• by P.J. Bednarski  @pjbtweet, November 12, 2018

It’s the Goldilocks principle, tech version. Is the screen on the smartphone a little too small? Or the tablet too big? For years, smartphone manufacturers have offered various sizes to help consumers find the size that’s “just right.”

Next year, Samsung will introduce the folding smartphone that offers both small and larger screens in one device.

But if a report from South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency is on the mark, the price may not be “just right.” The report says the cost of the first model will be about 2 million won, or $1,770 in U.S. dollars.

That’s more folding cash than for any of Apple’s newest iPhones, the most expensive on the market now.

The Samsung phone folds inward, with a screen measuring 7.4 inches when completely open, and with a 4.6-inch screen when folded to the size of a conventional  smartphone.

Either as a marketing determination or to keep expectations low, Samsung has publicly  positioned the phone as a niche buy. Yonhap says Samsung expects to sell a million of them in the first year, a small drop in the bucket for Samsung, which sold 75 million phones in 2017.

The news account says Samsung plans a March introduction of the Infinity Flex Display, which was more a definite timetable than Samsung committed to at its dog-and-pony show for the press in San Francisco last week. But Yonhap said Samsung was likely to hype the phone more at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona from Feb. 25-28 and then present it to the public after that.

Samsung is likely to have a major marketing year in 2019, when it will probably spend most of its advertising bullets on its upcoming Galaxy S10, since it intends to use that new model as the centerpiece to mark its 10th anniversary in the mobile phone business.

That newly designed S10  reportedly will have a state of the art fingerprint scanner, front-facing cameras and three cameras in the back, gradient color schemes and possibly a 5G option.

In San Francisco,  the promotional video for the Infinity Flex Display, meanwhile, didn’t give a clear view of it.  

Nor did Samsung  illuminate the subject much -- literally --when one of its executives showed it off in real life on stage, The auditorium lights were so dimmed it was almost impossible to see.  Apparently that’s because Samsung is still working on a slicker design.