I would like to stop carrying around the Galaxy Fold now. It is oddly shaped and heavy. It weighs down my bag even more than other phones do.
But the design is novel; it's centered around a flexible OLED display. That means when it’s expanded, when it unfurls itself to the world, it becomes a device roughly the size of a Kindle. When you’re ready to tuck the phone in your bag or pocket, you fold it shut, and it morphs into something akin to a shiny, button-free TV remote.
This folding phone costs $1,980. Samsung has made clear that it considers the Galaxy Fold a luxury item. The company is unabashedly aiming it at early adopters and people who just need to have the New Thing. But for that cost, even hypebeasts have to carefully consider how the phone fits into their lives, their coat pockets, their jeans, their bags. They have to consider the behavior change that a folding phone requires, and whether that adjustment period is worth it when our non-folding glass slabs currently do a pretty good job on nearly every task we ask them to do.
Personally I wouldn’t buy the Samsung Galaxy Fold, even if it sometimes expressed itself as a useful gadget. Samsung has managed to ship a flexible phone; that in itself is noteworthy. And there may yet be a time when the world is full of foldable displays: laptops that become tablets, tablets that become phones, large-scale screens that can be rolled up and carted off. But the journey there is going to be a little awkward.
In order to understand the somewhat alarming “Care Instructions” that come packaged with the Galaxy Fold, you might need a refresh on what happened during the initial launch of the Galaxy Fold. Samsung revealed the device with great fanfare earlier this year, then in mid-April began sending out review units of the phone to YouTubers and select journalists, including WIRED writers. Shortly afterwards, some of those Folds began to show signs of serious reliability issues, mostly in the form of broken screens. (WIRED’s Galaxy Fold loaner didn’t show any signs of damage after five days, but the issues with other units were very real.)
So Samsung delayed the Fold’s release. From April to September, the company worked on a series of reinforcements that were supposed to strengthen the phone and its “Infinity Flex” display. Samsung couldn’t exactly reinvent the folding phone wheel at that point. This OLED display and its flexible polymer layers had been in the works for years, and Samsung wasn’t about to start from scratch. But it did shrink the gap between the phone’s hinge and its two halves and added additional metal layers beneath the bendy display to make it stronger.