Gadgetory

you this has got to be the weirdest set of circumstances I've ever had to review a phone like little-known fact I've I've dropped and scratched an unreleased phone before I even got to shoot any footage of it I've had software updates dramatically changed the way I felt about a phone in the middle of shooting the review so weird stuff has happened behind the scenes but this is this is a lot so I want hands on with the phone for the first time then I dropped my video on the first impressions of it then I went home with one and then I broke it and then I got replaced and then I found out all the reviewers had theirs break for similar related reasons made a whole video about that and now this device is getting delayed and Samsung is actually going to change it before it actually comes out and ships to people who bought it so this is the Samsung Galaxy fold kinda it's it's the part one the pre review there's an official statement from Samsung saying they'll be strengthening the display and it'll be a little bit different when it actually comes out and gets released but until then this is more of a review of the rest of the execution on this whole foldable phone concept so right off the bat I love that this is it's just so different I mean we're so used to the slab the glass front and back that when you have a whole new form factor there's just so much more to talk about to think about so let's talk about it so one of the earliest thoughts that's floated around in my head about the Galaxy fold is it's more like a folding tablet than a folding phone so you have this little baby 4.7 inch display on the outside with I mean let's be honest comically big bezels and even that number it makes the screen seem bigger than it is with the rounded corners it even says on the box it's basically a 4.6 inch display and then even with that it's much narrower than normal so it feels like the same width as a three point six inch display all that to say it's small so what you want to do is open it up and use the 7.3 inch four by three OLED display that's on the inside that's where the magic happens that's the whole point of this foldable phone evolution is fitting a display this big in your pocket still so the galaxy fold this version of it is definitely chunky like this is a thick phone with maybe three or four C's it doesn't fold completely flat as you can see there's a gap in the middle of mine with a hinge all of them have this sort of a triangle shape and then yeah the more you look at it the more it sort of reminds me of two narrow phones connected to each other from a lot of angles like it has the weight of two phones it fits in your pocket like two phones it's really a lot of material so it turns out this is a fragile phone and you can tell it as soon as you pick it up like it's pretty fragile and that's because of really two main pieces the hinge and the soft plastic on the inside so of course glass doesn't fold make a folding phone you need something other than glass so you have plastic on this outside and then of course you need a hinge somewhere and this hinge from Samsung is this crazy complex mechanism with gears and this big cover over the back and it's a scary piece because there's speculation that dirt and dust can slide its way into this hinge through the gears and all the way up into the phone behind the display which may have caused a review unit to break which is pretty crazy but that will hopefully change with the updated version so I don't want to spend too much time on that but what I will say is even though it's rated for 200,000 folds by a robot in a lab I mean you can literally wobble this thing with your bare hands like there's give to this hinge I am literally terrified for the jerryrigeverything test when he finally gets his because I'd bet money it's just gonna snap in half like I'd bet real money on that but you got to have a hinge so there is one here and then the other delicate piece is a soft plastic screen and this is the part that Samsung had the most difficulty with with all the review units that is the part that they're definitely changing on the updated version of this phone but even if they do make it stronger it's still gonna be just one of the weak points of this first generation folding phone just because that's where material science and tech is right now so one of the biggest questions about the Galaxy fold unfolded is yeah how bad is that crease you know how bad is it can you see it pretty much everyone who's watched a video of the Galaxy fold has just stared at that crease so something I've noticed about that it seems like and you can look this up it feels like pretty much everyone complaining about the crease is people who don't have one that are watching a video of the crease and just noticing it and then people who do have one are mostly saying it's not a huge deal I fall somewhere in the middle because obviously like kind of like a notch if you stare at it of course it looks horrible and you're gonna notice that absolutely and this one has a notch too but this crease like if you're in a brightly lit environment or if you have a light wallpaper that's something you're gonna see that's why Samsung has a black wallpaper by default on this phone but for me when you're looking at the phone straight on and you're focused on the content you know whatever game or video you're in and what you're watching I don't see the crease at all so then I'm super immersed and it looks