After weeks of pain, I can’t help but hate the Samsung Galaxy Fold

It’s a lousy phone, but with some small changes it could be a half-decent hybrid

As a rule I’m addicted to my phone. I am not addicted to the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

Now, I’m not not addicted to the Fold in the precise same way that I’m not addicted to my iPad. But unlike tablets, smartphones are unputdownable and in my experience the Fold is... not.

Because this £1,900 Samsung hybrid – the first folding phone on sale in the UK – is at once a slim, tidy tablet; a feat of engineering; an early taste of a flexible screened future and a really quite terrible phone.

Fold as phone

I’ll just caveat this whole first section with a note that there are no particularly nasty surprises to be found with this ‘improved’ Galaxy Fold design. You cannot pick off or easily damage the folding screen. Mine hasn’t cracked, nor have any other reviewers’ models in this second batch. There is a new bezel, a raised ridge along the notch and clips at the top and bottom of the device at the previously vulnerable area where the display meets the hinge.

Likewise, if the prospect of a narrow 4.6-inch front screen and a 17.1mm thick phone (at its thickest point at the hinge) appeals to you, you will be perfectly satisfied with what you are paying for.

Everyone uses their phones differently and Samsung is positioning the Galaxy Fold, together with 5G – this is a 5G device – as a chance to change what we do with our phones. I’ll get onto that soon enough but let’s start with the basics.

If I’m selecting a new podcast episode to listen to or seeing who has emailed me or skipping a track that’s playing on a wireless speaker at home, I need a display I can quickly extract information from and then tap to get me what I need. In all these cases, the Galaxy Fold fails somewhat.

For the first few days with the Fold, every time I went to check something or do something, I did a tiny bit of arithmetic in my head first. As I picked it up from my desk, say, or removed it from my coat pocket, I had to decide - am I going to open it or not? But that makes sense in terms of acclimatising to a new form factor. After a day or two attempting to type out WhatsApp messages on the narrow, 4.6-inch 720x1680 Super AMOLED cover display, I started opening it every time. (A swipe keyboard helps here; my thumbs are just too fat for the tiny keys and I suspect yours will be too.)

That said, if the cover display is essentially not very useful, that negates a lot of the Galaxy Fold’s efforts. At work, if I had two phones on my desk – one a Galaxy Fold and the other, say, a Pixel 4 – and I had to check Slack or use the calculator or any number of other quick tasks, I would always instinctively reach for the non-Fold phone even after two weeks in.

The inner, folding screen is the star of the show, but the front display is just as important. Even if I have a 7.3-inch 362ppi screen available to me, I won’t always need or want it. As it stands, people use their phones more than tablets and smartphones vastly outsell tablets. That won’t change overnight and it won’t change just because tablet screens start folding up to be slightly more pocketable.

Pocketable! I have seen some reviewers note that the tall profile of the Galaxy Fold makes it pocketable. Although it is nice to be able to wrap your hand around it, this is still a device that looks like, and in some respects sort of is, two phones stuck together when closed.

It also weighs 276g. For comparison, a Galaxy S10 weighs 157g and an iPad Mini (with a 7.9-inch screen, cellular) weighs 308.2g. Ever stuck an iPad Mini in your pocket? Well, let me tell you the Galaxy Fold weighs down coat, skirt and pyjama pockets quite a bit, making it more likely to be left on the sofa or coffee table or kitchen counter. In fact, it’s a bit of a brick, despite its premium, mirrored finish and polished design details. I feel I could really do some damage with this if someone were to sneak up on me.

Folded, the Fold is an outrageous (for 2019) 15.7 – 17.1mm thick as it slants down from the hinge. Unfolded as a mini 7.3-inch tablet, it’s a mere 6.9mm thick, which is glorious in use and very respectable next to the iPad Mini’s 6.1mm spec.

What else would you choose a phone for over a tablet? Well, phone calls are only possible with the device closed and chunky or using the speaker. Web browsing was too annoying to bear on the cover display, too; a sign of how pixel-spoiled I am. How about taking photos and posting them to Instagram?

