Gadgetory

(gentle music) - Uh, hang on a minute. We need to make this Galaxy Fold review video a little differently. See, I have a lot to say about this $1,980 folding phone tablet thing because I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities, and it is legitimately amazing to have a screen that can fold nearly in half. But then we started to review this phone, and then, you may have heard about it. So as you can see, the screen on our Galaxy Fold is broken. I've got a line here and a line here, and here's what happened. Right about here under the screen last night I noticed that I could feel a little bump under the screen when it was completely open. And when it wasn't completely open I didn't feel the bump at all. And last night it wasn't causing any problems. It was flexing the screen out a little bit. I called it like a bulge. But when I woke up this morning, opened the phone up, it had caused apparently a little bit more damage, and so it's ruined the screen. Yeah, so there are two different issues here. The first is that on the front of the screen there's this thing that looks like a removable screen protector, but it is not removable. Instead it's this layer that's applied with some serious adhesive, and it's basically part of the screen. If you try to pull it off, which to be clear seems like a totally reasonable thing to do given how it looks, you will end up wrecking the hell out of this phone. But that's not what happened to me. As near as I can tell something got stuck in between the screen and the hinge on my first review unit. I still don't know what it was, but I do know that it broke the screen. So, Samsung replaced my unit, and it gave a statement about the issue. It said, quote, "We will thoroughly inspect these units." In other words, there's no answers yet. Which means, you can't trust this phone. I don't trust this phone. But Samsung also said that it is full steam ahead for the launch of this phone on April 26th. So, what are the heck are we supposed to do now? Well, we're gonna review the Galaxy Fold, but we're going to do it as if it were a device that doesn't seem to have this critical fundamental design flaw that could break the screen. (gentle music) This is the Galaxy Fold. Before everything went to hell and the first phone broke, here was my conclusion about this thing. I have never used a premium device with this many problems that I love this much. Screen breaking aside, and to be clear you should not set it aside, there are still a bunch of problems with this phone. The screen and the protector thing are plastic which means it picks up dings really, really easily. The front screen is too small to really use. Android still isn't as good as it should be in tablet mode. I could really go on and on, but then I open it up and I start using it, and I really like it. It's way nicer just having a big screen and I really like this almost exactly four by three aspect ratio. This main screen is 7.3 inches, which is just a little bit smaller than an iPad Mini, but it's got way smaller bezels than an iPad Mini, which means that it's super easy to hold. And again, like having this much screen real estate on your phone is great. If you go into the system and set the zoom level to small, you end up getting three columns in email, and you get tabs in your browser. Playing games is really fun on this big screen too, and I have to say that this is my favorite device for reading Kindle books, including the actual Kindle itself. This is just the right size, and if you want, you can rotate it sideways and get two columns of text. Surprisingly, when I'm just using it and not looking for screen problems, I don't really notice the crease between the two sides. Now, don't get me wrong, it is definitely there. You can definitely feel it. But, it's a little bit easier to ignore than you might expect. Now, the notch on the top of the screen, well that's a little bit harder to ignore because most video apps get cut off by that notch, and you have to set the whole system to hide the notch mode in order to get rid of that, and that's super annoying. Also annoying, the refresh rate. Okay, so screens need to have controllers and usually they're at the top or maybe the bottom of the phone, so when you scroll you don't notice that there's actually a subtle difference in scroll speed from the top to the bottom. Unless you're really looking for it. But, because this thing folds in half it has to put its screen controller over somewhere else on the right-hand side. So, when you scroll, you get this jelly effect where one side scrolls faster than the other side. It's the sort of thing that you don't notice, and then you notice it, and then you can just never unsee it. Look, all these problems are real, and they are not acceptable on any smartphone, and definitely not a premium one that costs, again, two thousand dollars. But, when you're actually using it, you do kind of forget about all those problems because it's just a great little tablet. The colors on the screen are vivid, and they're also bright, and the whole thing does feel pretty good to use when it's opened up. All right, let's talk about some classic phone spec stuff now. It has a Snapdragon 855 