The Samsung Galaxy Fold is an incredible phone that came at the right time. What more can we say when even it’s maker have described it as “the foundation of the smartphone of tomorrow”? And we really want to believe that.

Honestly, except in niche markets offering one-offs, there’s been nothing innovative like the Samsung Galaxy Fold in the mobile phone market in recent years. And as far as some qualities are concerned, chief of them being that it is a Samsung and running Android OS, it will probably maintain that throne for a while.

The Fold was first formally introduced in February 2019 ^[1]. Naturally, the introduction set a lot of tongues wagging. Here was a phone promising a brand new design; it was like a breath of fresh air in the already stagnant atmosphere of phone designs! In a market where phone makers are only competing on the margin, the Fold shook the idea of what a smartphone should look like to its foundations.

The first thing you will notice about the Samsung Fold is that everything about it is noticeable. Featuring a clamshell design; what should have been two separate normal slab-shaped form factor is joined with a special hinge. While closed, on the outside, the front of the left half featured a 4.6 inch screen useful for launching several apps and doing a host of other things. Opening the Samsung Fold is where the magic lies!

Opening the Samsung Fold, it becomes an uninterrupted 7.3 inch tablet phone – a screen spread across both halves of the tablet. The screen that made up this 7.3 inch foldable area is (you guessed it) not made of glass. It is made of a composite polymer Samsung is not ready to reveal. Anyway, Samsung calls it the Dynamic AMOLED display, and it is extremely breathtaking. It is what makes the screen foldable.

We have spent quite a long time staring at this phone. But of course, it is mainly the striking design that first stares back at us. However, we know the Samsung Fold goes deeper than that. With a price tag of around $2000, Samsung has no choice but to make it so!

Harkening back to the Nokia Communicator series of phones, Samsung bringing on a clamshell design in 2019 is selling exclusivity once again. But for the progress of technology, that gesture is welcome. And they did it right.

The last clamshell designs probably to draw sufficient attention due to their exclusivity and ability are the Nokia Communicator series. But in 2019, the brand of exclusivity being brought on once again by the Samsung Galaxy Fold is actually a brand new thing. After all, for example, all smartphones have features they share in common, but when the Samsung Galaxy Fold enters the market, it will be the first mass-produced phone whose screen can fold.

But apart from earning you envious eyes from friends, can Samsung Fold make you more productive? Is Samsung Galaxy Fold worth it. This article is written to answer those two questions for you as simply as possible.

Piece by piece, we’ll do the analysis. Follow us!

 1.        Yes. Google (Android) is giving it full support.  

It will be a very very bad dream if the Fold arrives with anything other than an Android OS. Nevertheless, it was a dream that briefly worried enthusiasts.

We all thought Samsung coming up with such a strange form factor (a wide folding screen) may require it adopting/developing a different OS to fit the peculiar operations of such a screen. But, no, Google’s Android has decided to play along, fully.

Speaking at the 2018 Samsung Developer Conference (SCD18) in San Francisco, Glen Murphy, Google’s head of Android UX confirmed that “Android is officially supporting the foldable form factor and … will be building into the platform the APIs to ensure a seamless foldable experience” ^[2]

Samsung and Google have had a long, fruitful working relationship, and we hope this won’t be an exception. The Samsung Galaxy Fold runs on Android 9.0 Pie. This means you can access your productivity apps on a larger screen.  

2.         It Features “App Continuity”

We think another way the Samsung Fold might make you more productive is through a feature in it called “App Continuity”

In the Samsung Galaxy Fold, don’t forget you are dealing with two capable screens: the smaller screen, used while it is closed, and the folded screen that can be unfolded.

“App Continuity” works by seamlessly moving your display from one screen to the other. This means that if you launch certain apps through the smaller screen while the Fold is closed, you can continue using the app(s) on the larger screen inside once you open the phone.

What makes “App Continuity” so interesting is that it came fully made – It is not a quick gimmick designed to just resize your app window size anyhow and dump it on either screen. No. It does it with an appropriate resolution change, and all app elements remained organized and sharp, although bigger.

Samsung actually partnered with Google to redesign some of their existing apps to include this “App Continuity” feature! This means that Google apps like Calendar, Chrome, Maps and Mail already have been redesigned to work with it. ^[4]

A lot of third-party app developers are also working on tweaking existing apps to work perfectly with “App Continuity”, and to develop new apps that will take advantage of the feature.

This means that you don’t need to switch to a PC or tablet when you want to view an item on a bigger screen. You can do it right on your phone. This should definitely boost your productivity when used rightly.

If the Samsung Fold is not going to do anything else, at least we can be sure it will revolutionize how apps are designed and presented, even if only for it and it likes.

3. It Supports Multi-Active Windows

You might agree with Samsung executive, John Denison, when he described this feature as “multitasking as it was meant to be”.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold Infinity Flex Display supports multi-active window, which is a feature that lets you actively run up to three applications on the screen at once. This means that you could be working on your to-do list in one window while scrolling through your newsfeed in another window and fixing up an alarm in a third window – all working concurrently.

Multi-active window is a feature clearly designed to ride on the larger screen provided by the Samsung Galaxy Fold – It would have been a pointless ability for a phone with a smaller screen. However, though, this ability itself will be rolled out by Samsung via it’s One UI, a UI already adopted on some of their previous product^[5]. It’s like the proverbial square peg which has just found a fitting square hole in the kind of power and display size provided by the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

Surely, the feature will soon be a staple of other high-end Android devices. But until then, Samsung is ready to truly simplify our tech lives with this and make us more productive.

