It’s unusual for a phone as new as the Galaxy Fold to be so battle-worn. In the course of its short life, the foldable phone went from the pinnacle of hype for our collective mobile future to cautionary tale about companies that rush to sell radical, under-tested technology. (Here’s a brief history of what went wrong with Samsung’s delicate plastic display.)
Now, after testing and using two versions of the Galaxy Fold — the original model and this redesigned version that fixes Samsung’s biggest design flaws — everything wonderful and terrible with the $1,980 Galaxy Fold is crystal clear.
As a blueprint for how foldable phones could be truly useful, it undeniably succeeds. There’s something physically satisfying about using the fold, and its 7.3-inch screen is a dream for watching movies, looking at photos and reading anything. Wanting to multitask felt natural, and more than once I used the Fold as a second screen that was easy to fold up and zip into my jacket pocket the moment I was done.
But as big a favor as the Fold does for all foldable-phone kind in proving that yes, we do want to see where foldable phones go, the Fold itself is still lacking when it comes to creature comforts.
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The Galaxy Fold has its charms, and also some rough spots.
Angela Lang/CNET
Samsung fixed the most hazardous errors to the Fold’s display, the ones that caused the phone to stop working. But it didn’t fix some more baked-in problems. The phone remains too expensive and too fragile, with some puzzling choices that give the inner screen an enormous notch and a plasticky bezel, and the outer screen a cramped keyboard that’s just no fun to use.
Battery life is strangely shorter than it seems it should be, despite two cells (on on each side of the hinge) that forms the equivalent of a 4,500mAh battery. It lasted an average of 12 hours, 15 minutes in CNET’s looped video test in airplane mode, compared to 21.5 hours for the Galaxy Note 10 Plus.