Samsung debuts revolutionary new concept: Phones you can fold up and put in your pocket

Those magnificent geniuses have done it at last, friends: Mankind’s dream of a phone you can fold up and put in your pocket is finally within our grubby-fingered reach.

This is per The Verge, which reports that Samsung—operating under conditions of borderline ridiculous secrecy—showed off its first foldable tablet device today, demonstrating a 7.3-inch phone that was then folded into a functional phone of, presumably, half that size. (You can see video of it in the CNET tweet below, and despite our general sarcasm about this particular branch of technical innovation, it’s actually pretty cool to watch.)

Dubbed the Infinity Flex Display, Samsung’s new device is a pretty clear effort to combat and combine two basic tenets of human nature: We love big, shiny things, but we hate carrying them around in our beefy, clumsy hands. After all: Tablets are great and all, but you can’t shove one in your pocket unless you’re willing to out yourself as a member of the cargo shorts generation, and that’s just too high a price for many of us to pay. Thank god, then, that science is here to ease that burden.

Samsung expects to debut the devices on the market some time next year; meanwhile, several other phone manufacturers are also looking to make the move into this wacky world called “folding” in the coming months.