During my time with the Galaxy Fold, I attended an evening event with a view looking out over the lights of Piccadilly Circus (this is not a humblebrag, this is pertinent, honest). It was a good opportunity to test out the rear triple-camera setup - main 12MP lens, 12MP telephoto lens (with 2x optical zoom) and 16MP ultra wide lens - which will be familiar to anyone who has tried out the Galaxy S10 and Note 10 families. It’s a very capable suite of photography tools, with lots and lots of settings to dig into, but if you’re focused on quality, particularly in slightly tricky conditions, the likes of the Pixel 4 capture more balanced, less noisy images more of the time.

Also pertinent: multiple people laughed at me while I was taking photos with the Galaxy Fold. In both modes, it’s fairly unwieldy as an on-the-go snapper: the cover display feels a bit like a mobile VR viewfinder and unfolded, you instantly become one of those losers taking photos with a tablet.

Again, it’s early days for support for folding phones so this is simply an early adopter irritation but when I chose a photo to preview on the Fold then post to my Instagram Stories, I ended up having to delete it after viewing it on my regular ratio phone screen. This was probably the height of my Fold-related panic. My friends’ Stories appeared cropped too, with vaguely witty, white slanted text streaming off out of view.

Fold as tablet

Now I’ve well and truly assassinated the Galaxy Fold, let me tell you how much I love it.

I’m a fan of small tablets. So I liked it a lot in meetings, placed on my lap, or in bed as an iPad replacement for some quick Big Mouth before sleep. Essentially, any time I was sitting or securely situated, the Galaxy Fold became my favourite thing. Standing, being jostled on the rush-hour tube? Not so much, there was just nowhere for it to go. This was a good opportunity to snap it shut though – the thud it makes when it folds shut is oddly satisfying, the most addictive thing about it. In order to close the Fold, you do usually have to get your fingers on the screen, which you might be a bit funny about, unless you are very careful to keep your fingers to the bezels.

Everyone I showed my tech curio to over the course of the two weeks was obsessed with two things: its beefy form factor as a phone and second, the ‘crease’. The second, to me, is much of a muchness – with the device straight on in front of you, you just don’t see it. And from an angle or when you’re using the touchscreen and you run your finger over it, it’s there but it’s far from an annoyance. The Fold is such a delight to use in the tablet mode, it’s a minor concern.

I mean, the Galaxy Fold’s main 2152 x 1536 AMOLED display is bright, detailed with superb contrast and tweakable colours. And it folds! It’s displaying backwards in heels. Give it a break.

Scrolling through Instagram images looks beautiful on the main display; this might be one of the experiences this device was built for. So too, Twitter previews, individual web pages, anything with big pictures works. Gaming is delightful, though watch out which way you’re holding it for the controls as there is a considerable notch in one of the corners, housing a 10MP selfie camera and possibly unnecessary RGB depth sensor for its ‘live focus’ trickery. (I also found I had to be careful when holding the Galaxy Fold as a tablet as it default auto rotates to mean that the speakers are on the lower half; great for the sound but easy to cover up with your hands. Solved with a flip.)

I would have preferred a so-so, boring front-facing camera in a Note-series-style hole punch here. On, say, YouTube the notch eats into the video; with Netflix it adds a third black bar down that side to account for it – you can also zoom in to fill the 4.2:3 screen.

On this point, if you place a Galaxy S10 on top of the Galaxy Fold when it’s unfolded and horizontal – which I did – you can see that if movies on the go are your priority then this folding phone might not make a great deal of sense. Watching Netflix on a Galaxy S10 gets you about 13.4mm x 6.8mm of The King in 16:9; watching it on a Galaxy Fold gets you 14.3mm x 7.7mm of The King. Considering you can now get a Galaxy S10 for around £600 (for less storage, sure) and the Galaxy Fold costs £1,900, that’s you paying £68 per extra mm squared of Netflix.