fantastic but then I'll look at it off access for like a second or I'll catch my finger running over it too many times like even when the phone's flat you can feel it and then you remember it's there and it's not so hot so the mild crease is just one of those things that you're gonna have to accept in a first-generation folding phone that's just part of the tech the Galaxy fold shares a lot of things with the Galaxy S 10 a lot of the good parts actually which make it feel a little less first-gen so it has the same high-end specs snapdragon a 55 12 gigs of ram and then materials of course so the glass and the metal everywhere and the speakers are actually a bit better than the s10 so you have the ones at the bottom and the ones at the top and it actually creates a sort of a stereo speaker separation so there you go a hidden advantage of having a gigantic device is the speakers are so far apart and can have so much room that they're actually better than normal closer to a tablet speaker that's cool and then of course you have mainly the same software as the s10 2 1 UI is still doing a good job as far as reach ability and organization responsiveness etc it's pretty good I have had a couple of random weird bugs with the fold though like Spotify lockscreen music controls haven't worked at all for me which is kind of weird because I use them all the time and I had this weird app drawer overlap bug that only a restart of the device fixed other than that though it's been pretty solid and then there are two main software features added to the fold multitasking which is a little adjusted and continuity multitasking for me wasn't a huge deal mainly because I've had multitasking on big phones before on this huge screen on the fold you can have three apps side-by-side in this triple window and then you can keep adding floating windows up to eight apps open at once and the 12 gigs of ram handles it fine but again like I'm a person who will probably just stick to two at once and I feel like it's great in this nearly square format because now it's feeling like two full size phones next to each other again but continuity though that is a core feature of a folding phone going from the small to the large and back to the small again and it's worked in the Galaxy fold better than I've seen in any other folding phone demo so I was impressed by continuity and it was fast so you have an app open on the small screen you want to get into it so you open up the fold it opens up and it picks up right where you left off so the apps that are supported best basically the ones from Google and Samsung right now will be the best at remembering everything about your small screen state and transferring it perfectly and then with some other apps there will be a kind of a reset timeline or scrolling which can be kind of annoying and then in the very few apps that don't support it at all going from the small screen to the big screen will give you a blown-up version of the phone screen and then you'll have to hit this button in the corner to restart the app to get the new aspect ratio from my experience it was a surprising amount of apps pretty much all the apps I use except for a youtube studio worked in some way with continuity which was cool so by default when you close the fold it just goes to sleep just because that's usually what you're doing when you close it you're going to sleep and you're done using it but there is a setting that will allow you to continue using apps from the big screen to the small screen so in the display settings it's called continued apps on front screen so you can turn that on too if you go in there and check like Google Maps or accurate weather for example then you have an app open on the big screen you close the fold and it'll wake up where you left off on the smaller screen this will also continue to get better with Android cue as Google and Samsung continue to work on it but it's already pretty impressive to me it's already miles better than the barely functional real flex pay I saw at CES okay so the rest of my thoughts on the Galaxy fold are I guess pretty random but let's talk about it so opening the fold in general is clumsy with these magnets and these buttons and how thick the phone is it's constantly a bit of a battle for me closing it is easy you just slap it shut and it's fine but opening it always like you have to pry it apart and I feel like I just never got used to that it's always a two-handed action the bezels on the front screen yeah they are super ugly but I'm also pretty sure Samsung knows this too like this is not what they would have wanted to make they would have rather made a bezel as if they could so that leads me to believe they were kind of forced to make it like this maybe the tech in the hinge in other parts rink the front screen down pretty bad there's an I fix that tear down but that's suddenly gone but that's what I believe the battery of the fold is fantastic it is split in half like I've said so there's a cell in each half of this phone that add up to four thousand three hundred eighty milliamp hours and I've had great battery life on the fold which is really impressive considering something with so much screen and then I got to say this phone might have been even more awesome with an S Pen right up the side obviously since it can't fold of course but I'm guessing there isn't enough space for that and it's not even a Galaxy Note fold but I'm just you know imagining how dope would it be