Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Samsung Galaxy Note Edge Unboxing”.
I’M about to show you one of the wackiest rarest smartphones Samsung has ever made it’s a phone that has shaped Samsung’s entire future, and so just before we unbox it. Let me give you a little bit of context. You might remember the samsung galaxy round from 2013. The first commercially available smartphone in the world with a flexible AMOLED display, and you can see the logic behind it. The curved back would, in theory, make the phone more comfortable to hold by complementing the shape of your palm, and the curved screen would offer a similar viewing experience to some of the highest end TVs at the time.
The idea of this kind of display is that, instead of a flat panel, they’re just sort of blast light, both at you and around you, a curved panel directs that light into the users eyes in the same way that they’d see things in the world around them. It reduces distortion just generally. This was a really exciting time in a smartphone market. Yes, true, the standard formula for a smart phone had already been established, but companies were still feeling their way into what direction the future was headed in experimenting with ideas and concepts. Anyways. The round completely failed, it sold less than a hundred thousand units in the first month in large part because it was 30 % more expensive than almost every other phone out there for a benefit.
That very few people could reason with. This was that novelty phone that device that everyone wanted to look at to talk about, but nobody actually wants to sink their money on one. It kinda reminds me of that crazy energize, a smartphone that we took a look at a few months ago. There was insane interest in this product, this device that could supposedly last 50 days on one charge. The video I made on that is on like four and a half million views, but when energizer took this as a signal that loads of people were gon na buy the phone, then things went a bit wrong. He actually created a full-scale campaign, a kickstarter page behind it and it just completely flopped and was cancelled pretty soon.
Samsung was not proud of the round and pretty much tried to scrub every trace of it from the internet. But whilst it’s etched into people’s brains as one of the biggest disasters Samsung has ever had, it may well be the most important mistake. Samsung ever made. They needed to know how not to do a curve, so they could learn how to do a curve, and that brings us to this. The Samsung Galaxy Note edge the successor to the galaxy round and there’s a very particular reason.
I’M making this video now because looking forward, I think we’re about to see this pattern repeat itself. Samsung’S first-generation foldable phone, the Galaxy fold is clearly not perfect, but just like the round, I reckon the Samsung Galaxy fold is going to be the device that we look at as the turning point. The pivots, the not quite right phone that that will eventually lead to the device that people end up adopting.
Well, the galaxy round did four curved displays. The galaxy fold will do for flexible displays, so that brings us onto the Note edge inside the box, of which we get a micro, USB cable, pretty standard. At the time you get a pair of earphones which look slightly above average, but not close to Samsung’s current AKG, offering there’s also a 15 watt fast charger, which Samsung hasn’t changed in the last five years. Okay, but this is a peculiar phone.
It released alongside the Galaxy Note 4 and it’s pretty similar, but with an extra 160 pixels on this curved panel, which gives it a super wide 16 to 10 aspect ratio. To give you an idea of just how wide this is, we can compare how much of my Instagram feed can be fit inside this versus a modern-day tour phone, and it’s not aloft so because this was the first iteration of a curve like this. There was going to be skepticism, and so it was kind of up to Samsung to convince people to convince the public and the press that there was some sort of a use for this edge. So even this early on, it was filled with equal parts features and gimmicks.
Samsung sold this device, as if it had two displays in one angle, did as the ultimate productivity phones, one that could let you play a game whilst also keeping up-to-date with Twitter. It’S pretty useful and the timer and ruler features, especially, you can see the appeal, but I think they really felt the need to flesh this out. So there are also a lot of bizarre features like this burger flipping game.
It is clearly pointless. It still demands your full attention, and so the only way I can see this being used over a proper game on the main screen is, if you were trying to hide it from someone sitting on your left, a pretty neat scenario, but at the same time it Was clear that Samsung was serious about curves, they handed out an SDK, so developers could make third-party applications just for it. Aside from the gimmicks, though, the Note edge was generally, it had the same top-tier components as the note for a Snapdragon 805, three gigs of ram and the same 16 megapixel camera capable of 4k video recording. It’S got a plastic leather like finish, but this was acceptable back in 2014 and, to be honest, I don’t hate the way it looks, and so compared to the Galaxy round, we’ve got a little bit of flack for basically offering and no major features above and beyond The cheaper Note, 3, the general impression left by the Note edge, was a corner, looking Note 4 with a few useful tricks, and that was enough.
That was enough for Samsung to run with the idea now, knowing that the convex curves we saw here had the potential to be a mainstream design, but one that would also differentiate them. This then led to these curves becoming standard on their phones and they slowly phased in the idea by introducing separate edge variants of their devices. All the way up to the note 7, after which the standard phones were completely dropped and every phone became an EDD phone.
Now I know not, everybody is a fan of Samsung’s current curves. They are easier to damage, they have difficulty with screen protectors and you get accidental touches every now and again, and people continue to ask the question: what is the point and yet they’ve taken off? And my hunch is that this cycle is about to go full circle with the fold. I reckon the second generation of the foldable device is gon na, be a big shift from the first and closer to the form factor there ends up sticking. Samsung has always loved experimenting and, whilst it is more efficient to let other companies do the innovating and then just kind of follow suit, with something that’s cheaper kind of the strategy of oneplus by the way, you’ll never quite be at the bleeding edge. Unless you do the experiments yourself and so to round this off, I just want to say that it’s a good example of how your biggest successes are sometimes just around the corner of your biggest failures. If you enjoyed this video, a sub would be massively appreciated and I’ve got tons more interesting.
Throwbacks like this on the channel, so I’ll leave them linked from here. It’S watching and I’ll catch you in the next one you .