Gadgetory

- Here it is, we're finally allowed to touch it. It is the Samsung Galaxy Fold. It is a $1,980 folding phone and we've been waiting to touch it for a long time, and I came into this room thinking that this was basically just a concept device and not a thing that regular people should buy. But now that I'm starting to use it, I'm starting to change my mind. (upbeat music) So the basic idea of the Galaxy Fold is obviously you have a nice big beautiful screen on the inside. And if you don't want to have it open, you can use this slightly smaller screen on the front. And we don't usually get to talk about the physicality of phones anymore because they're all black slabs, but we really do here. So you can see, you open it up, it's got this flexible plastic screen and if you really look, you can see a crease, but when you're looking straight on, it's not too bad, you only see it at an angle. And you can always feel it when you run your finger over it, but really it's not too bad. And you can also use it sort of folded like this if you want which feels a little bit more comfortable to hold especially if you're on a subway or something. But it has a nice snap to it, it feels really solid, and it doesn't feel like you're gonna break it. Now Samsung chose to put the screen on the inside and that helps protect it. But it does mean that you have a little bit of a gap when it's folded, and so you can kind of see down the barrel there. So all that's great, but you can't get around the fact that this is, when it's folded up, a kind of a weird shape. It's a very tall phone, it's sort of like a, I don't know, it's like a baton. Here it is compared to my Galaxy S10, so you can see it is quite a bit taller and of course quite a bit thicker. Now because it's so tall and so thick, you can fit it in a pocket, but really only if you got really big pockets or maybe if you have like a suit coat pocket or a purse or something. The way the screen works is that it's basically plastic. Samsung did a bunch of interesting things to make this work. They have a new special adhesive that holds the screens together that's more flexible. And it could be more prone to scratches but because it's on the inside of the phone, hopefully that'll be a little bit less likely to happen. The other thing to note about the screen, is there is this pretty large notch over here. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is they got the cameras and then like the proximity sensors and everything else up there. Two is unlike on the S10, they couldn't fit those other sensors behind the screen, because this is a new kind of screen technology, which is one of the reasons you've got this big notch over here. To wrap up the stuff that's maybe less interesting than the screen, there are buttons, so, you have a fingerprint sensor here on the side, and this doubles as a Bixby button actually, not the power button, cause the power button's right there, and then of course you've got volume buttons. In terms of cameras, do you like cameras, because we've got one selfie camera in the front here, two more inside it, and then on the back, we have a regular camera, a wide angle, and a telephoto camera. A total of six cameras if you count the RGB dove camera inside of it. Now last, and I guess for some people, maybe least, there is the screen on the front of the phone. Now this looks really small on this big baton like phone, but it's actually a 4.6 inch screen which is only a little bit smaller than an iPhone 6, although it looks taller because that's measured diagonally. Anyway, it does everything that you would expect an Android phone to do. It's basically just like a regular ol' Android phone on the front, and then when you open it up, it's the full size one. What's interesting though is the home screen on this one is a separate layout and a separate home screen than on the home screen on the inside. So you get two different HAP layouts. So that's all great, but how does this thing actually work? Well, let's say you have an app that supports what Samsung calls app continuity. So I've got Google maps here up on the outside, and then when I open it (clicks tongue). It opens up, bang, right on the inside. If the app doesn't support app continuity, it may have some black bars here, but if you open it up natively inside of the phone, it won't have those black bars. So this is cool, you've got your nice full screen app, but if you want more than one app, what you do is you slide over from the right, sort of like the old iPad system, and then you can select a second app. So we've got Chrom open there, we'll open up Google maps, and that opens up into a split screen that you can then, if you want, resize like that. And then if you want a third app, you slide that thing over again, and open up the third app, and then it shows up down there, and so you can have up to three apps open at a time. You can even do some really wild stuff. Like if you tap those blue bars, you can put stuff into like a pop-over window, so now I've got a pop-over window there, and then I'll open up, I don't know, the calculator, the third app, and now I've got four windows. And you can really go nuts with this thing if you want to. But that's maybe a little bit much. So when you watch a video, normally on YouTube here, you can see there's a notch up there, but then if you wanna go full screen, and watch it, you do notice that that notch is right there in the YouTube video, and there's no way to like pinch in and out of it. So that's a little bit annoying, but it's not the worst thing in the world. Alright so let's talk specs. On the inside this thing is not all that far off from say the Galaxy S10 Plus. It has a Snap Dragon 855 processor, it's got 12 gigs of RAM, it's got 512 gigs of storage. In terms of battery, it is 4,380 milliamps, although of course that's split between a battery here and a battery here. Don't know how long that battery life will actually give us, but it is pretty big, 4,300, so that should last a while. So on the outside again it's a 4.3 inch screen, it's HD plus, it's a fine screen. The inside, which is the screen you're really interested in, is 7.3 inches, and it's very very close to a four by three aspect ratio and it's 20.48 by 16.36, so that's QXGA plus in terms of its resolution. So the Galaxy Fold is shipping on April 26th, it's available for pre-order now, and again that price is $1,980, and that number is weird but apparently it's divisible so you know how much you're paying per month. And like I said, at the top, my overall impression is that this thing is actually a lot more usable and a lot less prototype-y than I expected. The hinge feels solid, I'm not super annoyed by the crease, I think that it's fairly ignorable, and you get this nice thing that is pretty big and easy to hold. Easier to hold than I expected, and then when you fold it up, you've got this. I just wish that, you know, I could fit it in my pocket. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching. We're gonna have so much more about the Galaxy Fold, because there's just so much more to talk about. There's the notch, there's the cameras, there's a whole thing. So keep it locked in the Verge, we'll have a full review for you very soon.