Today, Samsung has one job, actually two jobs.
First, they have to convince me that upgrading to the Fold 5 is gonna be worth the hassle
of moving all of my apps and settings and logins and all of that crap over from my Fold 3 daily driver.
Second, they have to convince me if that I'm gonna go to all that effort,
I should go with the Fold 5 rather than the Pixel Fold,
which is, I was gonna say one of the hottest devices
on the market right now, but that's a little on the nose.
So let's have a look. Wow, that is a lot heavier than I was expecting.
Got my handy Jerry Rig Everything knife, available on lttstore.com.
Is this an actual hard hat? Am I about to get glitter bombed by Dbrand?
Whatever this is, is in a lot of pieces.
Those appear to be glass shards.
Did Dbrand actually ship me a box of glass shards?
This is not the smart way to do this.
One of these days, Dbrand is gonna mail me a corpse
or something, they're gonna take it too far.
The Galaxy Z Fold 5 then. It's got everything the Z Fold 4 had, but more better.
So all the latest goodies from Samsung, including the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy processor,
which means that essentially it's a little bit overclocked compared to a regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2,
up to 12 gigs of RAM, Android 13, up to a terabyte of storage.
That is if you have 2200 US dollars
burning a hole in your pocket. No included accessories to speak of, that's right.
We not only don't get chargers, we don't get cables, we don't get, oh, we do get a cable.
Oh, look at that. Ha, a USB-C charging cable
that probably won't even do data transfer. Thanks, Samsung.
I should say thanks, Apple, for the industry trend that you started.
It also won't do any data transfer if the phone's not on. Let's get this thing fired up, shall we?
Speaking of which, charging is a strength of this device.
It charges from zero to 94% in an hour,
according to our data from the lab. That is, does that work out, to 17% more
than the Pixel Fold in the same amount of time, which is pretty cool. And that's not the only thing about it
that's better than the Pixel Fold. We measured gaming performance that was anywhere from 20% faster than the Pixel Fold
to nearly double, which is flipping impressive.
Oh, that would have been a great pun if only I was covering a completely different phone.
Okay, it's a USB-2 data transfer cable, so good job, I guess.
Before we get into any more performance stuff, I just want to take a closer look at this.
Right out of the box, I can say it is significantly flatter
than the Pixel Fold was, even similarly, right out of the box.
Although Samsung's hinges have not always had
a perfect track record for me for staying flat. This is my Fold 3, and this is how flat it is now.
You might actually be able to see this better in the top-down curve. Yeah, yeah, not that flat.
You kind of can give it the ol' eh, you know, eh.
But even then, see? But of course, this is a new hinge design
that hopefully is more durable and stays flatter longer,
but most importantly, is zero gap now.
I mean, where I'm from, that's not zero,
but I will give them credit. That is a lot smaller than the gap on the older phone.
So this is the three in my hand, and this is the five.
And that's gonna help with ergonomics when you're using the external screen. As someone who actually daily drives one of these things,
I can tell you, you're gonna find yourself using the external screen a lot more
than you probably think. That was one of the biggest issues with the first gen, aside from the super dim inner screen.
So for the outer one, we're looking at a 6.2 inch HD plus display.
It runs at anywhere from 48 to 120 Hertz,
an adaptive refresh rate mode that helps both make it feel more smooth
and helps it save power. They claim it'll do up to around 1700 nits peak brightness
in HDR mode. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to do HDR testing
just yet, but we were able to measure it in SDR mode, which is pretty flippin' bright.
And of course, it's got a pinhole camera, just like we've seen on the last several generations.
As for how good it is, I suspect it's fine.
Hello, here's my selfie.
One thing to note is Man Samsung is applying a lot of processing to their selfie pictures
these days by default. Yvonne took a couple of pictures of us
at a wedding recently, just like, you know, taking selfies.
She's like, wow, it's a really good picture. I'm like, yeah, because it applied makeup,
it embiggened our eyes, it reduced all our wrinkles. So I turned all that stuff off
because she had just reset it to default. And we took another picture and we're like,
yeah, we're pushing 40 pretty quick. Anywho, let's flip open to the internal display.
This one is 7.6 inches, 2176 by 1812,
also 120 Hertz, and also apparently capable
of 1700 nits peak brightness. Now, one of the biggest differences
between the Pixel Fold and the Galaxy Fold series is, of course, the aspect ratio of the internal display.
The Pixel Fold is meant to be open more like a wallet. You know, it opens up into landscape,
whereas the Galaxy Fold goes from portrait to slightly less portrait.
Personally, I've got to say, I kind of prefer this approach,
just because I find myself more often than not,
if I am watching video content, kind of reading comments and scrolling down below,
which is one of the main benefits of having a gigantic screen.
And I also find this aspect ratio really great for remote desktop.
Pretty much no matter what aspect ratio, the monitor of the system you're remoting into is,
this fits reasonably well. All right, she's bright.
Can't confirm, wow, those whites are eye-searing.
One thing I can tell you hasn't improved over previous gens is the screen protector.
It has the same, if not quite glass kind of feel to it,
but that doesn't mean that I would necessarily recommend removing yours.
