bigger screen than the Note, then it would become a tablet. So why don’t we think about folding? We started from this simple idea three or four years ago.”

And now they have a prototype.  And now they need apps that work on it. But this tech is so cool, that shouldn’t be a problem. (Google has already signed up to do native Android for it.)

Folded up, the device has a screen on its front. When opened, the interior screen lays flat — with little hint of a crease — to show a widescreen version of whatever app had been previously running on the front.

That interior screen is 7.3 inches, smaller than a tablet, but much easier to do work on (or have fun with) than the screen size of a current smartphone.

How’d they make the screen fold flat? Koh said Samsung has had bendable OLED screens for years, but they’ve been fixed behind glass. The folding phone’s interior screen uses a different kind of composite polymer transparent material that can withstand being opened or closed at least 300,000 times. We’ll have to see how it wears in real-world use.

Well if it lasts being opened and shut “at least 300,000 times”, that’s an open and shut case. Even if I opened it 100 times a day, it would still last me over 8 years. A lifetime! Especially when you factor in a) my age, and b) the fact that even someone who doesn’t lunge for every new tech bell and whistle – I tend to hang on to a phone or laptop for anywhere from 2 to 4 years – will be onto something new before this one dies on me. (When I replace depends on my current tolerance for the performance slowdown that comes as the apps get appier, and the batteries get funkier.)

But one of the reasons I never want to jump in to early on a new technology is that Version 1 generally has a ton of bugs in it. For those who thrive on acquiring the new and the shiny, these problems are just baked into early adoption. Me? I like to wait for the shakedown cruise to set sail and return before I’ll jump in on something.

In any case, I’m completely enamored at the idea of the folding phone and I’ll definitely be in one of the earlier of the adopter waves. (That is, unless it’s stupendously expensive.)

By the way, one of the things I like about this is that Samsung seems to have gotten a jump on Apple. Oh, I’m sure Apple’s working on something similar, but it’s yet to be seen. As one of the lone Android/Samsung phone users in my circle, I’m looking forward to showing mine off.

This one looks like fun!