Here it is at last: Samsung’s Galaxy Z Trifold, a ten–inch tablet that folds down into something roughly phone–sized, is officially hitting US shelves for just shy of three grand. Three thousand dollars used to get you a decent used car or an absurdly specced gaming PC; now, Samsung is betting it also gets you a pocketable slab of OLED origami with ideas about replacing your phone, your tablet, and maybe even your laptop.

The basics: Samsung is launching the Galaxy Z Trifold in the US at a starting price of $2,899 for the 512GB model, with sales beginning today, January 30th, at Samsung.com and select retail stores. There’s a 1TB configuration if you want to lean harder into the “tiny workstation” fantasy, but whichever storage tier you pick, the number on your receipt will start with a two and an eight and a nine and it will hurt a little. This is Samsung’s third act for foldables: after the original book–style Fold and the clamshell Flip, the Trifold adds a second hinge and a third segment of display, opening up into a 10–inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel that feels much more like a real tablet than the 7– to 8–inch canvases we’ve seen so far.

When it’s folded up, the Trifold behaves like a slightly chunky but otherwise normal phone, with a 6.5–inch outer display running at up to 120Hz. Flip open the first hinge and you get a tall, book–style screen; open the second and the whole thing unfurls into that wide 4:3 10–inch canvas that makes your social feeds, email, or a Google Docs draft feel more laptop–adjective. It’s the first time a mainstream brand has tried to make “three phones in one” work at scale in the US, and the device is constantly nudging you toward tablet mode — every notification, every app suddenly looks a little cramped when you know they can breathe on a 10–inch panel, a fold or two away.

Samsung has clearly thrown serious hardware at this thing to justify the sticker shock. Inside, there’s Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, the company’s current flagship mobile chipset, paired with 16GB of RAM and fast UFS storage. The battery lands at around 5,600mAh, split across the three segments, with 45W wired charging, 15W wireless charging, and reverse wireless if you feel like flexing on friends whose earbuds are dying. The main camera system looks like it’s been lifted straight from a top–tier Galaxy S phone: a 200–megapixel primary camera, a 10–megapixel 3x telephoto, and a 12–megapixel ultrawide, backed up by dual selfie shooters for the cover and inner displays. None of that is groundbreaking on its own, but stacked together on a device that can also masquerade as a tablet, it’s a clear signal that this isn’t some compromised early–adopter prototype — at least on paper.

What you’re really paying for, though, is the hinge engineering and that peculiar feeling of unfolding more screen than your brain expects to fit in a pocket. The Trifold’s chassis uses a mix of glass, fiber–reinforced polymer, and an upgraded “Armor Aluminum” frame, along with an IP48 rating — not quite as robust as a traditional flagship slab, but a step above the “just don’t get it wet” days of early folding phones. At around 309 grams, it’s noticeably heavier than a regular phone, edging into small–tablet territory, but the weight is distributed across the three segments so it doesn’t feel like a brick when you’re holding it in one hand. The hinges are designed for multi–angle use — think desk mode, tent mode, all the usual yoga poses — and Samsung is once again leaning on Flex Mode tricks to turn awkward half–folded positions into something actually useful for watching video, joining a call, or running two apps side by side.

On the software side, this thing lives or dies by how gracefully it handles all that screen real estate. Samsung’s One UI on Android 16 is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, with multi–window layouts, app pairs, and persistent taskbars that can survive the journey from candy bar to tablet and back again. The pitch is simple: start editing a document on the cover screen while you’re in line for coffee, then unfold once or twice and instantly have space for the document, a reference browser tab, and a messaging app without everything turning into cramped, overlapping chaos. The broader Android tablet app ecosystem is still hit or miss, but Samsung’s own apps, Google’s core suite, and most big social platforms increasingly know how to behave on weird aspect ratios and resizable windows, which makes the Trifold feel less like an experiment and more like something that might actually fit into your daily workflow.

Of course, the Trifold doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Huawei has been selling its own tri–fold device, the Mate XT, with a 10.2–inch OLED panel and a slightly different folding approach, but it’s not officially sold in the US, and getting one imported typically costs even more after shipping, taxes, and the usual gray–market headaches. That makes Samsung’s $2,899 pricing look slightly less wild: this is effectively the first trifold you can walk into a store and buy stateside, with full carrier support and a warranty that doesn’t involve mailing your phone to another continent. Still, this is very much a niche product — one aimed at early adopters, power users, and people who look at a regular foldable and think “not enough screen.”

The more interesting question is who actually needs this form factor. For some people, a big slab phone plus a lightweight tablet or laptop will still be simpler and cheaper than one device that tries to do it all. But if you live inside productivity apps, jump constantly between chat, docs, and email, or you’re the sort of person who edits a photo, drafts a caption, and responds to comments all on your phone, the Trifold’s extra real estate could feel less like a luxury and more like a genuine productivity boost. It’s also very obviously a flex — the kind of hardware that will turn heads the second you unfold it on a plane tray table or in a meeting room, for better or worse.

For now, the Galaxy Z Trifold is less about mainstream practicality and more about showing where phones might be heading if hinges and flexible OLED keep improving. You’re paying to live a couple of years in the future, with all the usual caveats: first–generation quirks in a new form factor, high stakes if you drop it, and the nagging awareness that the second–gen model is already somewhere inside Samsung’s labs getting a little lighter, thinner, and cheaper. If that trade–off sounds acceptable — if three grand for a phone–tablet chimera sounds more exciting than terrifying — then congratulations: your three–thousand–dollar Galaxy Z Trifold is finally here, and Samsung will be very happy to take your money on January 30th.