If the rumours are right, we are only about a month away from the announcement of Samsung’s flagship phones for this year, the Galaxy S26 series. But the tech giant has had its hands full recently, lifting the lid on the Galaxy Z TriFold, a folding phone with not one but two hinges on a bendable display that opens up to a 10-inch tablet.

My colleague Dave Snelling has had some hands-on time with the futuristic phone, but we’re still not sure if it will ever be sold on UK shores. If it ever is, it will likely cost significantly more than £2,000 given that the Galaxy Z Fold 7 retails at £1,799.

A major clue that this would indeed be the case is the US pricing for the Galaxy Z TriFold, which has just been announced. The cutting edge folding phone will go on sale in the US on January 30, with a retail price of $2,899, making it one of the most expensive mobile devices currently on the market.

That’s the exact same price as the latest MacBook Pro with M4 Pro chipset with 14-core CPU, 48GB RAM and enough oomph to edit entire movies or music tracks on.

Directly converted, $2,899 £2,100, which makes it look (only slightly) less astronomical, if only because there are phones for sale in the UK that nearly hit that price. For example, the priciest iPhone 17 Pro Max costs £1,999, but that does get you 2TB of internal storage.

The TriFold has 512GB storage, but remember, you’re getting a huge 10-inch internal folding screen, which Samsung says is rated to last 200,000 folds, the equivalent to folding it 100 times a day for five years. Samsung promises seven years of software updates, so hopefully the mechanism won’t fail if you bought it as a long-term mobile investment.

There’s a regular sized 6.5-inch display on the outside to use when it’s all folded up. There are also triple cameras similar to those you’ll find on the Z Fold 7.

But are we really ready to spend £2,100 on a smartphone? If the TriFold does come to the UK, I would not be surprised if it were more than £2,500, given that the Z Fold 7 costs $1,999 in the US and £1,799 here, so the TriFold’s price would not be a straight conversion.

£2,500 is more than you could probably get a perfectly acceptable used car for, and is more than the cost of three Samsung Galaxy S25 phones (£2,397). Then again, millions of Brits are probably on their phones more per day than they are driving their car, so there could be an argument that your phone should be the priciest purchase you make in any given year.

But the huge cost of foldables is still a big barrier to increasing sales, not to mention the inherent fragility of folding phone designs. We’ll have to wait and see if the Galaxy Z TriFold comes to the UK – and this year is said to also be the year Apple will release its first folding iPhone. If that happens, expect to see a lot more foldables in the streets, regardless of price.