Month: July 2020

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  The outside of the Galaxy Fold 2. That outer screen is a lot taller. [credit: MySmartPrice ]

Get a good look at the Galaxy Z Fold 2 before it gets announced next week. MySmartPrice has the official renders a few days before Samsung's event, showing off the inside and outside of Samsung's next foldable smartphone.

The pictures show about what we were expecting, which is a Fold with a dramatically taller outside screen, an inside screen with no giant notch, and hole-punch cameras on the inside and outside.

Assuming Samsung brings all the improvements it made with the Galaxy Z Flip to the Fold 2, we'll be looking at a solid second iteration of its foldable tablet. A flexible glass display would be a nice improvement over the squishy, dull plastic display of the original Fold, and it should also be a heck of a lot more durable. The interior camera notch on the original Galaxy Fold was massive and covered basically the entire top-right of the display, making it difficult to pull down the notification panel with your right hand. The minimal hole-punch camera looks like a big improvement.

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  Scenes from a visit to the offices of RSI parent company Cloud Imperium circa 2014. Like any good game development office, Star Wars swag was all over the place. [credit: Lee Hutchinson ]

It has now been almost eight years since Star Citizen launched its first Kickstarter. At this point, its backers, who have given over $306 million to the game's development, should be used to the seemingly endless series of delays for its final release (while clinging hopefully to a regularly updated but very incomplete alpha version). Backers also need to summon deep reserves of patience for Squadron 42, the single-player spinoff story that was first promised for a 2015 launch.

Now, though, Star Citizen is facing apparent delays in planned updates to the system it uses to publicly track development updates.

This latest saga started in March, when developer Roberts Space Industries admitted in a forum post that its current public roadmap for Squadron 42 development was "not reflecting [the] progress" that was being made on the game.