What Display Daily thinks: LG has beaten Samsung to the punch with a foldable laptop. It is pretty expensive as a productivity platform. It is pretty cool as a marketing promotion.
Foldables have consumer attention. They are different, and they seem practical because they extend displays beyond existing form factors, or look like they add some hitherto unknown functionality. In reality, we know absolutely nothing about their real value in terms of how they can add to our workflow or user experience, two essentials of IT products.
If you take LG at its word, its LG Gram Fold screen has been tested to the tune of roughly 27 folds a day over a three year lifespan. I am not sure how often you open and close your laptop over the course of a day, it may be more than on any given day with meetings and movement. The reality is that the LG Gram Fold costs nearly $3,000 and that’s a price that only a first adopter may love. What are consumers going to expect out of their foldable laptops when they are so expensive? We have no meaningful metrics to judge the efficacy of foldable IT products. It is as simple as that.
More to the point, and this is key, LG beats Samsung to the punch. It’s a slow news day, foldables look cool, and LG gets a branding win by being associated with being first past the post with a new technology. That’s golden. For LG, just this is productive enough.
LG Launches LG Gram Fold Laptop in South Korea
LG Display took to the airways to announce it was ready to go into mass production on 17-inch foldable laptop displays while LG Electronics was launching an 17-inch foldable laptop, the LG Gram Fold, in South Korea. The product is definitely innovative or, at least, a fresh form factor unlikely to have a match for now.
It has okay, not stellar, specs for the usual hardware – CPU, graphics, memory, storage etc. – but it is the display that carries the bulk of the expectations for the product. And, if the display lives up to the hype it is a pretty stunning foldable OLED touchscreen. But, it also suffers from the same inherent concerns as with all foldables: what is the impact of the crease or fold over time, how reliable is it going to be despite the 30,000 fold testing LG claims for it, and how good is the software for foldables right now? Are we realizing the full functional benefits of a foldable display on a laptop?
Unfortunately, time will tell. At just under $3,000, consumers are going to be paying a lot for a laptop but probably what it costs to have a foldable display on a laptop today. Again, it is not a stellar piece of computing hardware.
The other concern may be that LG’s marketing really does go town on the device doubling as a sort of tablet. That seems to be a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it: sell at a premium laptop price, but realize that it really comes into its own as a utility product if you treat it like a tablet. That’s incongruous messaging. It may be that no one has quite figured out what the killer app is for a foldable laptop. On phones it’s the compactness of the device when fold, and the fact that you don’t have to open it up and can see a lot on the back screen display. What is the main driver for wanting a foldable display on a laptop? No one treats a laptop well. They are workhorse products, at least at these prices.
But, LG has planted its flag in the foldable laptop territory before Samsung and BOE. It has come out with a statement of intent on manufacturing, and it has come out with a shipping product, at least in October. That may be enough value add for the LG Gram Fold, as a standard bearer for LG’s ambitions. At least as far as LG is concerned. Maybe not so much as far as its consumers are concerned.
| LG Gram Fold | Specification |
|---|---|
| Display | |
| Screen size (cm) | 43.1 |
| Resolution | QXGA+ (2560 x 1920) |
| Panel type | Foldable OLED with Touch |
| Processor | |
| CPU | 13th Generation Intel Core i5-1335U Processor |
| CPU clock | 1.3 GHz (based on P core) |
| Turbo Boost | 4.6 GHz (based on P core) |
| L3 cache memory | 12MB |
| Main Memory | |
| Memory capacity | 16GB |
| Memory type | LPDDR5 6000 MHz (onboard) |
| Multimedia | |
| Graphic | Intel Iris Xe Graphics |
| Graphic memory | Built-in |
| Audio & Sound | Dolby Atmos, Pivot Stereo speakers (1.5 W x 3) |
| Webcam | FHD IR webcam |
| Storage Device | |
| SSD | 512 GB (M.2, NVMe) |
| Input Device | |
| Keyboard | Bluetooth full-size keyboard 80 keys |
| Touchpad | Touchpad |
| Power | |
| AC(W) | 65 |
| Battery (Wh) | 72 (lithium-ion battery) |
| Size & Weight | |
| Size (WxH, mm) | Tablet mode: 378 x 280, Fold mode: 192 x 280 |
| Thickness (mm) | Tablet mode: 9.4, Fold mode: 23.6 (with keyboard), 19.2 (without keyboard) |
| Weight (g) | Approximately 1,250 (excluding keyboard), approximately 1,530 (including keyboard) |
| Network | |
| Wireless LAN | Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX211 (Wi-Fi 6E, 2×2, BT Combo) |
| Bluetooth | O (5.1) |
| Wired LAN | Gigabit (rangender sold separately) |
