Gadgetory

Galaxy fold oh my goodness a complete shift in smartphones you already know you watch the unboxing video now I'm playing with the thing I'm getting so many people saying like how do you even compare this thing like what do you put it up against the closest we can do right now is stack it up against the other flagship devices that exist and for me this is kind of useful I feel like just putting these devices together booting up YouTube you can kind of get a sense for how the fold stacks up against these other phones this on the far left is the brand new Galaxy fold fold it out it's on a youtube home feed right now next to that you have the current phone that I'm using that's the p30 pro next to that that's the latest a galaxy s 10 plus and then on far right I phone 10 s max and they're all in the YouTube home feed as you can tell the the watch window that exists right on a home feed without turning the device into landscape is almost as big as these phones are completely so if I take this iPhone for example I flip it and kind of drop it in there yes it extends beyond the frame of the galaxy fold but not by much you can think about this as like always having a large scale landscape device in your hands except in portrait mode now the aspect ratio is is quite bizarre as well because what happens is when you flip this thing into actual landscape of course it gets much larger but the aspect ratio is not that of a typical smartphone you know typical smartphones have been getting more and more narrow recently so much so that a lot of content creators are actually producing their videos in that slim almost 2x1 aspect ratio now it kind of goes the opposite direction where as you can see you have black bars on the top and bottom and what you really want is a taller video but nonetheless this gives you an idea of how much video you can fit on the screen and 16 by 9 and it's a ton in fact so much so that this video watching experience like this is more similar to a tablet than it is to a smartphone as I'm sure you can tell now when you go ahead and let's say you take the iPhone you can see you actually end up with a much slimmer image that's the biggest difference so things get pinched this way and you end up with the black bars on the other side now granted it's important to note that within YouTube there's no way currently to fill the display I'm sure this will be updated in in an app update for YouTube itself as well as other apps that start to take into consideration devices like the fold but for now that's your maximum display size whereas on these other devices you crop in like this in order to fill the frame and you end up with an image kind of similar for video watching granted it's important to remember that on the iPhone or these other two devices if you do crop into a video you are actually losing some of the video on the top and the bottom I'm sure you're already aware of this that's if you want to see the full video so this is a better one-to-one representation of how much extra screen you're dealing with on the phone now thinness when it's folded out it's actually thinner it's ever so slightly thinner than the iPhone it's just a bit fatter than the fold when folded out same thing goes for the p30 Pro it's a little bit fatter and the galaxy s 10 plus is almost identical another surprising thing to me with this device has been how light it is like it's it's one area where I was skeptical when I saw the original clip I'm like is that gonna be fatiguing to hold it for periods of time you know is it gonna be comfortable and the weight of it has a lot to do with that and the weight distribution and the truth is it's super comfy to hold you feel like you could kind of be set up like this right here for a while without any problems of course it's also important to have the comparison in folded mode because it looks really tall in pictures I expected it to be a lot taller than it is it's similar in height to any flagship large size smartphone that's out there right now now granted in the folded mode it's quite a bit fatter as you can see on that angle right there that said the pocket test kind of surprising I'll show you for all intents and purposes I mean yeah there's more of a thing there you don't feel any different it doesn't feel too big in your pocket just for comparison that's the pocket test galaxy bold this is pocket test 10's mags it's super easy in the pocket again an area where I was skeptical and it turned out better than I expected now speakers also very important I think video watching is gonna be a big part of why people pick up this particular device will bring up the same video on all of them to test the speakers or how about the fold unboxing why not now the other thing I should mention right now is that I didn't necessarily expect to watch most of my video on the fold in portrait mode I would have thought I would flip it into landscape but what ends up happening is it's as big as you're used to with the smartphone almost in portrait mode to the point where you're kind of happy to leave it pause so that you can go down and either scroll the suggested videos or scroll the comments so you can kind of be doing two things at once which you already kind of do on your smartphone at least a lot of people do except here the frame is quite small to the point where you do feel the need to flip the phone around on a frequent basis watching YouTube on any of these smart phones even though these are the biggest ones that most people have let's do volume test now they do he's got a special package today you pulled some strings would you look at this oh my goodness in front of me this is a hole this is a leap who's been waiting for I've been waiting for myself talked about this thing a lot one people have been waiting for I've been waiting for myself what better way