Review: Samsung Galaxy Fold

I would like to stop carrying around the Galaxy Fold now. It is oddly shaped and heavy. It weighs down my bag even more than other phones do.

But the design is novel; it's centered around a flexible OLED display. That means when it’s expanded, when it unfurls itself to the world, it becomes a device roughly the size of a Kindle. When you’re ready to tuck the phone in your bag or pocket, you fold it shut, and it morphs into something akin to a shiny, button-free TV remote.

This folding phone costs $1,980. Samsung has made clear that it considers the Galaxy Fold a luxury item. The company is unabashedly aiming it at early adopters and people who just need to have the New Thing. But for that cost, even hypebeasts have to carefully consider how the phone fits into their lives, their coat pockets, their jeans, their bags. They have to consider the behavior change that a folding phone requires, and whether that adjustment period is worth it when our non-folding glass slabs currently do a pretty good job on nearly every task we ask them to do.

Personally I wouldn’t buy the Samsung Galaxy Fold, even if it sometimes expressed itself as a useful gadget. Samsung has managed to ship a flexible phone; that in itself is noteworthy. And there may yet be a time when the world is full of foldable displays: laptops that become tablets, tablets that become phones, large-scale screens that can be rolled up and carted off. But the journey there is going to be a little awkward.

In order to understand the somewhat alarming “Care Instructions” that come packaged with the Galaxy Fold, you might need a refresh on what happened during the initial launch of the Galaxy Fold. Samsung revealed the device with great fanfare earlier this year, then in mid-April began sending out review units of the phone to YouTubers and select journalists, including WIRED writers. Shortly afterwards, some of those Folds began to show signs of serious reliability issues, mostly in the form of broken screens. (WIRED’s Galaxy Fold loaner didn’t show any signs of damage after five days, but the issues with other units were very real.)

Photograph: Samsung

So Samsung delayed the Fold’s release. From April to September, the company worked on a series of reinforcements that were supposed to strengthen the phone and its “Infinity Flex” display. Samsung couldn’t exactly reinvent the folding phone wheel at that point. This OLED display and its flexible polymer layers had been in the works for years, and Samsung wasn’t about to start from scratch. But it did shrink the gap between the phone’s hinge and its two halves and added additional metal layers beneath the bendy display to make it stronger.

In September, Samsung tried again. And this time, the Galaxy Fold started shipping with a rather intense warning label: “Do not press the screen with a hard or sharp object, such as a pen or fingernail. Do not place cards, coins, or keys on the screen. Do not expose the phone to liquids or small particles.” And so on. This didn’t inspire confidence when I obtained a new review unit. Was I not supposed to breathe on it? Should it be nestled in a tiny phone cradle next to my laptop as I worked from home, but never actually travel in my bag with me?

And yet, after carting the Galaxy Fold around for nearly a month, the phone is still functioning as promised. I haven’t noticed any bleeds or blobs in the OLED display, any unusual flickering, any damage to the top layer of the screen, which was too easy (and tempting) to peel back on the first Galaxy Fold model.

Now, admittedly, I haven’t been using the Galaxy Fold as my daily driver. I’m pretty glued to Apple Messages, and sometimes I used the Fold as my backup phone. I also declined to take it on a four-day business trip in September, because I was trying to carry as few devices as possible. I did, however, just travel with the Galaxy Fold for nearly two weeks, and I often carelessly tossed it in my luggage and shoulder bags. It was certainly in close proximity to dust and food particles and liquids from water bottles. I treated it as I would a smartphone. It’s still kicking.

Despite concerns about its fragility, the Galaxy Fold feels solid. It is essentially two phone panels conjoined by a dual-part metal hinge and the interior flexible display. The phone’s casing is made of aluminum. Because one side of the phone is a “cover”display, the Galaxy Fold looks two-toned from the back when it’s unfolded. One side might have a silver finish, for example, but the other is a deep black display.

When the Galaxy Fold is folded shut—and it closes with a satisfying magnetic snap—that “cover” display on the front has a 4.6-inch diagonal. This doesn’t take up the entirety of the front of the phone; there are large bezels above and below it. This display feels small. But it’s still has a standard smartphone UI, so at least this part is familiar.

When it’s folded closed, the Fold is thick. There’s no way around it. It’s 0.66 inches thick, to be exact, and it weighs nearly 10 ounces. One day, I walked around with an iPhone 11 in one sweater pocket and a Galaxy Fold in the other sweater pocket, and I was painfully aware of the Fold.

When the Fold is open, its display measures 7.3 inches diagonally. The screen doesn’t pour smoothly into the phone’s casing, the way most premium phone displays do these days. Instead, the display is slightly recessed from the phone’s thick edges, and two small plastic caps appear on the top and bottom. There’s a sensor module in the upper right-hand side of the extended display. When the phone is on and unlocked, the Android system icons and app notification icons are mostly clustered on the left.

While the cover display is coated in glass, this 7.3-inch display is plastic. Still, it’s luscious looking, which is to be expected from Samsung. And folding and unfolding the phone feels natural and—dare I say it—magical. But no matter which way you look at it, there’s the hint of a seam running down the middle of the Fold when it’s unfolded. This is especially obvious when the screen goes dark and there’s any kind of external light bouncing off of it.

