Samsung’s weird foldables are my favorite thing from MWC 2025

However, among all the news coming out of MWC, one company caught my attention the most: Samsung.

Samsung used this year’s MWC to showcase a handful of wacky folding phone concepts. They likely aren’t devices you’ll be able to buy anytime soon, but they paint a picture of what Samsung thinks the foldable future may look like. And after a series of tame smartphone releases from the company, it’s precisely what I needed to see.

The first two are the Flex S and Flex G, which you can see in the video above. Both are concepts for a tri-fold device, though each one has a slightly different take on the form factor.

The Flex S has one outward and one inward folding screen, similar to the HUAWEI Mate XT. When it’s all folded together, it looks like a (mostly) normal phone. But open the other screens up, and you get a giant tablet-like canvas. The Flex G has a different approach to a tri-fold in that its two other display areas both fold in on each other — making it look like you’re opening a book when unfolding it.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen these two concepts from Samsung, but they feel more important than ever, with continually mounting rumors that Samsung may release its first tri-fold foldable phone at some point this year. And given just how impressed we were with Huawei’s tri-fold, I can’t help but get excited to look at the Flex S and Flex G and imagine what either one may look like as a finished product.

In addition to the two Flex designs, Samsung debuted a new foldable concept called the “Asymmetric Flip.” It looks a lot like a Galaxy Z Flip, except that it has two hinges instead of one.

When open, the Asymmetric Flip looks like a traditional slab phone. But you can then shut both halves to turn the phone into a pocketable rectangle. What’s interesting is that this design leaves a small display section visible between the two folded portions, which can be used to show the time, weather, notifications, etc.

Is this design more practical than what we have today with the Galaxy Z Flip 6? Almost certainly not. But I honestly don’t care about that. I love seeing concepts like this because it shows that Samsung still has a drive to see how far it can push the foldable boundaries.

The industry quickly settled on two folding form factors, and that’s why foldable phones today are dominated by book-style and flip-phone foldables. But there’s so much untapped potential for what else folding phones could be, and the only way we change that is by starting with concepts like this. The Asymmetric Flip may never turn into a phone I can buy, but it may spark an idea for Samsung’s next big foldable. That’s why these things matter.

These foldable concepts are also exciting because they give me hope about Samsung, specifically.

The company’s last few major smartphone releases, while not objectively bad, have become increasingly safe. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, while both very good phones, barely pushed the needle forward compared to their predecessors. That tepidness is even more evident with the Galaxy S25 series, with those phones barely passing as proper successors.

Those back-to-back launches of minor changes and limited new ideas have made it difficult to get truly excited about what Samsung is doing, but these concepts prove that innovation isn’t dead at the company. Even in such an early form, devices like the Flex S, Flex G, and Asymmetric Flip don’t come out of a brand that’s given up on new ideas.

I’d love to see some of that innovation make its way into a shipping product soon, and maybe we will with the rumored tri-fold. But whether that launches this year or next, or Samsung has another weird foldable concept up its sleeves for next year’s MWC, I’m all for whatever strange and unusual smartphone ideas Samsung is working on. Trying new things is how Samsung got to where it is today, and I’m happy to see that the company hasn’t forgotten about that.