When Samsung dropped the Galaxy Z TriFold, one guy didn't wait for a launch in his home country. Yasuhiro Yamane, a Hong Kong-based IT journalist who's spent two decades reviewing smartphones and somehow amassed 1,800 of them, got on a plane to Korea the moment the device hit shelves. His reason? He was convinced this tri-folding form factor represented something genuinely different in mobile computing.
When you've owned 1,800 mobile phones over two decades, you develop an eye for what actually matters. Yasuhiro Yamane, a Hong Kong-based IT journalist who's covered smartphones since 2003, doesn't do hype. So when he heard Samsung was releasing the Galaxy Z TriFold - a genuinely novel multi-folding form factor - he didn't wait for reviews or retail availability. He booked a flight to Korea.
It's a telling signal about how Samsung has positioned foldables. Yamane tells Samsung Newsroom that he believes their foldable lineup stands out not just for the display technology, but for something more fundamental: "a foldable-optimized user interface" with genuinely useful split-screen functionality and multitasking. Most hardware makers bolt software onto form factors. Samsung built the software around the fold.
What struck Yamane most upon unboxing? The immediate sense that this wasn't just an incremental hardware refresh. "From the moment I first held Galaxy Z TriFold, I was struck by the sense that it was an entirely new kind of device - one that breaks the boundary between a smartphone and a tablet," he explained. The 10-inch unfolded display is genuinely expansive - roughly equivalent to three phones stacked together - yet the device somehow managed to feel "solid yet slim, lightweight and comfortable to hold" when unfolded. That's no accident. The engineering here bridges form factors in a way that hasn't existed before.
But specs on paper don't tell the full story. What matters is what you actually do with 253 millimeters of unfolded screen real estate. Yamane's been living with it since purchase, and the productivity gains are real. He's running three apps simultaneously - email in one window, navigation in another, PDFs in a third - and the display still feels "spacious and comfortable." That's the aha moment. A 10-inch tablet-mode screen doesn't just let you do more; it lets you do it all at once without feeling like you're working in a phone-sized viewport.
