After Samsung delayed the launch of the Galaxy Fold, there are a few hanging questions. What caused the screens the break, and what will Samsung do to change the Fold’s design? But for those who preordered the device and are not put off by all the drama about the screens breaking, the biggest question of all might actually be this: when it will finally ship?
AT&T has been emailing customers one potential answer — June 13th. That’s according to a bunch of screenshots we’ve been seeing on Twitter and Reddit. The screenshots themselves are certainly legit, but that doesn’t mean that the date is. Samsung tells us that it has not announced any updates on the timing. We’ve reached out to AT&T and were told the company did not have any comment.
It’s possible — and to our thinking, likely — that the June 13th date is just a placeholder. Maybe AT&T’s systems required some kind of specific date to keep the preorders alive and the computer wouldn’t accept an entry of “whenever Samsung finishes its diagnostics” in that particular data entry field.
If the June 13th date turns out to have just been a guess, it’s a pretty bad look for AT&T to have just sent a bunch of customers that email without more context. The need for the email could be related to this copy about “federal regulations require us to gain your acceptance of the new shipping date(s),” but that just makes it doubly important that AT&T provide more information about what’s going on. Hard as it may be to believe, some customers might not be fully caught up on what has been going on with the Galaxy Fold and its screen.
It’s all very unclear, but that lack of clarity is not entirely surprising. Delaying the release of a phone so close to its original shipping date is bound to cause some confusion.
Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that Samsung is collecting all the review units it has distributed so far. Likely Samsung wants to forestall any further reports of broken screens. At least one new report of a bulge rising up between the hinge and the flexible screen popped up just today from Michael Fisher. That makes for a total of three review units that have had bulges appear in between the screen and the hinge.
Sigh. A little grain of something found its way beneath my Galaxy Fold display. Like the saying goes: "not surprised; just disappointed." Sending this back to Samsung hoping they figure out a way to seal up that hinge.
Silver lining: video tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/9UfYDMOEul
— Michael Fisher (@theMrMobile) April 23, 2019
Collecting all the phones that are out there is a smart move on Samsung’s part, but as it finishes retrieving them, it will mean that we are even more beholden to the company for explanations of what happened to these review units. In the meantime, the most cogent guesses we’ve had so far come from iFixit, which pointed out several possible failure points. None of them are definitive, however.
We’ll update this post with more information from AT&T or Samsung if we get it. In the meanwhile, my suggestion to people who preordered the device and are getting these emails is to treat that June 13th ship date like AT&T’s infamous 5G E icon: aspirational, but probably not accurate.
No comments:
Post a Comment