The rumors were all true: the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, possibly the most anticipated and talked-about smartphone (aside from the Apple iFold), is real and ships this month, but the devil is in the details.
Samsung announced on Monday evening (December 1, 2025) that it’s launching its first tri-folding Galaxy phone this month in South Korea (Dec. 12), and then it will come to the US in the first quarter of 2026 (no word on UK and AU availability).
A lot of new technology
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In general, though, it sounds like an engineering marvel, with two different hinge styles – one has to be wider to fold the third section over the other two. Samsung says the dual-rail structure titanium hinges work in harmony. One wonders if the unfolding of one necessitates the unfolding of the other, meaning you can’t just have a two-thirds screen – it’s likely either the small 6.5-inch cover or you access the full 10-inch tablet.
The Armor Aluminum frame is designed to keep a portion of the 10-inch display from touching another part of it, preventing wear, tear, and damage. There’s also a special “reinforced overcoat” to help protect the flexible screen.
Triple camera system for the tri-fold
On the outside is the cover screen, bookended by ceramic-backed, fiber-reinforced polymer panels. The left side houses the sizeable tri-camera bump featuring a 200MP wide-angle, 12MP ultra-wide (120-degree Fov), and a 10MP 3X optical zoom.
There’s also a 10MP selfie camera cutout on the cover screen and another 10MP selfie camera cutout on the 10-inch flexible display. This is essentially the same camera array as the Z Fold 7, though we do not know much about the image sensors behind the lenses.
Even more so than the 8-inch display you get when you unfold the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, this 10-inch tri-fold sounds like it was designed for work. Samsung is touting the built-in Dex support and multi-tasking. The system would support up to four workspaces with five apps each. Alternatively, the unfolded display could be used like three connected 6.5-inch smartphones, but ones where you could easily drag and drop between running apps.
Naturally, this will also be a pocket movie display 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-length movie or a long streaming event: it has a 5,600mAh battery spread across the three segments.
And gaming on the big screen is likely to be a thing. Under the hood, the Z Trifold will be running the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform for Galaxy, which means the 3nm chip is probably overclocked just a bit for this tri-folding device. Supporting that, SoC will be 16GB of RAM and, to start, 512GB of storage. A 1TB model will be available of the Z Trifold.
What we do not know is the price. Most rumors put it at $3,000 to $3,500, which seems like a safe bet when you consider the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 starts at $1,999.99 (though Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals have seen considerable discounts).
A Samsung surprise
It’s unusual for Samsung to reveal so much with so little fanfare. Perhaps it’s because the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold is still months away from a US release (possibly longer in the UK and AU), and Samsung wants to use its hometown as a sort of big test kitchen for the new device.
The announcement, though, does raise the question of how the Z Trifold launch will factor into what is expected to be the Galaxy S26 line launch. Most people expect that to happen in late January or early February 2026. Perhaps the big coming-out party for the Z Trifold will coincide with Samsung’s big anticipated S26 lineup reveal. The only strange part of that scenario is that the one triple-fold phone is separated from what should be the launch of its folding cousins, the Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, sometime in mid-2026.
All will be revealed soon enough. In the meantime, we can’t wait to learn when we can touch and try out the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and just how much it’s gonna cost us.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
