Galaxy Fold: First impressions of Samsung's foldable phone
Phones
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Samsung has just dropped off it's unpacked event here in San Francisco and I've gotta say I sorta feel like I missed a little bit of history.
Because even though this was the ten year anniversary, of the Galaxy S phones, and we saw a lot of Samsung also took the opportunity to finally unveil it's foldable Samsung phone, and that is called the Galaxy Fold.
We did know a little bit about this phone ahead of time because Samsung gave us a teaser at its developer conference last November, but we only got a brief glimpse on the stage.
Now we know everything.
I want to start by talking about the design.
This is a device that closes like a book and it opens into a tablet.
It doesn't close flat, there's a little bit of a seem in between and that's something that we can kind of expect from these early designs.
Now we know that there's a 4.6 inch screen on the outside and a 7.3 inch display on the inside.
But that's not what's special about it.
Its the actual design itself.
So the screen uses a brand new material, this is a polymer which means it's not glass, it's plastic.
We know that glass makers like Corning are working on bendable glass we're not gonna get that yet.
The interesting thing here is that interplay between that screen on the outside and The screen on the inside.
Samsung has been working with Google to make this seamless.
They call it app continuity.
That means that when you're looking at an app on the smaller screen and you open up that phone, you're gonna see that populate on the inside.
Another thing that's interesting about the screen when it's fully open is that you'll be able to have three active windows open at once.
This is multi tasking To the extreme, he moved windows [INAUDIBLE] in the [UNKNOWN] size from kind of like you can on today's Galaxys but it does depend on what the developers choose.
I wanna spend a minute and talk about the hinch.
What Sam [UNKNOWN] is saying is that they brought this interlocking mechanism so you can actually.
So we see the hinge.
It's inside.
The battery design is really interesting too because batteries don't bend and fold.
So what Samsung did was they basically divided it in half like lobes of your brain.
Together you've got 4,380 milliamp hours Hours of battery.
Of course we haven't tested it yet so we don't have any claims on how long that battery will actually take you with a beautiful day.
Think a lot of it's gonna depend on how you used that device.
The galaxy fold runs on android 9 pie that is the most recent version of android and it has the Samsung one UI on top.
It's also launching with the galaxy as ten phone line up and [UNKNOWN] is rolling on to galaxy S Assign tones right now.
Samsung is really investing in high-capacity storage.
The Galaxy Fold comes with 512 gigabytes of on-board storage and 12 gigabytes of RAM to support it.
There is no micro SD card slot, that's really important to remember.
The Galaxy Fold comes in four colors.
You can get it in space silver, cosmos black, martian green and astro blue.
Now we get to the price and it's pretty astronomical Samsung was trying to prepare the entire presentation long by calling it a luxury device and you know that luxury devices come with luxury prizes in this case almost $2,000 and a lot of people on Twitter were really shocked at that price but I'm not.
Because there's already a foldable phone out there, FlexPie, a brand you haven't heard of, that doesn't have nearly all the whistles and bells as the Galaxy Fold.
And that one starts at $1,500.
Foldable phones are brand new.
This is gonna be more like a beta product.
This isn't gonna be something finished that everybody goes out and buys.
That's what the Galaxy S10 phone Are for.
Those are the mainstream devices.
This phone is gonna be more for developers, for status symbols FOr people who love to be on the fleeting edge.
It's not for everyday people and that's really reflected in the price.
In the future these foldable phones are still going to be really expensive but they're going to be a little bit cheaper than this.
Samsung is definitely not alone here.
There are a ton of other companies companies that are working on foldable designs.
Huawei is coming up with a foldable design.
And this is Samsung's number one challenger.
Apple has definitely filed patent applications for foldable phones.
I have to say that I'm extremely excited to test this out.
You know it's really different.
We've seen a lot of phones that are sort of shaped like brick tiles and a lot of them are black and they can get a little bit boring.
Even though they're so exciting But your phone is the most powerful that you really have.
It connects you to other people, to what's going on in the world.
So to have completely brand new design, is really exciting.
It means that it could change the way that people interact with their devices.
I am extremely excited to test out the whole.
Put it in my hands to see, how thick it is, how easy it is to carry around, if it's actually seamless, if it's worth $2,000.
This is something that the industry is taking a look at, and we're gonna be right along with them.
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