The phone runs Android 9 Pie out of the box, but it’s a version of Google’s software that’s been optimized for a folding phone. (Samsung phones are slowly being updated to a beta version of Android 10 in select markets, and the company says it plans to officially launch this new OS on its phones “in the coming months.”) And the phone is powered by a Snapdragon 855 processor, one of the most current in Qualcomm’s line of mobile chips.

The Fold’s battery life is impressive, which is also to be expected, since each “side” of the phone has its own battery. As with the giant Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, or the iPhone 11 Pro Max, the Fold often lasted me an entire workday and well into the evening without any kind of battery anxiety.

When Samsung began to think about the software experience for this phone, back in the spring of 2018, it knew that the user interface couldn’t just be a standard Android UI that shrunk on the “closed” phone and expanded when it was unfolded. This had to be a new UI for a new era of folding gadgets, a swiping and tapping and app interaction experience that not only felt fluid but justified the phone’s duality. So Samsung began working closely with Google and the Android developer community to ensure the software worked well on the Fold.

It does—for the most part. Google’s own apps are optimized for the Fold. One of the benefits of the Fold is that you can launch an app from the small-ish closed-phone display, and then open the Fold and immediately view that same app in fullscreen. That meant I could search for something in the Chrome app—like how to make waffles from scratch—and then unfold the Fold and view the recipe big and wide. Same with Google Maps: I could initiate directions from the front of the phone and then unfold it to see the maps on a larger canvas.

You can also work in three app windows concurrently when the device is unfolded. Reader, I think I did this once. I just don’t want to multitask that much on a mobile device.

During my most recent bout of travel, I used the Galaxy Fold as my Kindle, which is to say I downloaded the Kindle app and read 13 (short) chapters of a new book on it. In that instance, I was really glad I had the Fold; it was both my phone and my tablet, which is its ultimate promise. I also streamed Succession from the HBO Now app and was happy to have the larger screen for that.

That doesn’t mean all media consumption was great on the Fold. Instagram Stories, those 24-hour ephemeral updates, weren’t optimized for the unfolded Fold. My friends’ heads kept getting cut off in photos and videos. This is because the display ratio for Instagram Stories is fixed, and it doesn’t match the ratio of the Fold’s display.

Photograph: Samsung

And despite running a special fold-optimized version of Android, there’s a perceptible imbalance in the UI. As mentioned earlier, most of the app notification icons are on the upper left, while the Android virtual three-button system is pushed to the bottom right rather than the bottom center of the phone. The swipe-to-unlock happens on the lower left. (The Fold also has face unlock.)

Making phone calls with the Fold is awkward. When it’s open, it supports video calls and speaker calls. If you need to make a quick call and happen to not have headphones nearby, you’ll have to close the Fold and hold the wand to your ear, looking only slightly cooler than someone holding a cellphone in a movie from the 1980s.

Text messaging, which is probably more important for most people, is painful. On the 4.6-inch display, the virtual keyboard is impossible tiny. When you unfold the Fold, the keyboard can be used as a standard keyboard or one that’s split along the middle. But you’ll likely still have to hold the side of the Fold with both hands as you thumb type. This never felt comfortable.

When it comes to camera lenses, the Galaxy Fold has six. This includes a 10-megapixel camera on the front of the device (the selfie cam when the phone is “closed”); dual 10-megapixel and 8-megapixel cameras that face forward when the phone is unfolded; and a triple-lens camera module on the back, comprised of wide, ultrawide, and telephoto lenses.

The Fold’s cameras are as capable as any high-end Samsung smartphone camera. The cameras support Scene Optimizer, which is Samsung’s machine-learning-powered feature that recognizes up to 30 different scenes you’re shooting in and tweaks the camera settings accordingly. The photos I captured showed mostly accurate colors and an acceptable amount of detail, though the camera works best in daylight or in well-lit settings. The Fold also supports 4K UHD and HDR10+ video capture.

What’s different about the Fold’s cameras is how you actually use them. Taking a selfie or rear photo with the phone closed feels like you’re taking a picture with your TV remote. You can still open the camera from the lock screen with a flip of your thumb, but it’s like you’re wielding a wand, not a rectangular slab. When you unfold the Fold to take a photo, that large viewscreen sure is nice; but you’re essentially taking a picture with a tablet.

Again, all of the features of a premium phone are packaged into this folding phone. And it’s a folding phone! But using the Fold only made me realize that I take certain “normal” smartphone functions for granted, like having the ability to grab my rectangular slab out of my bag and snap a quick photo, or easily swipe down from the right-hand side for settings and notifications.

I often slide my smartphone into my pocket during long hikes, a decision that’s as much about photo taking as it is about having a cellular connection in case of emergency. But I couldn’t fit the Fold into the pocket of my athletic pants.

Sometime between last February, when Samsung first revealed the Galaxy Fold; April, when Samsung tried valiantly to launch the Fold; and this fall, when the Fold finally starting shipping, reality set in. Yes, it’s more susceptible to breaking than single-slab phones, but this reality has less to do with fragility than it does with utility.

One of the questions technologists are desperate to answer right now, even the technologists that have a vested interest in selling as many smartphones as possible, is, What does a post-phone world look like? What kinds of products will shape our “ambient computing” interactions in the future? And how can we make sure we get there first?

The Galaxy Fold is part of Samsung’s answer to that question, of what kind of device will power our experiences in the future. Only thing is, regular, non-folding smartphones are still darn useful and magical in their own right. I would say that I’m ready to take the Fold out of my pocket now, except it didn’t fit quite right in the first place.