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posted by martyb on Friday February 22 2019, @02:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the You-got-to-know-when-to-hold-'em,-Know-when-to-fold-'em,-Know-when-to-walk-away... dept.

Samsung finally showed off its new foldable smartphone, the $1,980 Galaxy Fold

Samsung on Wednesday announced more details about its foldable smartphone, called the Galaxy Fold. At Samsung's Unpacked event, we finally saw what the Galaxy Fold will look like, having only seen the device in the shadows when the company announced its existence in November.

The device will use a "7nm" processor and include 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage. Oddly enough, there is no microSD slot or headphone jack despite the device's size. Galaxy Fold will include six cameras.

See also: The Galaxy Fold makes no sense as a consumer device yet

With the Galaxy Fold, you spend big to get access to the beta test. The glimpses I got, brief though they were, during Samsung's live presentation of the Fold in London gave me reason to be wary. First and foremost, the inner display of the device never seems to fold out to be perfectly flat. Light reflections glinting off its surface in the presenter's hand exposed a slight ridge in the middle, a spine where the hinge resides and disturbs the flat plane. The left and right wings of the opened Galaxy Fold also reflected light at different angles. I know from my experience with the Royole Flexpai, the first foldable phone, just how hard it is to combine folding and flatness in one device. Judgment should be reserved until we've had a chance to hold one in our hands, but my first impression is that the Fold doesn't always have a perfect, undisturbed 7.3-inch tablet surface. It's a compromise.

As impressive as it is, the Samsung Galaxy Fold won't bring growth back to the smartphone market right now

Galaxy Fold will amaze you. Here's why you won't buy one

Also at Reuters, Bloomberg, and Wccftech.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 22 2019, @04:08AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 22 2019, @04:08AM (#804867) Journal

    It's not fair to compare your used car to a luxury smartphone.

    Not flagship, luxury.

    The Samsung Galaxy Fold isn’t for you [venturebeat.com]

    The Galaxy Fold makes no sense as a consumer device yet [theverge.com]

    To be fair to Samsung, pricing the Galaxy Fold at $1,980 is a lot like not releasing it at all, as far as the regular consumer market is concerned. I understand the company’s perspective: it expects the $2,000 tech consumer to be of a more forgiving disposition than someone looking for a pragmatic everyday device that works well in all circumstances. The target audience here is either die-hard Samsung fans (they exist!) or the sort of people who spend big on Supreme drops just for the status of being able to do it. For Samsung, serving up the first-generation Galaxy Fold to a self-selecting group of receptive users is an excellent expansion of its beta testing that would feed into improvements for future iterations.

    A select group of people will essentially pay to have the privilege of being beta testers for this form factor. Samsung will apply the lessons they learn going forward, and this kind of device will work a lot better and be a lot cheaper in 2021+.

    We can complain about the price, but the fact that foldable smartphones actually exist now means that we will see people begin to review, test, and adopt them. Maybe you'll be able to try one out at a Samsung store or something.

    I like the concept. We can see some clear limitations with the imperfect flatness, and we can imagine that there could be more problems after folding it and unfolding it thousands of times. Most of the electronics inside the devices are not bendy, which is why it folds in the middle rather than being a big, floppy rectangle that could be cupped in your hands. But the idea of having a smartphone in your pocket and being able to significantly expand the screen size is a sound one, as long as it can fit in your pocket when folded (something that reviewers should be able to measure with a ruler).

    One thing I wondered: what if you get a call in tablet mode? My take is that the software should pick up the call the instant you fold it. Or you could use speaker phone.

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