Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 Unboxing: 3 Major Upgrades!”.
Hey, what’s up i’m kphd here, and this is it. This is a the sequel to the phone that shook up the the folding phone world last year. It was, it was headline worthy. This is the galaxy z, fold.
2. 5G. It’S the fold too, and i’m shooting this in a bit of an unusual location, as you can probably already see, i’m in a trailer in the middle of the desert in arizona, because i’m out here essentially hosting david blaine’s ascension project, where he’s gon na float up Into the sky, while holding on to balloons, it’s it’s kind of insane and it’s a pleasure to be here, but i figured while i’m here.
I will have samsung ship the phone out here and then i also had andrew at the studio ship uh komodo out here. So we’re gon na do a little uh first impressions and hands-on of this phone before uh tomorrow. There’S the launch so watch that i’ll link it below if you haven’t gotten to it yet, but this is the phone now.
A lot happened last year with the galaxy fold right, but the benefit of being samsung and just experimenting out in the open like that is you can make mistakes and learn a lot from them? You learn a lot more from mistakes usually than success, and so one thing i’ve noticed about the galaxy fold 2 z, fold 2 is a lot of these. Changes are learned directly from the fold 1., so the box, of course here, is a little bit cooler. If i do say so myself, but as you get into it, you’ll notice, it doesn’t come with quite the same array of accessories like the top thing.
Here is paperwork and that’s kind of it. So you get the phone of course and then there’s just a fast charger included, which of course, you would expect for the two thousand dollars that this phone will cost again this year. But this time there’s no case there is no headphones and there’s nothing else. That really feels special about the stuff that comes with it, which to me honestly, is a little bit of a bummer like i thought there was no question.
This phone would come with all that extra stuff and then a note about the screen protectors. So we took the plastic off at the beginning, and that was all great, but the fold 2 comes with a plastic screen protector on the front display and on the inside on the main display. So i asked samsung very specifically about this. The screen protector on the front display is cool to remove yourself and they said that was fine.
I did that easy, just like any other screen protector, but they recommend someone officially from samsung removes this pre-installed main screen screen protector, and i don’t know how i feel about that. I it doesn’t look that great. It does have like a little bit of a haze. I feel like i’m going to want to remove it pretty soon, i’m probably going to remove it but i’ll.
Let you guys know on twitter when i do attempt that, but my impression here of the phone overall really is: there are three main areas where there are major improvements, uh and that would be the screens, the hinge and the cameras and there’s other stuff. There’S little design tweaks and there’s improved specs and all that, but all the rest is really minor or it revolves around those main three things: i’ll leave uh youtube chapter time stamps below. If you want to skip to your favorite part. So, of course, like i said, the specs are updated too, but we’ve seen those already snapdragon, 865 plus 12 gigs of ram 4500 milliamp hour dual battery and the design, i think, feels more refined. You can see it’s boxier, it’s a little weightier and i’m such a big fan of the satin finish. It’S not even funny.
It’S still mystic bronze. You can also get mystic black, but it’s really in the big areas where you see not just hardware improvement but real. Potentially big usability improvement too. So, let’s start with the screens, this one’s pretty simple. Both the cover screen and the main screen got big upgrades.
The cover screen is now full size, so it goes from like that little 4.6 inch display with huge bezels. That was, i think, easily the worst looking part of the first fold to a genuine corner to corner full size 6.2 inch display it’s still really narrow, but i feel like this alone is going to change the way i use the fold. The tiny cover screen before was actually pretty limiting and i didn’t want to use the phone closed as much, but now that changes a bit, i feel like the full size, smartphone type of size on the outside will change the behavior before you even open the thing, But then on the inside once you do open it up. There is your second big screen change.
The bezels inside are a little thinner. It’S now a 7.6 inch square display versus 7.3, but i think more importantly, the huge corner cutout from last year is gone for just a single 10 megapixel hole, punch, selfie, camera and i’ll talk more about why that makes a lot more sense in the camera section. But the bottom line is that ends up giving you a noticeably more impressive. Huge canvas of the screen like this is what i was hoping for when i was dreaming of improvements for folding phones. It’S impressive and this main screen is also now bumped up to yes, high refresh rate 120 hertz, it’s actually adaptive refresh rate, so it can modulate anywhere from 11 to 120 hertz, depending on what’s happening on the screen but yeah.