Mine started to peel at the hinge, and so I did eventually peel it up.
It's not like the first gen where you can't do that. You can, and it does have a nicer glass feel to it,
even though it's still not glass. But what eventually happened to mine is,
if you look closely, my display is actually cracking.
So here, let me just see if I can open something not incriminating here.
I'm sure Alpha Cool's website. You can actually see there's like micro cracks.
Can you hear it? Can you hear the noise? That's a bummer.
It seems to be the very top layer, either cracking or delaminating a little bit.
And hopefully they're continuing to improve this display technology,
generation by generation, but it does mean that even if you really like the phone,
I would have to caution you, and maybe,
I don't even know how long to tell you guys to wait, because this one was over a year
before it started to do that. So it's not like you could just wait.
I mean, there'll be a new one, and then you won't even know if that one has any game breaking issues.
One thing that has been good on mine though, is the IP rating.
I regularly use it in the shower, accidentally get water on it, go out in the rain,
all that kind of stuff, and I have had zero issues with it, other than it warning me not to charge
when there's water in the port. And the Fold 5 is rated at IPX8,
meaning that all of those same use cases should be fine, but don't take it into the ocean.
I have high hopes for the rear shooters though. That's something that could potentially convince me
to move on from my Fold 3. Are they really gonna be much better?
Oh, we have different zoom levels now though. What are we looking at for cameras? So the main's 50 megapixel,
12 megapixel on the ultra-wide, and 10 megapixels on the telephoto.
Ooh, we got some significant improvements here.
Yeah, look at that. Okay, I mean, yeah, Bell's interesting,
but forget about Bell for a second. You can't even make out these stitches here.
Huh? Definitely capturing more detail.
Hard to say if it's a significantly better sensor, or if it's just better processing,
but wow, that text is way more readable.
Another improvement over the Fold 4, let alone the Fold 3,
is that even though the processor is faster and the battery is the same at 44 milliamp hours,
Samsung claims that they're able to get another hour
of battery life out of it, just due to improved efficiency.
Let's see how that kind of shook out for us. We do have some Labs data, but like I said, we don't have anything for Fold 4
because we don't have one on hand right now. What we did have for comparison is the Pixel Fold though.
And that does not tell a very compelling story
for the Fold 5's efficiency. It got walloped.
I'm talking an hour of extra time in the stress test
for the Pixel Fold. With that said, using the external display
for video playback, we got an extra four hours on the Fold 5
compared to the Pixel Fold. So it's a mixed bag at best,
and the same goes for performance. We showed you guys some gaming numbers earlier
that have the Fold 5 absolutely walking all over the Pixel Fold.
But when it comes to productivity, actually their app launch times were surprisingly close
when you consider how much slower theoretically
the Pixel Fold is compared to Samsung's latest.
I mean, realistically, if you want the absolute most in performance, you're probably just gonna get an iPhone,
but that's a whole separate conversation. I mean, we can side load.
We can side load, baby. Ah, man, I guess that's just general ergonomics.
They haven't really changed much, to be honest with you.
It's exactly as handle-able as the previous gen device.
In fact, if you didn't tell me that I was holding a different one, I probably wouldn't notice.
Like, yeah, it's a little bit shorter, but so was the last gen that was already the case.
I guess just to help it be a little bit less top-heavy. Oh, how's that pinhole camera?
Actually, I'm very curious about that, both from a transparency standpoint
and from an image quality standpoint. Mm.
Okay. It's poo poo, just like it was before.
Awesome. Basically looks like there's something
smudged all over the screen, which there pretty much is, all your pixels.
As for how noticeable it is, that's better.
I don't know how to describe it, other than to say that the mesh
is noticeably finer on the new model. Oh yeah, we never really talked
about the buttons on the outside. So you got your lock button, which has a fingerprint sensor.
I cannot say how much I love having a fingerprint sensor
button compared to an on-screen fingerprint sensor. Like, especially Samsung's.
It uses ultrasonic tech rather than a camera, and it's just slow.
This is so fast. I mean, okay, obviously, I can't show you on this one,
but I'm sure it won't be any worse than this. So you basically just unlock the phone,
and it's on, it's great. Volume rocker, SIM tray,
noise canceling mics, other more different mics,
stereo speakers, USB-C for charging.
I like the feel of the hinge, but I always like the feel of the hinge out of the box.
So I'm like, I'm gun shy about saying it's good, right? Cause I said this one was good, and I loved it.
And then it turned into a piece of crack.
Piece of cracked. Other than the camera, I'm not really seeing a whole lot to upgrade to here.
I'm definitely not gonna go with the Pixel Fold, not with some of the issues that have been coming out around it.
First gen woes, you know? But for me, it basically just comes down to,
I really like having a phone that I don't have to worry about. Just like, whatever.
It's so beat up already. Cause I've accidentally dropped it so many times.
That has a value to me. Cause I can just give it to my kids knowing
that they're probably gonna drop it, and I can, you know, whatever.
Whereas this, it's all pristine, I feel like. I don't think the gap is a big deal to me.
I don't mind the gap. That's why I fall on the subway.
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