Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Samsung Galaxy Fold 4 Review: In A Class By Itself (In the US, At Least)”.
For the past 40 days, this Smartphone has been my calendar, my camera, my Kindle it’s been my journal, my hotel room jukebox, my little East River, ferryboat mini laptop, and, of course it’s been. My phone’s. Are that versatile in 2022., the Galaxy fold 4? Is it’s more than a phone, it’s a foldable, and so it can do most of those things better foreign, the reasons why are no different than they were for the fold 3 or the fold 2. Before that, it’s a phone that turns into a tablet in his own review Kevin the tech ninja reinforces a point. I’Ve made time and again the phone literally my phone, I mean the added utility of a foldable is no great mystery and this year there’s less Mystique than ever before, because Samsung was content to cram new cameras and capabilities into essentially last year’s casing. Next to the ultra ambitious designs from competitors like the Vivo X fold, see previous video or xiaomi’s me fold 2. stay tuned well, the Samsung can’t help but feel a little too familiar almost antiquated.
I mean the screen. Crease is still here and deep as a roadside Ravine ditto the Gap when it’s closed and, unlike my fold, 3 retail device, my fold 4 review unit opens more noisily than others. I wanted to kick off this review by noting those compromises because well I don’t just want to make another commercial for foldables I mean most of you know, I’m all in on folding phones having carried them continuously since January 2020. But while I think it’s important that people understand the benefits, I’m worried that sometimes it comes off like I’m glossing over the deficiencies of the category, and I don’t want to do that so yeah.
The fold 4 is still big and bulky huge and heavy enough to make me want to bring back the belt holster Daniel Rubino Compares it to carrying a gold brick in your pocket. Software still takes getting used to too. If you switch from the cover screen to the internal one, for example, some third-party apps might stay in their smaller format layout and need to be restarted. Instagram, as always, is inconsistent on the inner screen.
Although I do like the new arrow keys that let you bump at left right or Center Amazon Kindle still refuses to give you columns unless you turn it sideways. So the crease is in the wrong place and there are still apps that do the bare minimum on a big screen, simply scaling up their phone interface to fill the canvas looking at you here, todoist and be real. The good news is that these long, lamented pain points are finally getting better, and the fold 4 is actually good enough at multitasking. To make me actually want to use two apps at once. The new swipe gesture makes it so easy to multitask. I don’t know why. It’S not the default to enable it go into the labs menu under advanced settings and toggle it on and while you’re in there go ahead and enable multi-window for all apps too. After that, whenever you want to dual wield 2 apps, you just drag two fingers in from the bezel. When I guessed it on the Engadget podcast to talk about the fold four, I kept the fold spec sheet side by side, with my reference notes. Occasionally, I would swipe away from that to answer a quick telegram or check email or something and then swipe back to the same split screen.
Also, I’ve planned a lot of trips recently and it’s been handy to double up with my Airline app and calendar to make sure I’m getting my dates right, especially for one of those trips CES 2023 and I haven’t been to Vegas in years. So I ran Google Maps alongside hotel tonight to make sure I was putting myself within walking distance of the convention center. You know, even if I’m just counting down to the next ferry, while keeping up with Twitter. This phone has made multitasking a pleasure instead of something I do once or twice, and then you know forget about, for the 95 of my day spent running one app at a time.
Well, the advantages of this big screen have only gotten more pronounced and they’re far-ranging. I mean first of all, it’s just a saturated and gorgeous as ever. They really make these wallpapers from my thumbnail designer pop it’s easier to sign documents on a big screen. Also, if you spring for the S Pen, although there’s still nowhere to store it on the device apps like Telegram and Evernote, and many others now give you a proper multi-column view to make the most of the space and hopping between those apps is faster. Thanks to the persistent taskbar I was worried, this would get in the way of Android’s gestures, but it actually never has, and if you’d want to hide it temporarily, you can just long press it. When I went Upstate for the Luma Festival, stay tuned for more camera samples from that the event’s big PDF map and the menus of the restaurants surrounding it were only truly useful because I had the big screen of the fold back in Brooklyn. I finally finished finding my new apartment using an app called Street, easy to discover it and Google Maps to find it. I wasn’t worried about the rain thanks to the same water resistance that proved itself over a year with the fold three and no matter how brilliant the Sun, the 1000 nit High brightness mode, took care of me as well, and while I don’t use it as frequently As I expected, Flex mode is useful, often enough that I’m gon na miss it when I review that xiaomi like when I’m watching everyday astronaut, while brushing my teeth or having a video chat with fellow reviewer friend sherlynne from the aforementioned and Gadget or shooting ill-advised selfies.
