Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Are $2000 phones worth it?”.
Portion of this video is sponsored by rainway. This is a versus video that i’ve been wanting to make for almost a year. I love foldable phones and when you compare the two flagships that take very different approaches, it’s the galaxy full two and it’s microsoft’s brand new duo and putting these two together, you’d think there’s not much competition that clearly the full two would win in every category. But these two devices take very different approaches of the future different visions and out of respect to what microsoft is doing out of respect to what samsung is building it’s worth, comparing these two devices, because the picture is a lot bigger than even i originally thought.
So this whole video is sort of a story of getting past the first impressions getting past those first glances. If you’re, basing your perspective on what you think or 5 minutes with devices, then clearly the fold 2 is going to come out on top it’s. It’S got a folding screen for crying out loud. It’S got. The latest cutting edge.
Specs got a beautiful display on the inside beautiful display on the outside. It delivers on the foldable promise and again getting past that first impressions. You might look at the duo and only see bezels in last year’s processor and that’s not doing justice to microsoft’s vision and what the duo still brings to the table. I’M going to talk about it, a lot in the video, but that hinge is, i don’t know how else to say it, but it’s a marvel of engineering.
It is incredible: it’s satisfying no phone tablet to screen device. However, you want to classify the duo. Has any business feeling as good in the hand as this device does, especially for a gen 1 piece of hardware, and a lot of this is how you experience information, how you hold the phones when you have the fold opened you’re holding it like a tablet.
It’S one big screen the duo, because it’s got two separate screens, you hold it like a book, it’s meant to be bent in the middle and, quite frankly, that’s a really new experience for me with a phone and when you look at the duo, this feels like A device that had three or four generations before it, that’s how good the build quality is in the hand, that’s not something you generally see in a first gen device. One of the reasons that i love the fold line is because it always feels like it’s trying something new like it’s building to something awesome and the fold too sort of keeps that alive. First and foremost, it fixes a lot of the problems with the original fold.
The almost unusable outer screen you now have a really usable outer display, although at a very weird aspect ratio – and it’s quite tall – but it is usable. The inner screen now is bigger. 120, hertz that weird camera notch in the corner is gone in favor of the infinity.
Oh we’ve got the ultra thin glass on top of the plastic and plastic. On top of that, you just have a better screen the hinge. Now you can keep it multiple angles.
Everything has been refined and improved and how good it is, and despite how good it is, you still can’t help feel like we’re, not quite there. Yet. The technology is not at samsung’s full vision and you look at a phone that costs two thousand dollars. Obviously, expectations need to be high and brands have to be held accountable when they charge that much of a premium, but there are some things that i don’t like the back of it.
So i know it’s covered in gorilla glass. I actually had to look it up to confirm that, but the back still feels like plastic to me feels like the back of the regular note, 20. and again for a device that expensive that’s kind of an inexcusable thing whenever anybody who’s never used one of the Foldable devices in the past, the first thing they always harp on is the crease in the middle how’s, the crease. Whenever i tell people about the phone uh – and i can say very truly like last gen, the crease is not something i a care about at all, because the screen freaking folds uh, but also it’s nothing that i notice after the first 10 minutes.
They took a different approach, obviously than microsoft. They took a kitchen sync approach. The full 2 is a phone that expands to a tablet, because it’s viewed as a phone. It has all the essential phone things aside from waterproofing like wireless charging and nfc and fast charging things that you kind of, i guess take for granted on flagship, expensive phones and things that are missing on the duo, especially nfc and wireless charging.
Still at 1400. Bucks is an odd thing to not have in the device of that price category again at the approach of everything being in the full. The camera system obviously is really good. Samsung’S cameras have gotten more and more refined over the years and again another head scratcher. The single camera system on the duo is not good, i don’t know how else to say it or phrase it. It is not a good camera but again going back to the argument that microsoft doesn’t view this as a phone that starts to make sense. The camera is more for video conferencing than it is for taking pictures of your family on vacation, whereas the fold you can very easily use that as your main camera. That’S always in your pocket.
So, comparing the hardware of these two, despite the duo being really good, especially for a first generation device, i’m still going with the fold now you guys might remember a few months ago we did a video on an app called rainway. Essentially, it lets you leverage your pc and your pc games. You already have lets you play them like pretty much anywhere you are, and by anywhere like i mean on any phone that you’ve got on android or ios, any chromium browser pretty much any set top box. You’Ve got so android tv apple tv, fire tv.
