Gadgetory

you think back on all the phones you've had in your pocket the past ten years they've been some iteration of a rectangle ever since physical keyboards essentially went away on smartphones the design hasn't changed but starting now that rectangle is changing its morphing and it's folding and I don't think the smartphone landscape is ever gonna be the same I was trying to scribe to my wife who doesn't follow technology very closely what the Galaxy fold looks like and the best analogy I can come up with was it's like a book got a cover on the outside you open it up and there's your content and it's pretty much the same thing here you have to change a little bit the way you use a smartphone but the looks of it are much more impressive than I thought they were going to be this was announced you know now almost two months ago I admittedly didn't have the highest expectations for it it seemed a little bit gimmicky and it looked a little bit silly but I've actually got one in my hands the look is growing on me and it feels like a premium device did you expect for the 2,000 dollar price point I really like the way the fold looks so when the fold got announced I like you probably had a ton of questions one of the chief among them though was the hinge it looks big in video and pictures but how's it gonna perform so when you open the phone up actually really neat the hinge completely disappears you get kind of satisfying click and you don't get you know floppy hinge syndrome when the phone is open it's locked in that position it's not going to sort of accidentally fold safe so I did a really nice job engineering that hinge I also kinda had the reverse question too when it's closed it gonna sort of accidentally open up in my pocket or maybe open a little bit and turn the screen on and kill the battery I think it's close you get an equally satisfying what clicky noise to let you know this is closed and it's not going to open the fact you got to put some effort to actually open the phone up the other question I had was a 4.6 inch screen a couple years ago you know seemed like a normal-size screen but it's small by today's standards and you've got a very tall sort of amount of real estate here so the 4.6 and screens got gigantic bezels on the top and bottom you could look at anything we'd say okay I know what changes are gonna come for Gen 2 that would probably the first thing that I would call out but having said that it's still very usable and it's still a four point six inch screen even if the aspect ratio might be a little bit weird and you can use a closed like you would use any Samsung phone with one UI there's no sort of degraded experience it's not like a half phone with the spring clothes you can do anything you want and when you talk about the Galaxy fold the biggest question and maybe the elephant in the room was the inside screen itself is there going to be a crease and as a crease going to sort of impact what you're doing so the crease is here and it's definitely visible you can see it you can feel it even when you run your finger across it I don't mind it I'm trying to give you some perspective it's a foldable display there's got to be some sort of give here you can't have a glass screen that can bend it's sort of a plasticy polymer blend on top of it I don't mind it assuming it's not gonna get worse over time it's pretty good as is but it is definitely there but I don't think it's a grades at all from using the Galaxy fold so I think one of the biggest compliments that I can give the two screens on the fold is that they look like Samsung screens and I've said it for several generations of Samsung devices they make the best screens in the market and these two displays are no exception the outer screen it looks beautiful when you open it up you're still getting that OLED technology and it looks really good and so you might think 7.3 inches is gonna be a bit weird to hold because of the almost 4 by 3 aspect ratio it actually sits really nicely in one hand lens itself even better if when you want to use things with two hands so typing is really natural and because the screen is kind of split you're almost getting like two galaxy s 10 real estate one on each that you can work with so you got a ton of space here I tell all of that stuff is fine the screens like the hardware feels good software experience samsung has got a lot riding on this not being a degraded or weirdly strange software experience if you've used samsung 1u i recently this is actually going to feel very familiar so it's got something called app continuity and I thought that was only that Samsung did themselves but turns out they've worked very closely with Google it's actually baked into Android pious what you're doing on one screen will show up on the other screen when you open it up and most apps are supported and developers have access or to make all of their apps be supported so I've had no lag issues at all and I've had eight apps open at one time on this thing and everything works it is a multitasking powerhouse and in fact you could have one device that can do multiple things and one device that can take over multiple form factors really awesome so there's a lot of stuff you can do with it but the most interesting use case I think is with the cameras so this camera suite is pretty much taken exactly from the galaxy s 10 plus when you open this thing up and you use this giant 7.3 inch screen as a viewfinder it is incredible selfies looked terrifying I'm not used to seeing myself on that giant of a screen but you think it has a viewfinder being able to see that wide-angle lens is a really really unique experience so if you take a lot of pictures and you want a viewfinder you're not gonna look as ridiculous as holding a giant tablet up you know taking taking a photo this is a really cool way to do it so if you couldn't tell on a whole I really like the galaxy fold in fact I'm surprised by how much I like the galaxy fold but it's not perfect and it's certainly a Gen 1 device there's a huge notch in the upper right hand corner you can kind of hide it in software but it is there I don't mind that the fingerprint reader is built into the side what is weird though it's not built into the power button that's built into the big speed button so anytime you push that in you're going to bixby know you can remap it or maybe a double tap lip in Bixby but it is not the power but that's located right above fingerprint reader that seems a little bit strange to me there's a lot of open real estate obviously on the front screen I talked about that factoring in those few things least initially the aren't that many things that I don't like about the Galaxy fold Samsung did a really nice job here when the first note came out it's singing him ridiculous and out of every phone that I've ever tested in my time reviewing them I have never had more people stop me in public than when I was using the very first Galaxy Note it was so jarring and so different from what the mobile status quo was that peoples didn't know what to think of it it seems silly it seems ridiculous and you can't figure out why somebody would want that or want to spend the money for it but retrospectively you look back on five ten years from now I think we look back on the old is the same way as a note how could we imagine our lives without foldable screens how could we unfold into a tablet how could we change our screens to replace the laptops the fold is a really big paradigm shift for how we use phones I think more importantly what our phones are capable of doing and I give Samsung a ton of credit for that so in my 10 plus years of current technology I haven't seen that many firsts I've had a chance to be a part of a few momentous tech paradigm changes but I feel like the galaxy fold is one of those it's really the first foldable phone that's coming out to the mass market it's one of the first devices that's doing something new it's changing literally and think it's figuratively the shape of smartphones and I'm excited for it the galaxy fold Gen 1 might not be for everybody it's very expensive with its own quirks if you look at what it represents how it's going to change the industry in five six seven years I think we'll look back the folds launched as a something new