Okay, so I’m not going to spend much time on Samsung’s just-released Galaxy Fold because, to be frank, I’ve already spent far more time discussing this phone than it deserves. Yes, this past Friday morning the Galaxy Fold became the first smartphone with a foldable display to be released in the United States. It’s great news insofar as it’s an important first step toward a market where foldable devices are widely available, but that’s unfortunately the only good thing about Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold.
I told you a year before it was released, I told you a week before it was supposed to be released back in April, and I told you again a couple of months later. Now, I’m going to tell you one last time: the Galaxy Fold is a piece of junk. It was always going to be a piece of junk. Samsung’s first-generation mobile products are inevitably pieces of junk for all the reasons I’ve explained time and time again. They’re the physical embodiment of a troll racing to type “First!” in the comments section under a YouTube video. Samsung cares far more about beating the competition to market with a new product than it does about actually making a good product. You should never, ever buy a first-generation mobile product from Samsung. That’s always true but it’s especially true now that the Galaxy Fold has finally been released in the US.
The Galaxy Fold has a terrible design for so many reasons, and I’m not even just talking about all the quality control problems Samsung had before it “fixed” the Fold’s biggest issues. Why is the word “fixed” in quotes, you ask? Because the redesigned Galaxy Fold Samsung released on Friday is already breaking. Yup… and you can expect countless more stories like this to pop up in the coming weeks as Galaxy Fold handsets continue to break.
Apart from being poorly designed and poorly made, the Galaxy Fold is also quite ugly. That’s not merely my opinion, the phone is objectively ugly. It’s too thick, there are massive bezels around the main display, there are even more massive bezels around the secondary display on the outside of the phone, and there’s a huge unsightly notch chomped out of the corner of the main display. I could go on and on.
Samsung fans will argue that it’s a first-generation product and the tech involved is too young to make the design any better. And guess what, they’re correct! That’s why other companies that actually care about making good products aren’t launching foldable smartphones right now. The tech simply isn’t ready for prime time, and it won’t be for at least another couple of years. Samsung doesn’t care, though. First!
If you want our review of the Galaxy Fold, here it is: don’t buy it. That’s it. Our review is three words long.
Foldable smartphones are going to be amazing in a few years when the tech is a bit more mature and there aren’t so many barriers that are impossible for smartphone makers to overcome. And there’s a very good chance that Samsung will eventually be a market leader. Remember how Samsung’s Galaxy S phones started out as pieces of junk but have now become some of the best flagship phones on the planet? The same thing will probably happen with Samsung’s foldable smartphones. In the meantime, however, the idea of spending $2,000 on a smartphone that is undeniably a piece of junk is completely insane.
