Episode 120 - We unfold Samsung Unpacked 2025 with the Z Flip and Fold 7

On a shelf in my office is a line of phones… No they’re not spares, or “extras”, heck the vast majority of them probably don’t even turn on any more. Instead they represent signpost moments in my own technology journey. Far in the back is the same candy-bar shaped Nokia “brick” that pretty much every phone-using person had at one point in the early 2000’s… it was my first cell phone. A little further over is a lightly cracked but still intact Google Nexus One… not the first Android phone, but it was my first Android phone… You get it, and trust me the list goes on… these devices aren’t valuable or even particularly special… but each one anchors to a point in time of my journey to this very moment in the tech world, and hopefully the collection will keep growing. 

So what then, does that have to do with Samsung’s Summer 2025 “Unpacked” foldable event? See, one thing I find interesting about my own shelves of IT History is that no where on them… from a TRS-80 to the original Chromebook Pixel… is a true foldable (No, I don’t count you, Surface Duo. ). 

I’ve owned quite a few, going back years at this point. We’ve talked about most of them on this very show! So why then, has each one disappeared into obscurity as the next is announced unlike the dozens of personal artifacts on those shelves? 

To be quite honest… a lot of it has to do with these things are freakin expensive, trade-ins have been a big part of getting “the next one”… and that… hasn’t changed this time around. 

So this week we’ve got phones, watches, software, the full gamut to talk about… and we will. But somehow, as I anticipate receiving this years entries and seeing where they fit in my own day-to-day technology life… I can’t help but wonder… will any of them end up on the shelf? 

Guess we’ll have to wait and see…