4. There’s plenty of processing power and space and this will assist your productivity

For people who want their phones to function similarly as an ultraportable laptop, they will definitely fall in love with the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

While it is only a phone, the processing power it boasts of will soon put more app developers on nitro to develop more powerful apps to utilize all that processing power.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold has a 7nm octa-core processor and 12GB of RAM – That’s more than enough processing power to jerk the fast and the best out of any phone app! Apps open and close quickly. Android 9 runs on it like a Merry-go-round on lube!

It is safe to suspect that apart from the specs matching the price tag, Samsung deliberately powers up the phone to meet the covert but real desire of people to have phones that has similar capabilities with their laptops, but small enough to carry in their pockets. A little on the big side though, like a remote control, in size, the Samsung Galaxy Fold is still not an abomination in the smartphone world, the worst it can be called is a clunky phone!

As for the storage space, there’s plenty of room. In fact, so much room Samsung reasonably conclude there will be no need for an expandable storage in the Galaxy Fold. With 512GB of storage space, we think no reasonable person will deny they haven’t tried. 512GB is far more than the average person will ever use.

Wait, how many apps will that accommodate? Don’t even think about it!

We will like to believe that Samsung Fold is like a laptop in your pocket. You can easily get things done fast and manage information on the go.

 5. The battery power is good and comes with the usual Samsung perks

In recent times, a smartphone with poor battery power is as good as useless. Fortunately, such phones are actually getting rarer because battery technology is improving.

As far as the Samsung Galaxy Fold is concerned, it’s battery set-up is actually a bit unusual – the Fold has two batteries, one in each half of the clamshell design.

Both batteries combine to give 4,380mAh; enough juice to use the phone all day, depending on the usage.

The Galaxy Fold also supports wireless charging just like its predecessors, the S10 and the S10 plus. The Wireless PowerShare feature that enables users to charge other wireless charging compatible devices is also present in the Galaxy Fold too, carried over from the S10 and S10 plus. This means the Samsung Galaxy Fold can act as a power bank too.

 6. It has been built to last      

The elegance of the Samsung Galaxy Fold is deceptive – it suggests fragility. But the truth is that it has been built to last.

Ordinarily, any phone bearing the Samsung brand shouldn’t be expected to fall apart like a house of cards as soon as it possibly can. But the Samsung Note 7 overheating/burning problem still reminds us Samsung can make mistakes too, but only as much as it made us certain they will never want to make any costly mistake ever again.

So put your mind at rest. We know $2000 is no easy price tag!

Actually, Samsung has been very careful in making every external component (that’s what we can see) of the Fold work well and last long. The 7.3 inch Dynamic AMOLED display is literally shatter-proof as it is made of a flexible polymer rather than glass. ^[6] So is the hinge at the back designed to sustain the folding, Samsung claims it has been engineered to withstand over 200,000 folds and unfolds. ^[7] This means that if you open and shuts the Galaxy Fold 100 times per day (quite unlikely), you can do that for five years and the hinge won’t break down!

 7.        It will probably get cheaper and this will make it more worthy of our money

The Samsung Galaxy Fold is now a trailblazer. Its existence means more like it are sure to come; from Samsung and other manufacturers. However, other manufacturers joining the bandwagon means phone like that will get cheaper in the long run.

Samsung has spent over 10 years and gone through many hundreds of prototypes ^[8] before perfecting the technology behind this foldable phone, so it is justifiable its first incarnation will be expensive. Depending on how you see it, it will be a tool or toy for mostly the wealthy among us. Some outlets are even reporting Samsung wouldn’t make more than a million units of the phone – Exclusivity birthed by price!

One thing is notable though: Samsung is ushering in a new era of phone design by re-introducing that form factor. And their introduction of a folding screen means our display technology may not be the same again. However, it is still a novelty. Once the novelty wears off, it will probably be like any other phone. The price will get increasingly lower as soon as competing manufacturers enter its niche.

Thanks to the boldness of Samsung, foldable phones may soon be commonplace, improved and inexpensive.

References:

 1.        Samsung’s wildly ambitious $2,000 folding phone that was breaking on people after days of use is finally set to arrive in September – https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-galaxy-fold-mess-explained-2019-4 (Retrieved 6-9-2019)           

 2.        Samsung has shown a folding phone is possible – but Android will make it huge – https://www.wired.co.uk/article/samsung-folding-phone-infinity-flex (Retrieved 6-9-2019)                  

 3.        Read our review – https://m.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_fold-9523.php (Retrieved 6-9-2019)       

 4.        First Look: Hands on With Samsung’s Galaxy Fold – https://www.wired.com/story/samsung-galaxy-fold-hands-on-first-impressions/  (Retrieved 6-9-2019)               

 5.        Samsung has shown a folding phone is possible – but Android will make it huge – https://www.wired.co.uk/article/samsung-folding-phone-infinity-flex (Retrieved 6-9-2019)                              

 6.        First Look: Hands on With Samsung’s Galaxy Fold – https://www.wired.com/story/samsung-galaxy-fold-hands-on-first-impressions/  (Retrieved 6-9-2019)   

 7.        Hands on: Samsung Galaxy Fold review https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-fold-hands-on (Retrieved 6-9-2019) 

 8.        Ibid.