Multi-tasking works beautifully, particularly when it’s held horizontally. You can run two or even three compatible apps at once with quick access to these with a swipe from the right hand side of the screen. Samsung apps, Google apps, Spotify, WhatsApp, Twitter, it all works with handy floating windows also available for messaging apps.

There’s room for improvement here, too. Apps opened on the smaller, cover screen do indeed auto-fit the larger screen when you open it without any hiccups. This doesn’t work the other way round though. If, for instance, your folding phone is getting nudged a lot on the tube and you’d like to snap it shut and continue what you were doing, you have to re-open the app.

Also, it’s worth noting that when the onscreen keyboard – helpfully split for two-handed use - pops up, this removes your ability to move the slider between the two multi-tasking windows you have open.

There’s a wireless charging dock on sale, but no custom keyboard cover yet and no Note-style S Pen support on this generation. The year of Samsung Care+ and 24/7 helpline is all very well but I’d like to see more accessories for the Galaxy Fold, on top of the very thin ‘aramid fibre’ case I used and the leather case.

It’s seriously powerful with a 7 nanometer, octa-core 2.84GHz processor and 12GB of RAM and you can’t help but think a few add-ons might help to get this potential across. The specs are all as you’d expect for nearly £2,000: fast charging, a fingerprint sensor on the side, Bluetooth 5.0 and 512GB of storage.

It’s running Android 9 Pie so there’s no Android 10 dark mode yet. There’s also no headphone jack but the bundled Galaxy Buds (£139) will help to console you there.

Battery life is brilliant, with 4,235mAh of capacity. It’s officially 12 hours of internet use and 19 hours of video playback – I got a day and a half out of it easily.

Could Samsung have decreased the battery capacity here in order to make this thing lighter? Certainly. Similarly, does it need two screens and six cameras including three selfie cameras? Probably not.

Over the past few years, Samsung has backed itself into a corner on flagship phone specs to the point where it couldn’t release a phone that’s double the price of its other top models and not match them on every single spec. It’s worth considering that Samsung could have made more hardware compromises in order to improve the design and overall usability.

Verdict: Fold as something else entirely

Perhaps the major flaw was Samsung’s decision to fold the main display inwards like a book rather than outwards as on the closest competitor, Huawei’s Mate X which I’ve seen up close but not tested. That £1,870 phone is an impressive 11mm folded, 5.4mm when unfolded - it’s on sale in China, though we don’t know when it will go on sale internationally.

Time will tell whether the Mate X’s display is robust enough in that flashier, riskier configuration. The Samsung Galaxy Fold does not have a water or dust resistance IP rating or Gorilla Glass, but instead relies on the placement of the folding display in the middle of the device for protection.

The Mate X’s design, and similar ones from Xiaomi and Oppo, presents a phone view comparable to this year’s flagship phones and removes all the issues I’ve had with the Galaxy Fold in ‘phone mode’. If any tech company can make a device slimmer with a better screen-to-body ratio it’s Samsung, though that’s no help to owners of this first-gen device.

As for this folding phone, at times, I hated it. I struggled with basics – typing messages on WhatsApp; the aforementioned Instagram issues; taking photos with it felt odd. It was something of a relief to swap my SIM card back out.

When I started to play the Fold’s game, though, the benefits became more clear. It lends itself to more expansive, concentrated bursts of internetting, and to be honest, that might be a very good thing. It’s not for everyone and it’s not for everything, but this can be a very good device for getting stuff done.

This is a bold product. And I’m firmly on the side that says this form factor as a whole is not a gimmick. This is a more pocketable alternative to an iPad Mini. But we’re much more picky about smartphones than any other product category, except perhaps wearables.

The future folding phone of my dreams could replace a small tablet, Kindle and maybe even a laptop, with the right accessories - see Microsoft’s dual screen Neo and Duo for one possibility. But the most important thing it has to do is replace my phone. And the Galaxy Fold seems to forget that.


The Samsung Galaxy Fold is available to buy for £1,900 from Samsung online. You can get up to £500 off with a smartphone trade in.


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This article was originally published by WIRED UK