Samsung’s Top Secret Project

We first heard about Samsung’s incredibly elusive and top-secret device, code-named “Project Valley,” back in March. But now Samsung's foldable smartphone was leaked, with photos to prove it.

The rumor mill has been working hard to crack this case for over six months. We first heard about Samsung’s incredibly elusive and top-secret device, code-named “Project Valley,” back in March, when Business Korea reported what a Samsung official was hinting: “The industry believes that the commercialization of foldable smartphones will be possible in 2016.” But recently, Samsung’s foldable smartphone was leaked on a Chinese microblog site called Weibo.

Until the Weibo leak, though, despite several reliable sources reporting on it, no one had any photo evidence, or even leaked specs.

But according to the Weibo user that uploaded the photos, the dual screen, foldable device will have a Snapdragon 620 or Snapdragon 820 chip, 3GB of RAM, an SD card slot (which I really hope is true, the fact they got rid of this on the recent Galaxy series has been awful), a non-removable battery (again, what’s up with this? stop that).

The Weibo leaked also seemed to believe it would get announced this January, although that doesn’t mean it will go on sale then.

A foldable screen from Samsung isn’t such a crazy idea. The past two years the tech world has gone mad for phablets, and a device with a foldable screen means that it would obviously be a large device (phablet) with a maximum amount of display space, that could still be folded and put into your pocket. Even better, while folded, you would still be able to use the secondary screen to make calls, play games, etc.

Foldable screens have been talked about for ages. The real question is whether they have the technology to actually do this successfully: the screen would have to be incredibly smart and reliable. This phone couldn’t rely on specs alone (like Samsung Galaxy series is so famous for).

I think there is a strong case to argue that Samsung is already there - if the photo is proof enough, Samsung has been playing curved screens for a while now. It’s not a far leap.