processor, and 12 gigs of RAM, so it's very fast. It has 512 gigs of storage, and it also has a 4,380 milliamp battery. And that means that I'm getting screen time in like the seven or eight hour range. This thing just lasts all day. It also has wireless charging, and you can charge other devices on the back of it like the Galaxy Buds. There are, six, six cameras, and I'm not gonna spend too much time on them because they're basically the same as what you get on the Galaxy S10+. There's one regular, one wide, and one telephoto on the back. One regular on the front, and then one regular and one depth sensing one on the inside. And, they're all very good, but that does mean they're not quite as good as what you'll get on Pixel 3 or a P30 Pro. Now, it's not waterproof at all unfortunately. But, overall the build quality felt pretty good. The hinge originally felt really solid. You know what? Well, let's just call durability and build quality a big question mark right now, okay? Yeah. There's no headphone jack, and the button layout is weird. The fingerprint sensor is super fast and it's on the side, but instead of doubling as a power button, it doubles as the Bixby button, which, why? Is this some dark pattern to trick me into using Bixby more? I don't know, but I can tell you that Bixby is still Bixby. As for the rest of the software, it's actually better than I expected. But, I didn't expect a lot because Android has never been great on tablets. The big new feature here is the thing called app continuity, and what it means is if you have an app open on the tiny screen on the front, when you open it up, it'll be right there on the big screen, fully and properly resized. It's based on this work that Google is doing to make Android apps resizable for Chromebooks and tablets. But, not all apps support it yet, so sometimes when you do it you get an app that's got black bars on either side of it, and you have to relaunch the app to resize it. Resizable apps also let Samsung do its multitasking tricks on this thing. So, you can swipe over from the right and select a second app to open in split screen. Then you can do it again to open a third app underneath that one on the right. And then you can do crazy Samsung stuff, like open popover windows like real windows and move them around, and resize them, and it's all just kind of a lot. And, it's okay, but it's no where near as elegant as how multitasking works on an iPad. Like, for example, you lose your window layouts all the time. If you just close and open this thing your multi-window layouts are just gone. Maybe all this will get better with Android Q later this year, but that's not right now. Okay, but this isn't really just a tablet. It's also a phone, so let's talk about what it's like in phone mode. Just as a physical object, it's weird, like a big phone remote or something. It's super thick, and it's super heavy, and there's just no way you're gonna get this to fit comfortably in your pants pocket. Plus, friends, the screen on the front of this thing is just too small. Technically it's 4.6 inches, but that's a diagonal measurement, and so it feels way smaller than that because it's so narrow. You can barely type on this thing. What I ended up doing is basically treating it like a glorified super powered lock screen. And, maybe that's the point. It has a totally different home screen layout than the main screen, so I ended up just putting the stuff on it that I use in my commute, and that's Google Maps, holedown, and Spotify. So all that's the annoying part of this screen, but once again there was this weird possibility that I could not only get used to that but almost learn to like it. Here's what I mean. Think about this thing that happens all the time with your phone. You pull it out to check something quick but then all of a sudden a half hour has gone by while you were scrolling Instagram or whatever. It's a real problem, but it's a problem I didn't really have with the Galaxy Fold because when I was just using the tiny screen I wanted to get something done and put it away really fast because the tiny screen's not that good. But then, when I unfolded it and used it I was really using it. I had to hold it in two hands. It became an active thing that I chose to be doing. It required some intentionality. Phones, they fit in our in-between times, when you're just waiting in line or you have a minute to glance at it. But then it fills up that minute and then it sort of just fills up everything. The Galaxy Fold though is too big to fit in those in-between times. So I ended up feeling better about how I was using this phone than I usually do when I use a regular phone. Is that worth $2,000? Is it worth all of the first generation problems that you run into here? Is it worth the risk of buying a phone whose screen might be so fragile that it could break at any minute if a piece of debris gets stuck between it and the hinge? Nope, nope, and super nope. But it is worth thinking about. And even though I'm gonna be sending this thing back and definitely not spending the two grand, I'm gonna keep thinking about it. Because, you know what? There is something really new here. Something different. I just wish it wasn't also, well, broken.