You can play your pc games and play them really awesomely with almost no latency. I think this is a big deal right now, especially for ios users. So, like you still want to play fortnite, for example, you can still play fortnite on your ios device and not lose access to the new season. If you’ve been getting crazy gaming out to fall guys on your pc, you can now do that on your phone or tablet or even on your browser, whatever game you’re playing on your pc will work wherever you are.
That’S been an awesome thing for me. I prefer to game sitting on my couch and also it works with games that are meant for keyboard and mouse it’ll automatically detect whether or not you’ve got one of those and you can still use your keyboard or mouse even on your mobile. So if your device is 120 hertz high refresh rate, so if you’ve got like an ipad pro or a lot of sort of flagship, android devices right away, app is going to detect that and it’ll increase the bitrate increase of frame rate. So you can still game taking advantage that 120 hertz refresh screen uh. It looks really good.
I think the best part of rainway is that it is free. This will not cost you anything and the app can access your library of games wherever they live, whether it’s steam origin or anywhere else. If you want to check out the rainway app and you should it’s free, there’s no risk, i will link to it down below.
Do you want a tablet, or do you want kinda, two phones, and that’s really the feeling that i get when i use both of these devices. It’S kind of fun to see two companies take two very different visions of what a foldable future is going to be. I mean samsung is in the camp of one big screen a tablet in your pocket that previously we couldn’t have, and in that way they clearly succeeded with the original fold and the full two microsoft approach is multiple screens multitasking in your pocket and that’s a very Interesting way to look at what people do they’re saying and they’re betting that people would rather be able to run multiple things and have them run perfectly than have one giant display seamlessly in their pocket, and that’s where the duo shines. Despite there being a very clear gap in the middle single tasking, multiple apps is the duo’s jam like that’s where it shines.
If you are running two things at once, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better than what the duo can do. The fold can obviously multitask and run two apps at once, but you’re left doing some sort of fiddling with sizes and it’s not the same experience of holding in your hand and having two entirely separate screens running two entirely different apps. You expect the software here to be amazing and you could pinpoint one area: that’s holding it back at least right now, as a filming. It’S software, the hardware is there and you can see microsoft’s vision, but just a buggy software experience keeps reminding me. This is going to be a hard device to use day in and day out, and i’m not talking about doing crazy things that maybe create bugs like trying to multitask and do multi-window type stuff. I mean things as simple as swiping home now.
These are all things that can be fixed and i expect them to be fixed, but as a head scratcher why the device was released to the public with software that still very clearly wasn’t complete. The fold is the same experience as the fold. One you’ve got a screen on the outside, which you can use like a regular android phone, and if you choose to open it up that app that you’re, using will open up in a beautiful full screen, tablet form factor assuming the app you’re using is not instagram. Because instagram is a mess on pretty much every device, that’s not a regular uh rectangle.
So obviously i talked a lot about multitasking and single tasking multiple apps on the duo, because that’s where it shines, but it’s not to say that you can’t do it on the fold. You’Ve got flex mode. You can run multi windows. You can have apps running side by side, different configurations.
You can have floating apps all over the place. You have a lot of different ways to still multitask it’s just you’re multitasking on one screen and for a lot of people. That is a good way to go and it’s a familiar way to go, and i oftentimes used it when i needed to. I think the next big step samsung has to get to is getting those foldable technology at a lower price point. So i’m just going to get this out of the way the fold two is the device that i would buy. In fact, i did this device that i’m showing is one that i spent two thousand dollars on of my own money to have and to use.
But looking at the future, i think it’s a combination of both of these approaches and microsoft said they went for the two screen approach, so you could still use things like pen and you could still have gorilla glass on the outside, but i do think if foldable Technology gets better to the point where those things are still an option and you could have a display that can fold all the way around. I think microsoft would use it and i think samsung certainly use it as well. So the merging of these two visions might not be here, yet it might not be here for six or seven or eight years, while they’re very divergent.
Now i think, they’re very quickly heading to the same point and i think the duo as it exists right now is the perfect companion device to something else and if you view it in that lens and it’s a very expensive lens to use the duo succeeds. But if i was to have one device that i’d have in my pocket that i could use as a phone as a tablet for multitasking and taking pictures, it’s not the duo right now. So today, if you have to buy one of these, it’s very easy to recommend the fold despite its astronomical price point and that’s not to say or be interpreted as a duo being irrelevant, because it represents a really cool future and just a future.
That’S not there. Quite yet, .