to pop it open take notes on that huge screen and then just close it just a thought the Samsung default keyboard is actually split when you open the phone I actually prefer this Google keyboard and I've been using it and it's not split but I suspect that people with smaller hands will appreciate the default split keyboard design and the Galaxy fold is super awkward as a GPS in your car so you don't want to use it with the tiny four point whatever inch screen but when folded open it's way too wide for any of those clamping car mounts or even a cup holder or anything so yeah someone's gonna have to make a sort of specialized car mount for this thing that holds it unfolded so you can use the nav as a big screen the Bigsby button underneath the fingerprint reader is the worst I'm convinced Samsung was like oh we can just put the Bigsby button in there quietly and they won't even notice it because they'll be so focused on the fold yeah no I'm talking about it Samsung it's not it's not the move it's straight-up route just the form factor of the Galaxy fold unfolding it so many times you're gonna accidentally press that button constantly and you know we don't want to use big speed but hey they dropped it in there so at least you can turn it from being a single press to a double press to open Bixby so there are less accidental triggers of your favorite voice assistant and then actually agree with a lot of what dieter from the verge was saying in his review about the front screen of course it's super small and because it's so bad looking most people won't want to use it most of the time I'm doing something quick on it like taking a phone call or music controls or messing with podcasts or just something quick that you can use on the small screen and then put it back away but you know those times where you just take out your phone do one quick thing and then suddenly it's 15 minutes later and you're just mindlessly scrolling through Instagram yeah that doesn't really happen on this front screen so it doesn't really happen on this phone the screen is so small you don't really want to do anything on it so anytime you want to really get into something or get some work done you have this intentional opening the fold action and then you're using it then you're getting work done or whatever you were gonna do when you're done you close it up and you don't really ever have those like getting lost moments of wandering around on that small screen it's interesting so at the end of the day like I said in that broken video I was never really gonna recommend people go out and buy the two thousand dollar generation one galaxy fold why you may ask well for a two in one or a convertible whatever you want to call this to actually be worth it in any category it generally needs to either be better than or cheaper than having to get both things in that category so for all those crazy laptops that fold backwards and have a touchscreen in there these two and one convertibles those are trying to be both a laptop and a tablet and a lot of those are specialized at being a better laptop than most or being a better tablet than most or they're just straight-up cheaper than buying both a laptop and a tablet the galaxy fold is trying to be a phone and a tablet but it's not a better phone than most and it's not a better tablet than most and a two thousand bucks it sure as hell isn't cheaper than just buying a Galaxy S ten and a tablet so yeah I'm not gonna tell you to buy it but what I will tell you to do is when these actually do start showing up in stores go into a store and try it like pick it up hold it unfold it close it like get that feeling of actually having this huge screen that you can fit in your pocket as a concept folding your tablet and being able to put it in your pocket that's that's the main advantage that's what will make these better than most tablets and then the fact that it can be a phone on top of that too is a nice bonus so I like the concept but this is of course generation 1 of what I to now believe after using it that this will be the future of smartphones or the future of or both you know this clamshell design reminds me of this is this right here is everything the LG Voyager ever wanted to be like this this right here with the all touchscreen and if phones can get as good as they did in the last 12 years from the LG Voyager till now then I'm pretty excited for what smartphones are gonna turn into from this first gen folding phone over the next couple of years so I'm thankful for Samsung willing to jump in early and get it started to everyone hating on the Galaxy fold I get it it's so easy it's really easy to see a phone like this come along and it's 2,000 bucks and it's got this hinge down the middle and I know it's been tough to like find real big flaws with phones lately so when you see something like this oh you got a dive in this is your time to shine this is this is the one to hate on but for those of us that actually get excited about new technology this is one of the few truly new form factors and and new first gen concepts in a long time and for it to have this much promise this early is actually pretty exciting it's pretty cool there's gonna have to be a part two of this review with final hardware when that's eventually a thing but until then I'm gonna send this back to Samsung I'm gonna let them work on it I'm gonna cross my fingers until it gets good then until then thanks for watching catch you guys later peace