The IT Nerd

I’ll say this right up front. I have not seen nor held a Samsung Galaxy Fold. And nobody outside of Huawei has seen nor held a Mate X. But both of these foldable phones which are leading the way in the new frontier of the smartphone market do have one thing in common. You should avoid them like the plague.

Why?

Let’s start with price. The Galaxy Fold is almost $2000 US. The Mate X is going to be $500 more than that. And at that price point, it makes the iPhone XS which I criticized as being insanely expensive look cheap. But what you’re paying for is being on the bleeding edge of tech because up until this point the only foldable phone that was out there was the ZTE Axon M and that shall we say, underwhelmed the planet. The Samsung and Hwawei offerings however are more in line with what people expect from a foldable phone as they have seamless screens and the versions of Android that they come with more or less allow whatever apps and content to look great.

But there’s always a catch and Samsung found that out last week when review units sent to selected tech reviewers started to exhibit two issues:

• Several reviewers peeled off one of the layers of the screen which at first glance seemed to be there to be removed. But in fact it was a integral part of the screen that when removed caused the screen to die. I’ll chalk this up to user error which will be mitigated by warnings being added to the consumer units when they ship. Still, this was not a good start.
• The more serious issue was the review unit sent to The Verge which had their review unit fail after bulges appeared in the hinge area. CNBC also had a screen failure. But in both cases, neither outlet removed the layer of the screen that I mentioned above.

This of course started a hashtag on Twitter: Foldgate. Which is not the press that Samsung was looking for. Added to that is the fact that launch events that Samsung had for the Galaxy Fold in China have been cancelled leads one to conclude that Samsung has a major problem on its hands and they know it. And one has to wonder what’s going to happen with the phone’s launch on April 26th in the US.

Here’s the problem. When it comes to these products, they are version 1.0 of some very cutting edge tech. Which makes you the beta tester for these products. And you are paying big bucks to beta test these products. Take it from me, that never ends well. I remember when I got the first Apple Newton back in the day and the news of its inability to read handwriting, a key feature for the product, made the news and was mocked in the Doonesbury cartoon strip for about a week. Subsequent versions were marginally better on that front and in other ways, but the damage was done and the product was killed about 4 years later. But here’s the flipside of that experience with the Newton. Apple took all that tech from that product and moved into places like the iPod and into macOS.

The thing is, I partially financed that by buying a version 1.0 product. And upon understanding that fact, I vowed never to buy a version 1.0 product again. And those who buy the Galaxy Fold or the Mate X will be doing the same thing. Which is helping Samsung and Huawei to finance the foldable phone that you actually want to buy. Because neither of those phones are fully baked products as evidenced by the issues that the Samsung variant is having at the moment with experienced tech reviewers. Which of course does not bode well for what might happen with the average consumer. Now will foldable phones be something that will be a viable option for consumers someday? I think so. But today is not that day. And seeing that everyone has to work hard for their money, I would suggest that you avoid Samsung and Huawei’s Kickstarter projects and not buy either of their phones in the here and now. Your wallet will thank you.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2019 at 9:08 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Huawei, Samsung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.