All the rumors were true: the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, arguably the most anticipated and most talked about smartphone (aside from the Apple iFold), is real and shipping this month, but the devil is in the details.
Samsung announced late Monday (December 1, 2025) that it will launch its first foldable Galaxy phone this month in South Korea (December 12), then coming to the US in the first quarter of 2026 (no word on availability in the UK and Australia).
Lots of new technology
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Overall, though, it sounds like an engineering marvel, with two different styles of hinges: one has to be wider to fold the third section over the other two. Samsung says the titanium hinges with dual-rail structure work in harmony. One wonders if the deployment of one requires the deployment of the other, meaning you can’t just have two-thirds of the screen; It’s probably the small 6.5-inch cover or access the full 10-inch tablet.
The Armor Aluminum frame is designed to prevent one part of the 10-inch screen from touching another part, preventing wear and damage. There is also a special “reinforced coat” to help protect the flexible screen.
Triple camera system for the triptych
On the outside is the deck screen, supported by fiber-reinforced polymer panels with ceramic support. The left side houses the all-important triple-camera bump with a 200MP wide-angle, a 12MP ultra-wide-angle (120-degree field of view), and a 10MP 3X optical zoom.
There is also a 10MP selfie camera cutout on the cover display and another 10MP selfie camera cutout on the 10-inch flexible display. This is essentially the same camera set as the Z Fold 7, although we don’t know much about the image sensors behind the lenses.
Even more so than the 8-inch screen you get when you open the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, this 10-inch triptych looks like it was designed to work. Samsung is touting built-in Dex support and multitasking. The system would support up to four workspaces with five applications each. Alternatively, the unfolded screen could be used as three connected 6.5-inch smartphones, but where you can easily drag and drop between running apps.
Naturally, it will also be a pocket movie screen for apps like Netflix and YouTube. The only thing that might be missing is a kickstand.
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The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold may be well equipped to handle an MCU movie or a long streaming event: it has a 5,600 mAh battery spread across all three segments.
And big-screen gaming is likely to be a reality. Under the hood, the Z Trifold will run the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform for Galaxy, meaning the 3nm chip is probably a bit overclocked for this triple device. To back that up, the SoC will have 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage to boot. A 1TB model of the Z Trifold will be available.
What we don’t know is the price. Most rumors put it between $3,000 and $3,500, which seems like a safe bet considering the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 starts at $1,999.99 (although Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals have been heavily discounted).
A surprise from Samsung
It’s unusual for Samsung to reveal so much with so little fanfare. Maybe it’s because the US launch of the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold is still months away (possibly longer in the UK and Australia), and Samsung wants to use its hometown as a sort of big test kitchen for the new device.
However, the announcement raises the question of how the launch of the Z Trifold will influence what is expected to be the launch of the Galaxy S26 line. Most people expect that to happen in late January or early February 2026. Perhaps the Z Trifold’s big reveal party will coincide with the big early reveal of Samsung’s S26 line. The only strange part of that scenario is that the triple phone is separate from what should be the launch of its foldable cousins, the Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, sometime in mid-2026.
Everything will be revealed very soon. In the meantime, we’re eager to find out when we’ll be able to touch and test the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and how much it will cost us.
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