Samsung’s new smartphone: know when to fold them

It’s pretty safe to call the launch of Samsung’s first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Z Fold, a debacle. Even the CEO of the company referred to it as “a disgrace” at the time, and that probably falls short.

The first Fold was sent to reviewers prior to shipment, as is often done with flashship phones. Those tech journalists discovered all sorts of flaws, from a protective film that was too easily peeled off and shattered the screen to the fact that dirt and sand quickly made their way into and under the screen.

Ultimately, Samsung scrapped the launch, retired the phones that had come out, and tweaked the glitches. Months later, a patched Z Fold finally went on sale.

what a difference a year makes. Samsung released the successor, the Z Fold 2, last week. I’ve been playing with one for several days now and it’s an impressive piece of hardware. The durability issues that plagued the original are gone, but many of the conceptual flaws remain. Plus, it’s still a very expensive phone, selling for $ 2,000.

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The Basics: The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is a smartphone that folds out onto a tablet. There is a 6.2-inch external touchscreen on one side, allowing you to use it like a standard smartphone. Flip it open and it’s a 7.6-inch tablet with a slightly smaller screen than the one found on Apple’s iPad mini. It’s packed with impressive technical achievements, notably that the glass on the side of the tablet folds up when closed.

It’s a heavy smartphone and twice as thick when folded because it’s basically two glass slabs held together by a strong hinge. It weighs 9.7 ounces, or about half an ounce less than an iPad mini. Carrying an iPad mini with this type of weight seems light, but carrying it with a folded smartphone with that weight is not.

The build feels solid. The inner screen protective layer no longer feels like a temporary film, which is what prompted reviewers to peel it off last year. The body is a rigid metal.

This is actually Samsung’s third folding phone. Last year, it released the Galaxy Flip Z, which looked like the foldable-style phones of the early 2000s, but opens up to become a smartphone. That device used a hinge with internal plastic brushes that prevents dirt, and has been incorporated into the design of the Z Fold 2.

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The hinge also allows you to contort the fold at infinite angles, a feature called Flex Mode, and is rigid to ensure that the angles stay in place. In fact, it may be a bit stiff. I found the Z Fold 2 quite sturdy, and I forget trying to open it with one hand.

The tablet screen has a crease in the middle that is not too prominent, but you are always aware that it is there, especially when you move your finger across the screen. Both displays look great, with a 120Hz refresh rate that’s adaptive, meaning it slows down when the screen is static and speeds up as needed when there’s motion on the screen. This helps with battery life.

Which, by the way, is fair. . . OK. There are two batteries, one inside each panel, and I found the battery life to be enough to last a full day with light use (viewing videos, speed tests, photography), but not much else. The Samsung Note20 Ultra, which I also recently reviewed, performed much better.

One of the cooler features is that you can launch an app on the outer screen with the Z Fold 2 closed, then open it and the running app is instantly transferred to the inner screen, in all its glory. Conversely, you can fold the device into an L-shape and apps like YouTube will display a video in the top half and text in the bottom. Only a handful of apps work this way, but more are sure to come.

You can also run up to three windowed apps on the tablet screen at the same time, although this multitasking feature, called Multi-Active Window, works best with two. (That also makes me more interested in trying Microsoft’s foldable phone, the Android-based Surface Duo, which has its two separate displays and is specifically designed for this kind of two-app use.)

The cameras are respectable, but not as versatile or high-powered as those on the Samsung S20 and Note20 smartphones. There are three 12-megapixel cameras on the back of the device, mounted on a vertical bulge: a main camera, a wide-angle, and a telephoto. The front cameras on the outer screen and the tablet screen are both 10 megapixels. Overall, I found the photos taken with the exterior cameras on the outside to be fine, but on the inside they looked a bit washed out – the colors weren’t showing up, as is often the case on Samsung phones.

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For a device that costs this much, there are some surprising corners that have been cut. It is only available with 256 gigabytes of storage; for an expensive smartphone like this, I’d expect 512GB, but that’s not even an option. And that might be forgivable if you could expand the storage via a memory card, but no.

While the Z Fold 2 is a far better technical feat than its predecessor, its price and limitations continue to make it a niche luxury smartphone. Foldable phones may one day be commonplace and affordable, but this is not that day.