Two of the most common complaints about new phones: they are too expensive, and too similar to last year’s. The Samsung Galaxy Fold will be pummelled by one of these. But it is immune to the other.
You can call the Galaxy Fold ridiculous. You can call it criminally expensive, but you cannot say it’s boring or anything like 2018 smartphones. There are doubts as to how easily this phone will slot into people’s lives, and whether its benefits can possibly be worth the £1,800 it costs. However, success or fail, this is a milestone in phone design.
The Samsung Galaxy Fold is one of just two important first-wave folding phones, alongside the Huawei Mate X. They represent two ways to tackle a phone that’s also kind-of a tablet.
Huawei’s screen is on the outside. The Samsung Galaxy Fold’s is on the inside, with a makeshift display on the front for light jobs.
Several of the elements that worried us most are non-issues in person. Yes, there is a slight fold mark you can feel with a finger and see with your eyeballs at the screen’s centre. But it is not noticeable when you use the phone held in front of you.
Asphalt 9 is at its most immersive on the 7.3-inch Galaxy Fold screen too. Mobile game graphics reached a level of fidelity that's more than enough to be appreciated on a 5-inch display a long time ago.
Gaming on the Samsung Galaxy Fold is a treat. You might accuse a phone like this of being symptomatic of the bizarre excesses of late-stage capitalism. But this two-in-one will make a mental-heath degrading commute much more enjoyable.
“The rest of the time” is what the Galaxy Fold and its prospective buyers have to come to terms with.
Screen closed up, the Galaxy Fold is an oddity. It’s 161mm tall and just 62.9mm wide. Taller than an iPhone XS Max, only a shade wider than the original iPhone, this phone is jarring and odd to hold. Its 4.6-inch screen fits on the front, bordered by miles of blank black, with the apologetic character of a “back in five minutes” note taped to a shop front.
It is thick too, at 15.2mm. The Galaxy Fold’s dimensions and seamed contours feel strange, as if its insides should be home to some watercolour paints and a brush rather than a tablet-like screen. This is perhaps the boldest design experiment in the entire history of the Galaxy series. It seems stranger than the Galaxy Note did in 2014, with its curved screen edges. And stranger even than the 2012 Galaxy Camera and its Frankenstein’s monster optical zoom.
Samsung, of course, likes to paint the 7.3-inch screen as the perfect partner to all content. It’s better for social media. It’s better for web browsing, says Samsung. You can run three apps at once — as long as they are part of the Fold-friendly elite, which at present does not include Netflix.
Gaming and video-watching seem the only real uses for the Galaxy Fold once you imagine it in a real-world context, though. This is a tablet that fits in your pocket, at only four times the normal tablet price. It’s the high-res Nintendo Switch, without most of the bits that make the Nintendo Switch so popular.
Playing games benefits from the big screen more than video too, because virtually nothing is filmed in an aspect ratio remotely close to the Galaxy Fold’s 4:3. Video content does look fantastic on this OLED QXVGA+ panel, and this is the first HDR10+ certified phone. But movies leave great chunks of the screen black, and even then the front “notch” still eats into the image.
The Galaxy Fold is an experiment, and feels like one.
There is a conjunction to note here, though. Samsung first hinted at a folding phone prototype almost a decade ago. We tried one of the first cloud gaming services, OnLive, almost a decade ago. Both are back in the spotlight, thanks to the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Google Stadia. And they could make quite a couple.
Stadia is Google’s take on PS Now and Microsoft xCloud, a game streaming service that will play titles still out of the reach of top-end phone processors like the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s Snapdragon 855. These include Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Doom Eternal.
This display is large enough to make involved games like this look great. And there is, in theory, enough room to incorporate virtual stick controls without making them an ergonomic nightmare.
These are still glimmers of a potential future. A platform like Stadia demands a very reliable, low-latency connection, such as a 5G one. This version of the Samsung Galaxy Fold, unlike the Huawei Mate X, is not a 5G phone. And even if it was one, this hardware will likely look dated before the UK’s 5G networks are up and running properly. This isn’t the perfect phone for Stadia, but a phone like this may be, one day.
The Samsung Galaxy Fold has all the hallmarks of a first-wave “new” technology. It’s very expensive, it’s chunkier than you’d like and the full extent of its usefulness isn’t clear yet. However, Samsung has done a good job of making sure the parts it can optimise at this early stage are optimised.
Apps and games can hop between the displays quicker than you can open up the Samsung Galaxy Fold, and appear in the same state. This, alongside multi-tasking, is likely why the phone has 12GB RAM, which would seem pointlessly excessive in another phone.
The folding mechanism is engineered to both last and charm. Samsung says it is tested to withstand 200,000 open and shut movements, and it moves into its final open position with a satisfying clonk. Every measure has been taken to make sure the Galaxy Fold does not seem an expensive gimmick. The public will decide whether it is one.
Elsewhere, the Samsung Galaxy Fold matches the Galaxy S10. It has three cameras on its back, including a 16-megapixel ultra-wide and a 2x “zoom”, using the same high-quality sensors. You can shoot selfies whether the Galaxy Fold is open or not, and the inside has dual 10/8-megapixel cameras for background blur and group shots.
The sheer R&D involved in this phone, as the result of more than 1000 prototypes, and its expensive manufacture, ensured the Samsung Galaxy Fold was always to sit in the same price bracket as phones dappled with jewels. But Samsung does try hard to justify the £1800 price too.
You get a pair of Galaxy Buds true wireless earphones in the box, which can be charged wirelessly through the Fold’s back, a year of insurance that covers accidental and water damage. And, somewhat less impressive, four months of YouTube Premium — that’s another £50’s worth if you’re counting pennies.
Anyone doing so likely won’t buy a Galaxy Fold, though. This is an early adopter’s confection, of a kind we do not see often now that 4K TV and phones are mature, and the real money in tech comes from selling data and services rather than shiny trinkets.
Should you buy a Galaxy Fold? Probably not. But you should try one while it’s still fresh.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
