Samsung is panicking. The Galaxy Fold isn't going as expected. The world's first folding phone, designed to show off Samsung's technology leadership, literally fell apart in reviewers' hands—and Samsung got so paranoid about iFixit's teardown that the company demanded it be scrubbed from the Web.

The Galaxy Fold will probably recover. It was just released too early, in the latest of several odd, premature, panicky 2019 moves in the wireless industry. I've discussed this with wireless providers: it's about phrasing situations that aren't ready for broad consumer adoption, as "launches" for marketing purposes.

First AT&T claimed to launch a mobile 5G hotspot in 12 (now 19) cities, but by invitation only. Then Verizon launched 5G in two cities, but with extremely limited coverage. The date was clearly pushed up by a marketing need to come out before South Korean carriers did it.

Now we have the Galaxy Fold, which was born of a good idea but simply isn't ready yet. The device hit reviewers' hands too early in the quality assurance process, and Samsung has since asked for all the review units back. Samsung and carriers have preliminarily pushed back the Galaxy Fold launch to mid-June, but that might be an optimistic timeframe to fix all the troubled device's issues.

Nobody's really been hurt by this whole mess; nobody's money has been taken, and the only real damage has been to Samsung's reputation. I think three kinds of panic drove this premature launch.

Huawei Panic

It seems like everyone outside China is seized by Huawei Derangement Syndrome right now. I just watched an FCC commissioner rail against Huawei for 15 minutes straight (without using the company's name), basically describing it as indistinguishable from the Chinese government intelligence apparatus.

Huawei has been slowly growing at Samsung's expense everywhere except the U.S., where its phones are banned, and South Korea, Samsung's home market. And Huawei has its own, even more expensive folding phone coming out in June, the Mate X.

Samsung clearly thought it could regain some momentum with the world's first phone of its kind, especially in China, where techies are obsessed with the absolute latest features and designs. But it pushed too hard and too fast. Now it looks like Samsung will lose its timing advantage over Huawei amid the Galaxy Fold delays.

Flatline Panic

Beyond Huawei, high-end smartphone sales have flattened out. The Galaxy S10 has sold well, but isn't really moving the needle. Much of this comes down to the fact that we're now at saturation: everyone who can afford an expensive smartphone in the world now has one, so we've entered a market where it's just about forcing replacements and upgrades.

A radical new form factor, like the Fold, could start tipping high-end buyers who are waiting for something special into the upgrade cycle. Since the S10 didn't genuinely push sales up, there was potential for the Fold (and for future folding phones) to change the game. Samsung jumped the gun out of eagerness here.

ASPanic

Samsung has been suffering from lower average sales prices because of competition from mostly-Chinese lower-cost competitors. In this case, not Huawei, but companies like Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus.

Apple has been able to fight off ASP declines by slowly ratcheting up the price of its high-end iPhones, but also by killing off lower-cost products like the iPhone SE, shifting low-cost iPhone buyers to used devices. Samsung still insists on playing in all segments of the market.

So how do you raise ASP? One way is to sell a decent number of insanely expensive, $1,980 phones. Selling the Galaxy Fold as early as possible in the second quarter of the year—April, not June—would have let the company book as many high-ticket sales as possible, pumping up average selling prices for the quarter. Delaying the phone until mid-June means it may not have enough weeks of sale to materially affect ASP.

Just Breathe, Everyone

I think Samsung will sort the Fold's problems out, much as both AT&T and Verizon will in fact have decent 5G offerings later this year. All of the companies' issues right now are about the push-push-push of marketing departments to declare themselves as "FIRST!" at various things, ignoring what the actual consumer experience is, as long as they can get a superlative into a press release.

Sometimes it's better to get things right than to get them first. Hopefully Samsung will take that lesson from this little PR debacle to heart.