On a slippery surface, like this stupid sucker, I am fortunately the found’s gorilla glass victus meant the price I paid for that stupidity was pretty low, just a few dings on the armor aluminum casing. That said, this could easily have been much worse. So before we go any further, I want my ends. This video is sponsored by dbrandt, whose skins will be familiar to anyone.
Who’S watched any of my foldable videos because well they’ve protected a lot of those foldables from the very beginning. You might be tired of hearing about the real leather versions, because there are so many other fun options, but you know what I’m not tired of talking about how they look feel and yes, smell, debrand your device, whether or not hinged or otherwise, at the link in The description, okay, as always I’ve shown you some samples in these host segments. So let’s actually talk about the fold. 4’S cameras, as I said earlier, whatever improvements Samsung wanted to bring to the cameras had to fit in the same design as last year. So while the pixel Matrix over the inner selfie camera has gotten much denser to camouflage it better, it’s still the same 4 megapixel underachiever underneath fortunately around back, we did get a much higher resolution, 50 megapixel main sensor and a 3X telephoto up from last year’s 2X.
Those are meaningful updates and, while I’d love to criticize Samsung, yet again for being too conservative with its pace of innovation, the fact is that foldable cameras can still get away with being good instead of great because they’re just so much more versatile. I used the phone in its standard, candy bar mode for an Instagram live in early September, where the only complaint I had was the occasional Focus wandering. I used it to capture content from my Hands-On session with the Bose quiet Comfort, earbuds 2 and I put Samsung’s excellent scanning feature to good use, capturing slides from a mediatek presentation in New York City.
After that, I went up to Binghamton New York as a guest of Panasonic for that Luma Festival, where, after the unfortunate fall, I had a more successful Flex mode session, which I was able to frame up by moving the viewfinder to the bottom of the screen. Very handy and walking around that Upstate City and all lighting conditions at all hours of the day and all levels of sobriety, and I found that the fold was occasionally outstanding, infrequently inferior, but ninety percent of the time much more than adequate. The only times it truly disappointed me was in low light when I put it up against the pixel 6, which absolutely trounced it in color and detail, and that really is frustrating. But as I say, the versatility of coming with its own built-in tripod usually makes up for those deficiencies. I call my final Point concerns the battery, which is the same size as last year, and the endurance is pretty familiar too on a heavy day with 90 minutes of voice calls constant texting, lots of maps and Ferry tickets and Evernote and Google Docs. I hit the 50 mark less than five hours after taking it off the charger Granite.
That is a punishing workload and thanks to a more efficient processor, it’s slightly better endurance than the fold 3 could claim, but this phone, more than any other, is meant to be used. It’S big screen begging to be put to work, so it’s a bummer that you might need to carry a battery pack to use it to its full potential and that you still need to settle for 25 watt charging. When you do considering we’re only three years into foldables being a thing, it feels strange to already be at the point where we’re criticizing new releases for being too iterative and, as I’ve said many times, I’m genuinely longing for Samsung to bring us a Galaxy fold. Ultra that includes a lot of those super high-end features that competitors are cramming into their foldables overseas. Instead, Samsung doubled down on what was already working and gave us an improved version of last year’s phone at the same exact price, and my thoughts on that price are the same as they were last year too. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
If you want a phone that does a million things buy any smartphone, but if you want a phone that does a million and one things and gives you the space to do all those things more comfortably. The Galaxy fold 4 is in a class by itself. This video was produced following 40 days with a Galaxy fold, 4 review sample provided by Samsung, but as always, the manufacturer had zero creative control, editorial input or even an early preview of this content, and it provided no compensation in exchange for its production. Special thanks to Verizon for providing the review Sim used during my testing and, if you’re wondering how well or poorly the fold 4 might age. Well, I spent a year with the fold 3 and I made a review about it check out that video on the same channel you’ll see coverage on the Motorola Razer 2022, the xiaomi Mi fold 2 and the iPhone 14 pro all coming soon to the Mr Mobile On YouTube, until next time from Michael Fisher, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends .