I even got to shoot any footage of it.

I've had software updates dramatically change the way I felt about a phone in the middle of shooting review.

So weird stuff has happened behind the scenes, but this is, uh, this is a lot.

So I want hands on with the phone for the first time that I drop my video on the first impressions of it.

Then I went home with one, and then I broke it.

And then I got replaced.

And then I found out other reviewers had.

There's break for similar related reasons.

Made a whole video about that.

And now this device is getting delayed and Samsung is actually going to change it before it actually comes out and ships to people who bought it.

So this is the Samsung Galaxy fold kinda.

It's the part one.

The pre review.

There's an official statement from Samsung saying they'll be strengthening the display and it will be a little bit different when it actually comes out and gets released.

But until then, this is more of a review of the rest of the execution on this whole foldable phone concept.

So right off the bat, I love that this is it's just so different.

I mean, we're so used to the slab, the glass front and back that when you have a whole new form factor, there's just so much more to talk about to think about.

So let's talk about it.

So one of the earliest thoughts that's floating around in my head about the galaxy fold is it's more like a folding tablet than a folding phone.

So you have this little baby 4.7 inch display on the outside with.

I mean, let's be honest, comically big vessels, and even that number makes a screen seem bigger than it is with the rounded corners.

It even says on the box.

It's basically a 4.6 inch display, and even with that, it's much narrower than normal.

So it feels like the same with as a 3.6 inch display.

All that to say it's small, so what you want to do is open it up and use the 7.3 inch four by three Ola display That's on the inside.

That's where the magic happens.

That's the whole point of this foldable phone.

Evolution is fitting a display this big in your pocket still, so the galaxy fold.

This version of it is definitely chunky, like this is a thick phone with maybe three or four sees.

It doesn't fold completely flat.

As you can see, there's a gap in the middle of mine with a hinge.

All of them have this sort of a triangle shape.

And then, yeah, the more you look at it, the more it sort of reminds me of too narrow phones connected to each other from a lot of angles, like it has the weight of two phones.

It fits in your pocket like two phones.

It's really a lot of material.

So it turns out this is a fragile phone, and you can tell it as soon as you pick it up like it's pretty fragile on.

That's because of really two main pieces, the hinge and the soft plastic on the inside.

So, of course, glass doesn't fold.

Make a folding phone.

You need something other than glass, so you have plastic on this outside.

And of course you need a hinge somewhere.

And this hinge from Samsung is this crazy, complex mechanism with gears and this big cover over the back.

And it's a scary piece because there's speculation that dirt and dust can slide its way into this hinge through the gears and all the way up into the phone behind the display, which may have caused a review unit to break, which is pretty crazy.

But that will hopefully change with the updated version, so I don't want to spend too much time on that.

But what I will say is, even though it's rated for 200,000 folds by a robot in a lab, I mean, you can literally wobble this thing with your bare hands like there's give to this hinge.

I am literally terrified for the Jerry rig.

Everything test when he finally gets his because I have been money, it's just gonna snap in half like I bet real money on that, but you gotta have a hinge.

So there is one here and on the other delicate pieces, a soft plastic screen.

And this is the part that Samsung had the most difficulty with with all the review units.

That is the part that they're definitely changing on the updated version of this phone.

But even if they do make it stronger, it's still gonna be just one of the weak points of this first generation folding phone, just because that's where material science and tech is right now.

So one of the biggest questions about the Galaxy fold unfolded is Yeah.

How bad is that?

Crease, you know, how bad is it?

Can you see it pretty much.

Everyone who's watched a video of the galaxy fold has just stared at that crease.

So something I've noticed about that, it seems like and you can look this up.

It feels like pretty much everyone complaining about the crease is people who don't have one that are watching a video of the crease and just noticing it.

And then people who do have one are mostly saying it's not a huge deal.

I fall somewhere in the middle because, obviously, like, kind of like a notch.

If you just stare at it.

Of course it looks horrible and you're gonna notice that absolutely.

And this one has a notch, too.

But this crease, like If you're in a brightly lit environment or if you have a light wallpaper, that's something you're gonna see.

That's why Samsung has a black wallpaper by default on this phone.

But for me, when you're looking at the phone straight on and you're focused on the content, you know whatever game or video you're in and what you're watching, I don't see the crease it all.

So then I'm super immersed and it looks fantastic.

But then I look at it off access for, like, a second, or I'll catch my finger running over it too many times.

Like even when the phone's flat, you can feel it and then you remember it's there, and it's not so hot.

So the mild creases, just one of those things that you're gonna have to accept in a first generation folding phone That's just part of the tech.

The Galaxy fold shares a lot of things with the Galaxy s 10.

A lot of the good parts, actually, which make it feel a little less first.

Gen.

So it has the same high end specs snap dog, any 55 12 gigs of RAM and on materials, of course.

So the glass and the metal everywhere.

And the speaker's air actually a bit better than the S 10.

So you have the ones at the bottom and the ones at the top, and it actually creates a sort of a stereo speaker separation.

So they go hidden advantage of having a gigantic device is the speaker's air so far apart and can have so much room have to actually better than normal.

Closer to a tablet speaker?

That's cool.

And then, of course, you have mainly the same software as the S 10 to when you guys still doing a good job.

As faras reached ability and organization responsiveness, etcetera, it's pretty good.

I have had a couple of random weird bugs with the fold, though, like Spotify lock screen music controls haven't worked it all for me.

Which is kind of weird, because I use them all the time and I had this weird apter or overlap bug that only a restart of the device fixed.

Oh, than that, though it's been pretty solid.

And then there are two main software features added to the fold multitasking, which is a little adjusted, and continuity.

