- I loved the original Galaxy Fold.
It's gigantic screen, top tier performance,
and head turning, "wow, cool phone" factor
was enough for me to ask it to go steady with me.
Until I eventually got tired
of carrying a second device around in my back pocket,
and ultimately junked it for one
without a floppy hinge, dim screen,
and game breaking software bugs.
I mean, how could Samsung treat
their most premium customers?
The ones who spent $2,000 on a smartphone,
like second class citizens?
Is the question that I asked back then.
Well, now I have the answer,
along with my one month review of the only smartphone
who's asking price would make Apple blush;
the Galaxy Z Fold2.
And it's brought to you by,
this ugly picture of me.
Thanks dbrand.
You can get this,
or the infinitely more attractive sticker bomb skin,
which is chock full of LTT memes and tech references
at the link below.
But only for a limited time.
So act now, or robots will come murder your pets.
Why do they want me to say that?
I don't condone pet murder.
Wait, sorry, they're paying how much?
All right.
Pet murder then.
(upbeat music)
The original Fold already did a lot of things right,
once we got past the whole breakage scandal.
But it had four obvious flaws.
The outer screen was too small to really be usable,
even with my homunculus hands.
The main foldable screen was too dim,
the hinge seemed great out of the box
only to turn into a flacid pile of suck down the line,
and the software was buggy.
And I'll address each of these
with the Z Fold2 as we go.
But first, the pitch.
Why on earth would you spend $2,000 on a phone?
Well, I never would.
But if dbrand wants to send me one,
there is a solid argument to be made
for chucking everything else and switching to it.
For starters...
Yes, my friends.
From a dollars per square millimeter
of screen area standpoint,
the Z Fold2 actually doesn't look too bad
in comparison to the latest and greatest in Apple
or Samsung's own lineups, does it?
It really is like carrying a tiny tablet
around in your pocket.
And almost everything about the experience
is better than last time.
For starters,
the weird, jello effect when you're scrolling
is almost completely gone and,
that gigantic multi-lens selfie camera
is replaced by a tiny little hole punch that
drove me crazy at first 'cause like,
why wouldn't I just take a selfie like this
and use the front screen and then my better rear camera?
And then I could have my screen totally unblemished.
Until I realized what a terrible experience
using it this way was ergonomically,
and accepted that, yeah,
the hole punch here was probably the best they could do.
Next up is brightness.
The final straw for me, when I was using the original Fold,
was a trip to LA when I realized,
walking out of the airport,
that it was completely unusable in strong sunlight.
By contrast,
totally intentional, by the way,
the Z Fold2's max brightness managed 741 nits
in GSMArena's tests.
Not market-leading, but in the real world,
it was noticeably more usable.
And then finally, there's the hinge.
I'm gonna admit something.
Andy, I'm sorry.
I was super miffed,
when I got my Fold1 back from the camera guys,
with a bit of a Gull wing shape to it,
unless you like really crank it open.
And even though I never said anything,
I blamed my shooters.
But it's clear to me now, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
seeing the infinitely better hinge on the Z Fold2
that the old one never stood a chance.
This feels much more sturdy.
And on top of that,
it actually opens up to almost
any angle that you could want.
Although, I have to confess,
that with all this screen real estate at my fingertips,
Samsung's idea of using the fold as like
a built-in stand while you watch movies
feels pretty wasteful.
I'm just gonna do that and use the whole thing.
Unlike, multitasking,
which is where this device really shines.
Got a WhatsApp chat going,
and you wanna browse the internet?
No problem.
Got a spreadsheet rolling
and wanna reference some data to copy into it?
You can do that too.
Are you more of a single task kinda person?
No problem.
In supported apps, we will talk about this later,
the Z Fold2 offers what is simply
the most immersive experience
of any phone that I've ever used, ever.
And pretty much without compromise.
With the latest Snapdragon 865 processor, 12 gigs of Ram,
and a 120 Hertz display.
Oh, I can't believe I didn't mention that before.
Apple's A14 Bionic might be a lot faster on paper,
and when rendering a video,
and when gaming,
okay. It's a super impressive chip.
And we'll make a video about that,
make sure you're subscribed.
But the Z Fold2,
and any device with a high refresh rate display,
just plain feels smoother in day-to-day use.
The best part,
is that even with that enabled,
the 4500 milliamp hour battery
only failed to get me through the day a couple of times.
And that's with me seeing a fair bit of TV.
Don't worry though, I'm actually sleeping
for a lot of while that's running.
I don't actually watch eight hours of TV a day.
And by the way, the speakers are great.
I also unlock,
70 times a day, according to Samsung's usage stats,
with 100 plus notifications coming in.
Although that notification number seems a little off.
And we will talk about that later too.
For now, more good things.
5G, Corning Victus glass on the front,
up to 512 gigs of internal storage,
wireless charging with reverse charging as well.
What could be bad?
All right, here's something.
The unfolded screen is bigger than last time.
I know, I know,
crazy thing, right?
I'm like, "Hey, sales pitch, giant screen.
By the way, my biggest complaint,
giant screen."
Lemme explain.
One of the biggest reasons that I almost never use a tablet
is that unless you sit down at a table,
and hook a keyboard and track pad up to it,
it's basically impossible to type.
And at that point,
I might as well just use a laptop.
