Is Europe not cool enough for Samsung's Galaxy Z TriFold?

Samsung's first tri-fold phone, the Galaxy Z TriFold, is as much for the tech enthusiasts as it is for the cool kids. Only that can explain the rather peculiar launch strategy that the company has adopted for the launch of this unique device.

The Galaxy Z TriFold was first released in South Korea on December 12 and that was to be expected. It's Samsung's home country so you wouldn't put it past the company to prioritize its home base. South Korea is also where the Galaxy Z TriFold has been priced the lowest out of all markets where it's being sold.

Other markets where Samsung is making this device available include the United States, China, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Taiwan. As many of us were surprised to see when Samsung confirmed the availability information, there's not a single European market on the calendar.

The entire continent has been treated as equal. If there's no love for the glitzy Paris, there's none either for the majestic London or the imperial Rome. You'd find as many cool kids as tech enthusiasts in any of those hotspots, but what you won't find is a Galaxy Z TriFold.

One can imagine why Samsung needed China on the list. Huawei already has multiple iterations of a tri-fold phone out in the market there. Samsung needed to show the public that it can compete with the best of their local giants even if its smartphone market remains below 1% in the country.

There's no question why the United States won't be on the list. It's where all the leading tech media is based, where some of the world's best tech is released first, and it's also an opportunity to show up Apple in its own backyard.

Singapore and Taiwan launches are catered more toward the tech-forward crowd while the United Arab Emirates launch will attract influencers and hype beasts.

Samsung hasn't ruled out a wider launch for the Galaxy Z TriFold but it doesn't seem the company wants this device to be a mass-market product, at least at this stage. It has only been making a couple of thousand units available in each launch country.

The entire stock sells out in a couple of minutes and then customers are left waiting for the next drop that doesn't come for a few weeks at the very least. This strategy is helping Samsung milk the news cycle for everything it's worth but it also shows that there's no real attempt to capture the tri-fold market share.

There could be any number of reasons why Samsung thought it wasn't worth giving Europeans even the slightest taste of the future of foldable technology. Perhaps the company felt that the prices it would need to charge will deter customers, but given how people have been snapping up whatever inventory is being made available in launch markets, Samsung could have ended up being pleasantly surprised in Europe.

Europe does have a reputation for being more stringent with regulations. Perhaps the Galaxy Z TriFold wouldn't clear repairability or sustainability standards, and Samsung might not have wanted to waste time going through that whole problem when it never intended to sell a lot of units in the first place. It wouldn't have made much sense to begin with.

It's also possible that Samsung felt it would generate the most media buzz in the launch markets chosen, and that any potential benefit gained from diverting some of the limited supply to European markets would easily be outweighed by making more units available in the markets where it felt the device would gain the most traction.

European markets will ultimately be on the schedule once Samsung follows through with a true at-scale launch of the Galaxy Z TriFold. Until then, whether you're in Lausanne, Lyon or Lisbon, this phone will be closer to legend than launch for you.