Samsung Galaxy Fold hands-on review

Samsung Galaxy Fold hands-on

Science fiction until recently, foldable phones are now very much a reality - and two of them at once, all of a sudden. After handling the Huawei Mate X a few weeks ago, we now got to spend some time with the Samsung Galaxy Fold, and it's a fun reality we're in.

As much alike as they are different, the two foldables currently in existence take different approaches to the very bit that makes them what they are. Samsung's Galaxy Fold we have here is an 'innie' for the lack of a better term - its 7.3-inch display folds in on itself making it reasonably well protected from the outside world, a major concern with the Mate.

The Fold is kept closed thanks to springs and magnets - there are no last-century solutions like clasps or the like. The magnets are pretty strong too, and the thing closes with a remarkably satisfying 'clack'. So satisfying in fact, that undoubtedly a lot of the 200,000 hinge actuations Samsung promises the Fold will survive will go towards just pointless clacking while fidgeting the hell out of it.

Mind you, there is no risk of it opening on its own - the two halves are held together very securely, to the point of it actually being a two-hand task to open the Fold. It's not a bad thing really, as you'd want to use both hands anyway when in tablet mode, so might as well prepare.

Unfolding the Fold presents you with the whole 7.3 inches of Dynamic AMOLED display goodness. Effectively, the area showing content is in a 4:3 ratio but there is also a status bar up top to account for the additional 100-odd pixels extra height beyond the customary 2,048x1,536px.

The status bar is off to the left side, with a notch that holds the two selfie cameras eating into it in the top right corner. It's one of the biggest notches around, there's no denying that, and it is a bit of an eye sore.

It's not the only eye sore either. There's also the vertical crease in the middle where the display folds in half. It's just there, always. It's particularly visible on lighter backgrounds or on dark ones with light reflecting directly off of it. The crese is sharper and straighter than on the Mate X so on the one hand it looks like it's meant to be there, but it's also somewhat more visible, if any of that makes sense.

It's not ideal, and all the developments Samsung's made in its display technology to get to this point aren't quite enough to make a foldable screen that opens up fully flat. The good thing is your brain is very likely to actually learn to ignore it and look past it. That, of course, depends on just how big of a perfectionist you are about the displays in your life - moderately sane folks will probably be fine with it.

There's another irksome aspect of the Galaxy Fold - when you do fold it, a gap remains between the two pieces, a lot like the Microsoft Surface Book scaled several times down. The driving forces between the two gaps are obviously different - after all there's no bending display on the Surface. There is one on the Galaxy Fold, however, and you can't just fold in half like a piece of paper - we take it Samsung went for the minimum radius that was technologically feasible.

So the gap between the two halves does pose a potential danger of something wedging in there and actually scratching the display which you though was safe on the inside. While freak accidents do happen, we'd say the chances of damaging the innie Fold are markedly slimmer than the outie Mate X.

The folded Fold is a reasonably manageable device, and one you can (semi-)easily stick in a jeans pocket. Of course, it's not compact by any stretch of the imagination - it's as thick as two regular S10+ phones and a couple of mm taller too. It's substantially narrower though, so there's that. At 263g it's not light either, yet it doesn't come off as exceptionally heavy.

In its folded state, the Galaxy Fold it's well within a single-handed usage territory. The 4.6-inch display is a throwback to simpler times before phablets went so mainstream that we forgot there was a specific name for this category. You can easily pull out the Fold and make a phone call while carrying a bag of groceries in the other hand. Or a quick selfie.

The Fold has slightly different controls from all other Galaxies. There's no under display fingerprint reader on this one like there is on the S10 and S10e. Instead, it's a conventional capacitive sensor on the right (non-hinge) side, similar to the one on the Galaxy S10e. It also doubles as a Bixby button and we're certain that will lead to unintentional Bixby launches and it will require getting used to.

Above that is the power button and further up - a volume rocker. All of these are on the bottom half of the screen (when it's folded), so they remain on the right when you unfold it.

A few things we've taken for granted on the S-series are gone on the Fold, and all things considered, we get where Samsung's coming from. With all the hinge action dust and water protection really isn't something we'd expect from the Fold. Also, space was clearly at a premium and Samsung's omitted non-essential bits - the 512GB of built-in storage do make a microSD slot non-essential and a 3.5mm jack is perhaps at odds with the uber-premium nature of the Fold.