Now phones get around this
by allowing anyone with fast thumbs,
and a reasonably good predictive keyboard,
to get darn close to desktop typing speeds.
As long as the whole keyboard
is actually reachable with your thumbs.
So for me,
a taller unfolded screen would have been way better.
It would have reduced the size of black bars
on full screen media,
and resulted in a better fit
when reading large documents in portrait.
But then Samsung went and widened the screen instead,
making it hard for me
to reach the middle of the keyboard quickly.
I know, both the stock keyboard,
and actually Swiftkey for that matter, do have split modes.
But for me, I reach over the center line a lot
when I'm at full speed,
and I can't do that on a splitty.
Now, if you've got big hands,
or you don't mind the split, you can ignore all that.
But I did have to get it out there.
And this too.
The included screen protector is horrible.
I understand why it's there.
Glass doesn't fold, at least not yet.
Which means that almost anything
is gonna leave horrible scratches
in that underlying plastic screen.
Unfortunately, using the also plastic screen protector
has really felt like going back over a decade ago.
Like the way my finger, like,
here, listen to this.
Right?
And it's almost impossible to keep clean.
So, here's what we're gonna do.
Oh yeah, that, and it's actually starting
to come off at the bottom hinge point.
I'm just gonna pull it off right now.
Samsung does not advise it.
But my understanding is that
technically it's a thing that you can do, so
this really does feel like the kinda screen protector
I would have gotten on like my HP IPAQ Pocket PC.
Immediately looks better.
Feel how thick look, how thick this is.
Check this out.
It's disgusting.
Oh my God, that is so much better.
- [Guy] Yeah, that's way better.
- That's actually my backhand making that noise.
Way smoother.
If that gets ruined, at least the Z Fold2's outer screen
is a whopping two inches larger diagonally than the old one.
It's still not a pleasure to use
by any stretch of the imagination.
But compared to the tiny first gen outer screen,
it's way better.
Like if you just need to
quickly reply to a text or something,
it gets the trick done.
Even if holding a device like this
makes me feel a little bad for mocking like,
the makers of chunky gaming phones.
Now, let's talk in detail about the camera.
Actually, I'm just kidding.
It is fine.
It's totally not the main attraction
for a device like this though,
so I didn't bother sending Brandon out
for two days to take pictures.
Realistically, all it needs to be is
good enough that the vast majority of people
would never notice the difference.
And it definitely manages that.
I never felt like it was holding me back.
But then I'm also happy with my daily driver Note9,
which at this point is
basically crap compared to the latest Pixels and iPhones.
Did you notice that by the way?
That bit where I said daily driver Note9?
Yeah, I think it's happening again.
The Z Fold2 simply can't be my one and only phone
when it has game breaking bugs like this.
Back to my notification stats.
Where the hell is Microsoft Teams?
I use it for work.
And I promise you, I get plenty of messages
from people at work.
Notifications are enabled,
and yet, somehow I don't get any of them.
Now to be clear, Teams notifications
are a festering piece of crap and Microsoft should feel bad.
I'm not the only one in this building that is like,
having problems with it.
But for all I know,
Samsung could easily be partially to blame for this.
Because even very mainstream apps,
like Instagram and YouTube,
offer degraded experiences on the Z Fold2.
Instagram, actually, I hadn't even put this in the script,
but this is hilarious.
Instagram looks like garbage and has black bars on the side.
Not to mention that it started double posting,
every time I tried to post an update.
Which was especially charming
because I couldn't even go back in my older posts
and see that there were two posts
on the Z Fold2.
I had to check on a different phone to realize,
"Oh no, all these comments about double posts."
'Cause there's the second post.
So it took me a while to figure out there was a problem.
And then, YouTube still doesn't have support
for community posts or stories,
features that,
well, as a YouTuber,
I regularly use.
Now when pressed,
my Google contact all but confirmed
what I've always suspected
is the case with the device like this.
"Yeah, Linus, we know it's expensive but,
frankly that's not our problem.
And for anything that's not running stock Android,
there's just no guarantee that
it's gonna work out of the box.
And it takes coordination between Google engineers,
and engineers at the device manufacturer,
to make these kinds of things work.
As you can imagine, at the moment,
the dozens of people like you running foldable phones,
just aren't a priority compared to the millions
who will be running iPhone 12s within the next few weeks,
so you're just gonna have to deal with it."
Well, okay then.
See you later.
(phone thuds)
Oh, it's just the ROG phone.
For a limited time,
we've got a drop where you can, for some reason,
buy this face skin.
But I kind of figured, we talked to them.
I was like, "Really you guys."
So we also worked on this super cool sticker bomb skin.
It's all the same dbrand quality
that you guys have come to expect.
You know, precision fit,
comes off without any residue,
protects your device from incidental scuffs and scrapes.
And the drop is available for two weeks.
So get it while it's here.
Because after that, it is gone.
It's gonna be linked down below.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out...
I don't know what the hey,
go watch "Whole Room Water Cooling."
That was years ago,
but a lot of the new viewers
probably have never heard of it.
We water-cooled an entire room.
Yeah, it was awful.
Pet murder then.
(laughter)
Sorry?
Is it funny though?
Okay, you sure it's not too far?
Okay.
People can tell it's just silly?
Okay.