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TCL: We'll Unveil Our Folding Phones Next Year
By Sascha Segan
Sept. 19, 2019, 9:30 p.m.
TV maker TCL has been working on folding phones for a while and will show them off early next year, but 90Hz displays aren't in the works.
Best known as a TV brand, TCL is a multi-headed smartphone hydra. The big Chinese company is responsible for making Alcatel, BlackBerry, and Palm phones, as well as some carrier-label devices, and it recently released its first TCL-branded phone, the Plex, for Europe.
"The big shift is TCL phones ... we built such a strong segment for Alcatel in the entry-level space that we could never go to the mid-tier flagship level with an Alcatel device," Jason Gerdon, TCL's head of global communications and strategy, told us. "Now this allows us to have an entire ecosystem of products across all of TCL."
That will include foldable phones. TCL has been showing foldable phone prototypes for several months now, and Gerdon said the company has "a number of different displays" and two different hinge designs in-house. Like Samsung, but unlike Huawei, TCL makes its own screens, he noted.
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"The No. 1 challenge is the flexible display, but because we're one of the world's leading display makers—I don't want to say it was an easy hurdle for us to overcome, but it was a much more attainable hurdle," he said.
Now TCL has to put its foldable screens together with its hinges and add software. Google now has official APIs for foldable phones in Android 10, and Gerdon said "we're working with the partners we need to work with" to get software that's going to be relatively easy to use and not break the bank.
Getting Out Front With Foldables in 2020
"Next year will be when we bring a foldable to market," Gerdon said decisively, and the device will be "accessible"—meaning it won't cost $1,500 and up like Samsung's and Huawei's foldable phones. TCL will be at CES in January and Mobile World Congress in February, and "we're going to be much more out front with the foldables" then, Gerdon said.
That backs up what Gerdon told us in February 2019, when we first saw TCL's folding prototypes.
Foldables are a focus for TCL, but 90Hz screens are not. OnePlus has started to use high-refresh-rate screens supplied by Samsung, and Google is rumored to be doing so in its next Pixel phones. But Gerdon said 90Hz displays were more of an enthusiast feature that didn't yet have a wide appeal.
"90Hz doesn't make as big of an impact for consumers in that mass market," Gerdon said.
The company today also announced its latest flip phone, running an innovative OS called KaiOS, which sits between feature phones and smartphones.
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Sascha Segan Lead Analyst, Mobile
PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed to the Frommer's series of travel guides and Web sites for more than a decade. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite ... See Full Bio
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