Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Foldable That Wasn’t: TCL’s Canceled “Chicago” Flip [Into The Fold Episode 9]”.
This past summer, samsung brought back the flip phone with a blend of retro, styling and modern performance that reminded us that phones can still be fun, but it was the galaxy flip 3’s starting price, a penny shy of a thousand bucks that seems to have promoted it In the minds of many consumers from costly curiosity to potentially pocketable in foldables, more so than most in mobile after all price matters. So what if another company came along with a similar foldable? Maybe not quite as good, but a couple hundred dollars cheaper and before you get excited. I have some bad news. This particular device will never get further than what if tcl’s first foldable will never go on sale and as such is still known only by the code name, its manufacturer gave it chicago i’ll, explain why and why it still matters in a second first.
Let me take you on a notional tour of what might have been at first fold. This feels, frankly like what you’d expect when you hear less expensive. Foldable obviously meant to be a competitor to the first galaxy z flip, not the current model.
The outer casing between the aluminum alloy rails is plastic instead of glass and that’s also true of the oled screen, which doesn’t get as bright as samsung’s latest. Speaking of the flip 3 chicago is about 10 percent heavier and slightly larger, along most axes with a more conventional 20×9 aspect ratio, and it’s built around a slightly lesser slab of snapdragon silicon. It’S actually the same 765g. That’S served me well on the razer, but chicago has none of the audacious design of the motorola phone feeling once again, much more like a revamped first generation, galaxy z, flip, which may have served as its inspiration, but we’re not dealing with a simple retread here, while Chicago apes features from that first flip, like the positionable hinge, it expands upon others like the cover display, which is larger and therefore more capable it bundles.
A bigger battery offers the option to hide the selfie camera and virtually eliminates the gap between clamshell halves. When closed. It’S also less likely that this plastic display will experience the kind of fatigue cracking we’ve seen in some of samsung’s phones that use ultra thin glass, tcl, wouldn’t pin down for me exactly what price point it was hoping to launch at, but it’s safe to assume that It would have landed somewhere between 700 and 900, with my personal speculation being 799.. Now i can’t say whether chicago would have been a success, because the unit tcl, let me borrow – puts the pre in pre-production.
The software is still buggy the hinge a bit creaky wireless charging can’t reach its full speed, and the camera has so little tuning that entire sections, like the camcorder mode, failed to operate. But if we assumed tcl would have gotten it right or even mostly right – and we assume my 799 dollar conjecture is equally on target and in my view this thing would have moved some units if it wouldn’t have been cheap enough to be a low end or Even mid-range foldable and at least the most affordable we’d yet seen a notice to samsung that motorola and xiaomi aren’t the only companies willing to challenge it and an affirmation that tcl takes its promises seriously, because we can’t forget, the company did pledge to ship its first Foldable before 2022, a promise it’s now backing out of in an interview with tcl execs, i asked wind pleaded for a reason why the company decided to cancel this phone and its response was twofold. First, tcl’s mobile division is a new brand and thus somewhat reliant on carrier support to help market, its phones and right now, carriers aren’t as interested in foldables as they are. The 5g phones they’ve spent billions of infrastructure dollars to support. Given the underwhelming hype to performance ratio 5g has demonstrated thus far that burns my grits a little, but it’s understandable second part of the answer is the better one. Tcl says that while it’s confident in the device it wanted to deliver a better experience than what chicago would have provided on several unspecified fronts, and it also wanted to bring the price down even further by tcl’s logic. If someone’s willing to spend eight or nine hundred dollars for a phone that same person can likely afford to spend a thousand dollars on a phone one from another brand people already know. Oh and the company didn’t say this, but i think we can assume that the ongoing component and supply chain problems affecting the whole world probably didn’t help matters.
But the company stressed repeatedly that it is not abandoning foldables and it reminded me that it spent 30 billion dollars on display technology over the last 10 years and that it wasn’t just teasing us with all those trade show concepts over the past three years. Personally, i say the sooner the better and not just because i’m a foldable stan. I mean if you’ve been in any comment sections of the past few weeks. You know samsung’s galaxy z, flip 3 seems to have single-handedly reignited interest in folding phones, and i i can’t help but think tcl is missing a big opportunity to capitalize on that resurgence. Now, toward the end of my interview, i asked if maybe tcl was too conservative, too risk-averse to be playing in foldables, and i was politely reminded of a few things. Tcl is the company that resurrected the blackberry back in 2017, creating the keyone and key2 that i loved so much.
I carried them as daily drivers, it’s the company that reanimated palm or well the brand name anyway. It’S not afraid to try crazy things and more to the point. If these folks wanted to keep mining the past, they wouldn’t have started their own mobile brand and if they wanted to abandon foldables, they never would have sent me and a handful of other outlets. This sample my favorite quote from my interview. We are going to do this for real and, if doing this, for real means making a better version of this for less money. Well, i think we’re all eager to see whatever that device ends up being.
This video was produced following one week with a chicago pre-production sample provided by tcl mobile and an over the phone interview with company executives. Like many manufacturers tcl requested, i not published this video until after an embargo time lifted, but no company had any editorial input. Early preview or copy approval rights concerning this content, nor did anyone provide compensation in exchange for its production. Please subscribe if you’d like to see more from me michael fisher aka, mr mobile, until next time, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends .