Two seals covered the box seam. One printed in Chinese. A white English-language label on top reading: “DO NOT ACCEPT IF SEAL IS BROKEN.” Beneath it, the cardboard was bubbling.
That was the welcome waiting at the end of a weeks-long attempt to buy Samsung‘s Galaxy Z TriFold — a phone that, according to the report, has technically been on sale in the US since January 30th at a retail price of $2,899. Technically.
The phone sold out within minutes of its first US availability. It went back in stock briefly in February and sold out again before a corporate credit card could be fully entered. Calls to retail stores turned up nothing. Samsung PR declined to provide a review unit. Weeks passed.
In desperation, the purchase moved to eBay, where a seller named Moderntek — carrying positive ratings and apparently a supply of TriFolds — was listing the phone for $4,399 each. The report notes explicitly: this is not a recommendation to buy from that seller, or anywhere.
What arrived in that FedEx bubble mailer
The phone was promised for early March. Early March arrived and it hadn’t shipped. The seller cited logistics issues and overlooked orders. Then, suddenly, it was in transit — from Scottsdale, Arizona, not Hong Kong, where the original tracking number had pointed.
Inside the retail box, the protective film on the inner screen peeled away to reveal bits of hair and crumbs along the adhesive. Then came the larger problem: the phone was already set up. An unrecognized app triggered an immediate pop-up requesting an extensive list of permissions. The reviewer denied access and performed a factory reset.
The phone reset. Then it demanded a SIM card to continue setup — an obstacle the report says is unusual for Android devices, which can typically be configured without one. With no physical SIM available, setup remains stalled. The phone sits there, asking for a “USIM,” going nowhere.
Scarcity by design
The report raises a pointed question about how many units Samsung is actually releasing at a time, suggesting the rapid sellouts point to very limited batch sizes rather than overwhelming demand. The TriFold also shows as out of stock on Samsung‘s Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese websites, meaning the supply constraint isn’t unique to the US market.
The gray market exists precisely because that gap between official availability and real-world access creates an opening. Sellers without ratings offered the phone at prices barely above retail. Moderntek, with its positive history, looked safer. The result was a $4,399 device that arrived pre-configured, carrying an unidentified app with aggressive permission requests, packaged under a tamper seal that had clearly already been tampered with.
Whether the phone contains malware, the report says, remains an open question. What isn’t open is the math: $1,500 over retail, paid to a third-party eBay seller, for a phone that may have passed through unknown hands, running unknown software, and that currently cannot be set up at all.
Photo by Pixabay
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