to find and now is here it's in front of me this is a hole this is a leap and if the speakers are their flagship territory I'd say they're a bit better I would say that they are better than these three devices in terms of clarity of course you have true stereo speakers on here so holding it in landscape mode is going to improve their performance even more as you can tell it's a consumption device that's where this thing really shines that brings me to the next thing I want to mention actually which along with video which is the obvious reason to have a big display keyboard was a surprising place as well you can see what a typical keyboard size looks like on a flagship device but look what happens over on the galaxy fold as you can tell it's a split keyboard now you can change this you can go to a keyboard more like either of these if you choose to this for me is the best layout and as you can tell if the thumb typing is unreal in this scenario the quick brown you get the idea from a Productivity standpoint this is big because this is one of the reasons that people reach for a laptop tablet or bigger device is because typing on a phone has its limitations when you go into landscape of course what happens is you lose most of your display so if you were trying to go through a bunch of emails productivity stuff you find yourself scrolling through the email that sits there and you don't end up with that much bigger of a keyboard anyhow not only do you get a bigger consumption device you get a bigger productivity devices while you're going to see more it's kind of like two smart phones it's kind of like a tablet in a smart phone form factor so now the interesting thing on the web is that you kind of lose out on some of the advantage of the bigger display because it's loading up the mobile site you're limited to that particular design what you'll probably do with this device is actually trigger the desktop version and it's big enough that the desktop version actually works pretty well and as you can see here you now I'm getting way more information on the display comparatively to this where I probably have to scroll a bit more but in order to truly take advantage you kind of have to treat this like a tablet when it's folded out or like a laptop now I've got Instagram loaded up obviously the layout is identical but the experience is kind of different just because of the scale so obviously on the fold side you got bigger images but interesting lead you don't necessarily have more you don't see as many and this could be a thing again where the app developer could change this and go in and have it show up differently for the fold not sure that it will but as of right now on these flagship devices you actually see more in the feed just smaller versions of the images now if you go to the discover page for example it's kind of more the same you get bigger thumbnails unfold but you see more in one glance on the other three flagships because videos on Instagram are square they take up almost the entire display of the fold now comparatively you'll see that the square I mean it really only takes up half the screen it really truly is almost like two flagship smartphones stacked beside each other it's very close since you basically do have two smartphones pinned together that fold out you might want to multitask instead of only doing one thing at once all right so here's what it looks like with two apps open this is kind of wild now you can adjust it as well like this so now I have the mobile version of this website that I'm scrolling while watching YouTube click on a video scroll over I mean it's really like two smartphones side-by-side but you want to get real crazy you can add a third app to it I could go ahead and open up the Play Store and now you've got three apps on the display instead of two or one I don't know maybe you got to have a chat open maybe you have slack or what's happening one keep it open in the corner while watching a video and also browsing the web maybe you're crazy like that I think two apps is more reasonable and probably is going to be utilized more frequently than three but at least they let you do it it's completely up to you you have the screen real estate so go ahead and get after it these on the left-hand side are very mature versions of what this might eventually be you're looking at version 1.0 in the case of the fold but surprisingly it seems like it's already a good version like a surprisingly polished version for something that's a 1.0 type of device and that's the part that's impressive to me for something this ambitious that it can be polished at all now I don't know having played with it how much functionality I'm gonna get out of the closed off phone this is a bizarre situation here it's like when how often are you going to use that you know in the short time that I've had it I've realized you just flip it open almost for everything kind of like a laptop you stop thinking about the fact that you're flipping it open and the screen and the real estate is so nice to have that you kind of feel handicapped being on the exterior display so you just pick it up and flip it quick and you just operate like that and the cool thing is you just want to open and close it frequently anyways I'm gonna be that guy opening and closing this thing it's just there's something about the mechanical aspect of that which is just quite satisfying in a bizarre way so there it is it's the Galaxy fold that's how it stacks up to the other flagships in the marketplace once again that's the iPhone 10's max p30 pro from huawei this is the samsung galaxy s 10 and this is the latest player on the block I can't wait to use it more it is the Galaxy fold it's a whole new thing guys I've been this excited for a smart phone in a while it's just fun it fun to play with something this different