The rumors were all true: The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold, possibly the most anticipated and talked about smartphone (apart from the Apple iFold), is real and shipping this month, but the devil is in the details.
Samsung announced on Monday night (Dec 1, 2025) that it’s launching its first triple Galaxy phone this month in South Korea (Dec 12), and then it’s coming 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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Overall 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 titanium hinges work in harmony. One wonders if unfolding one necessitates unfolding the other, meaning you can’t just have a two-thirds screen – it’s probably either the tiny 6.5-inch cover, or you get access to the full 10-inch tablet.
The Armor Aluminum frame is designed to prevent one part of the 10-inch screen 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 tri-fold
On the outside you can see the tire screen, which is provided with ceramic backing, fiber-reinforced polymer panels. The left side houses the big triple-camera bump with a 200MP wide-angle, 12MP ultra-wide (120-degree Fov) and a 10MP 3X optical zoom.
There is also a 10MP selfie camera cutout on the cover screen and another 10MP selfie camera cutout on the 10-inch flexible display. This is largely the same camera array as the Z Fold 7, although we don’t know much about the image sensors behind the lenses.
Even more than the 8-inch display you get when you unfold the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, this 10-inch tri-fold display sounds like it was designed for work. Samsung touts the built-in Dex support and multi-tasking. The system would support up to four workspaces with five apps each. Alternatively, the unfolded screen could be used as three connected 6.5-inch smartphones, but ones where you could easily drag and drop between running apps.
This will of course also be a pocket movie viewer for apps like Netflix and YouTube. The only thing that might be missing is a stand.
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The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold can 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 become a thing. Under the hood, the Z Trifold will run the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform for the Galaxy, which means the 3nm chip is likely to be slightly overclocked for this tri-folding device. Supporting it, the SoC will be 16GB of RAM and initially 512GB of storage. A 1TB model will be available from Z Trifold.
What we don’t know is the price. Most rumors peg it at $3,000 to $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 seen significant 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 kind of big test kitchen for the new device.
However, the announcement raises the question of how the Z Trifold launch will factor into what is expected to be the Galaxy S26 line’s launch. Most expect it to happen in late January or early February 2026. Perhaps the big upcoming party for the Z Trifold will coincide with Samsung’s big expected S26 lineup reveal. The only strange part of that scenario is that the triple phone is separate 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 the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and how much it’s going to cost us.
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