New tri-fold smartphone puts an 8-inch tablet in your pocket

TCL tri-fold phone on a desk.

Samsung has long been mocking Apple for not having a foldable phone, but China's TCL CSOT thinks two folds are better. At the Society for Information Display's Display Week 2024 in San Jose, California, the semiconductor display manufacturer has unveiled what it's hailing as the world's first 7.85-inch tri-foldable smartphone. 

That's quite a specific claim, but the reason is that TCL already revealed a prototype for a 10-inch model several years ago. That didn't see any uptake in the industry, but TCL sees the development of the smaller version as a major advance in foldable screen technology (I still think I'll still stick to the best iPad for drawing).

The prototype 7.85in TCL CSOT tri-fold phone (Image credit: TCL)

TCL is dubbing the latest iteration of its self-developed tri-foldable screen tech 'Free-type'. The screen can be fully flattened for use like a tablet or folded in “G-shaped” and “Z-shaped” configurations for a more versatile experience. The screen is less than 0.5mm thick and the overall thickness of the device 17mm. This improves on previous tri-foldable prototypes, which were a bit chunky. However, the new model appears to still sport some chunky bezels.

The display area has a uniform pixel density of 420ppi, avoiding any changes in quality over the scree, and it supports an LTPO-driven variable refresh rate from 1-120Hz depending on the content. TCL says the tri-foldable screen incorporates low-power technologies, including Tandem, LTPO, and PLP to enable high brightness with low power consumption and long battery life. There's under-screen face authentication technology for convenient security.

The TCL tri-fold phone opened as a tablet (Image credit: TCL)

Samsung, Google, OnePlus, and Motorola all have foldable phones that fold once, and there's clearly a market for them. The advantage is that the devices are compact but can be opened up to something closer to a tablet size for work, drawing or watching videos. TCL's tri-folding display tech provides a larger unfolded display than the 6.10-inch Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 while folding into a pocket-sized device. However, it remains to see if phone manufacturers will be interested in the possibility.

There's been a lot of tablet news in the past two weeks. Apple has released the new M4 iPad Pro with an OLED display, and this week Microsoft followed with the new Surface Pro 11, also available with an OLED display as well as a new keyboard accessory. See prices below.