This is one of those things again that i mentioned even last year with the fold one of improvements i’d like them to make, and we have it here now now. One of the things i was wondering about is the crease, since it’s now using the same ultra thin glass on the z flip and i’m i’m seeing the crease. Still it’s not like it’s going to disappear after one generation uh, you run your finger over it. A little bit and you can still feel it like the z-flip but again just like those other phones, it’s not quite as big of a problem if you’re just looking at the content and not looking for the crease, so the screen’s pretty sweet thumbs up for me.
So it’s just such a what a difference that cover screen makes right, but that brings us to the second big piece, which is the hinge and i’m just going to keep saying it. The hinge to me feels like the most important part of a folding device. I just got done in my last video raving about how the surface duo’s hinge is one of the most impressive things in any piece of tech.
In a long time – and now this hinge, i was kind of trashing it before with the first fold, but now this hinge does a lot of the same stuff. So this is now the second version of their zero gap hinge. It looks pretty similar to the first one conceptually it’s still the same with their hinge and the back plate, but this year samsung will actually let you customize the back plate color between a couple.
I think it’s four different colors, which is super cool if you’re willing to wait a couple extra weeks for the customization to come through. But now this new hinge will allow for freestand anywhere from 75 to 115 degrees, meaning it can basically stay put in almost any reasonable angle. You want and then there’s a bunch of software features built around this new hinge that i’m going to be testing for the full review. It’S still called flex mode and there’s a slowly growing list of apps. That will recognize when the hinge is folded halfway and then it’ll treat the app like a mini laptop, basically uh. If you’re watching a youtube.
Video, for example, and half close it it’ll put the video in the upper half or, if you’re in calendar or gallery. They also have special layouts in flex mode, and even the camera has a special mode for when it’s half folded. So clearly they see people using it half folded a lot more because of the hinges ability to do it makes sense and speaking of cameras, that’s the last big piece here for the fold two now the first fold already had pretty good cameras. It was flagship quality at the time and you again get flagship quality cameras here, triple 12 megapixel system on the back, regular 3x, telephoto and ultrawide.
But that’s not the big improvement here. The update is the layout of the cameras, which was kind of clunky. If you remember that big ugly cutout in the first galaxy fold, so if you’re ever to make an argument about, if this is the right way to do a folding form factor, i think the camera layout being much smarter here is a good argument for it. So it’s the triple cameras on the back, like i mentioned in that mesa, that squared off camera bump, like the note main camera telephoto and ultra wide, then on the inside, like i said earlier, just a single 10 megapixel selfie camera and on the front cover display Again, a 10 megapixel selfie hole punch camera, so you can take photos and videos like normal with that huge viewfinder that part’s still great, but now, instead of having that huge cutout for better selfie cameras.
If you really want to take a good selfie, you can just do rear camera, selfies and it’ll turn on that bigger cover display and let you use it as a viewfinder. That’S really smart. I believe this will also be coming to the first galaxy fold, but now that’s just so much better of a way to take selfies with a high quality camera there’s also now dual preview mode, which turns on the back camera. So you can show the subject of the photo and the framing there’s just a bunch of other software stuff being built into one ui. That will also come to the old fold, but it works that much better because of the bigger cover display and the improved hardware. Here but overall i my impressions are pretty positive for fold too, and a lot of the things they’ve done. Even the smaller things feel much more considered for a daily driver.
Now it’s still a folding phone. It’S still second gen. It’S still not ip certified, no dust resistance, there’s still durability, questions with this hinge and the inside screen, but a lot of the stuff they’ve changed the fingerprint reader being on the power button.
Now the better cameras, the new software modes, the hinge that just feels a lot more sturdy and a lot more fluid. I like it so i’m gon na pop my sim card in it and i’m gon na start using it. As my daily driver multitasking beast and i’m gon na review it, so let me know in the comment section what you guys want to know: whether it’s the cameras or durability battery is another one. It is a 4 500 milliamp hour battery, which is not small, but it’s also a 7.6 inch quad hd 120 hertz display. So that’s that’s, not small either. So there’s a lot of stuff to test and i’ll check out your comments for that. But that’s been my first impression of the escobar galaxy z fold.
2. stay tuned for the full review. Thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one peace you .