Multitasking for me wasn't a huge deal, mainly because I've had multitasking on big phones before on this huge screen on the fold, you can have three AP side by side in this triple window, and then you can keep adding floating windows up to eight APS open at once, and the 12 gigs of Ram handles it fine.

But again, like I'm a person who will probably just stick to two at once.

And I feel like it's great in this nearly square format, because now it's feeling like two full size phones next to each other again.

But continuity, though that is a core feature of a folding phone going from the small to the large and back to the small again, and it's worked in the galaxy fold better than I've seen in any other folding phone demos.

I was impressed by continuity, and it was fast.

So you have a nap open on the small screen.

You want to get into it so you open up the fold, it opens up and it picks up right where you left off.

So the apse that are supported best, basically the ones from Google and Samsung right now will be the best at remembering everything about your small screen state and transferring it perfectly.

And then with some other APS, there will be a kind of a reset timeline or scrolling, which can be kind of annoying.

And then, in the very few ups that don't support it at all, going from the small screen to the big screen will give you a blown up version of the phone screen.

And then you'll have to hit this button in the corner to restart the app to get the new aspect ratio from my experience, it was a surprising amount of APS.

Pretty much all the APS I use, except for a YouTube studio, worked in some way with continuity, which was cool.

So by default, when you close the fold, it just goes to sleep.

Just because that's usually what you're doing.

When you close that you're going to sleeping, you're done using it.

But there is a setting that will allow you to continue using APS from the big screen to the small screen.

So in the display settings, it's called, continue APS on front screen so you can turn that on, too.

If you go in there and check like Google maps are accurate there, for example.

Then you have an APP open on the big screen.

You close the fold and it'll wake up where you left off on the smaller screen.

This will also continue to get better with Android Q.

As Google and Samsung continue to work on it, but it's already pretty impressive to me.

It's already miles better than the barely functional, really flex by I saw at CS.

Okay, so the rest of my thoughts on the galaxy fold our, I guess, pretty random.

But let's talk about so opening the fold in general is clumsy.

With these magnets and these buttons and how thick the phone is, it's constantly a bit of a battle for me.

Closing it is easy.

You just slap it shut and it's fine, but opening it always like you have to pry it apart, and I feel like I just never got used to that.

It's always a two handed action, the basil's on the front screen.

Yeah, they are super ugly, but I'm also pretty sure Samsung knows this, too, Like this is not what they would have I wanted to make.

They would have rather made imbecile list if they could, so that leads me to believe they were kind of forced to make it like this.

Maybe the tech in the hinge and other parts shrink the front screen down pretty bad.

There's an I fix it tear down, but that's suddenly gone.

But that's what I believe.

The battery of the fold is fantastic.

It is split in half like I've said.

So there's a cell in each half of this phone that add up to 4380 million powers.

And I've had great battery life on the fold, which is really impressive considering something with so much screen.

And then I got to say, this phone might have been even more awesome with an S pen right up the side.

Obviously, since it can't fold, of course.

But I'm guessing there isn't enough space for that.

And it's not even a galaxy note fold.

But I'm just, you know, imagining how dope would it be to pop it open, take notes on that huge screen and then just close it just a thought.

The Samsung Default keyboard is actually split when you opened the phone, actually prefer this cool keyboard and I've been using it, and it's not split.

But I suspect that people with smaller hands will appreciate the default split keyboard design, and the galaxy fold is super awkward as a GPS in your car so you don't want to use it with the tiny four point whatever inch screen.

But when folded open, it's way too wide for any of those clamping car amounts or even a cupholder or anything.

So, yes, someone's gonna have to make a sort of specialized car mount for this thing that holds it unfolded so you can use the knave as a big screen.

The Bixby button underneath the fingerprint reader is the worst.

I'm convinced them Song was like, Oh, we can just put the Bixby butting in there quietly and they won't even notice it because they'll be so focused on the fold.

Uh, yeah, no, I'm talking about It's Samsung.

It's not.

It's not the move it straight up route, just the form factor of the galaxy fold unfolding it so many times, you're gonna accidentally press that button constantly.

And, you know, we don't want to use Bixby, but hey, they dropped it in there, so at least you can turn it from being a single press to a double pressed open Bixby.

So there are less accidental triggers of your favorite voice assistant and then actually agree with a lot of what deter from the Verge was saying in his review about the front screen.

Of course, it's super small, and because it's so bad looking, most people won't want to use it.

Most of the time, I'm doing something quick on it, like taking a phone call or music controls are messing with podcasts or just something quick that you can use on the small screen and then put it back away.

But you know those times where you just take out your phone to do one quick thing, and then suddenly it's 15 minutes later and you're just mindlessly scrolling through instagram.

Yeah, it doesn't really happen on this front screen, so it doesn't really happen on this phone.

The screen is so small you don't really want to do anything on it, So any time you want to really get into something or get some work done, you have this intentional opening, the fold action and then you're using it.

Then you're getting work done or whatever you're gonna do when you're done, you close it up and you don't really ever have those like getting lost moments of wandering around on that small screen.

It's interesting.

So at the end of the day, like I said in that broken video, I was never really gonna recommend people go out and buy the $2000 Generation one Galaxy fold.

Why, you may ask Well, Frey two and one or a convertible Whatever you wanna call this toe actually be worth it in any category, it generally needs to either be better then or cheaper, then having to get both things in that category.

So for all those crazy laptops that fold backwards and have a touch screen in there, these two and one convertibles those are trying to be both a laptop and a tablet and a lot of those air specialized of being a better laptop than most, or being a better tablet than most.