i loved the original galaxy fold its gigantic screen top tier performance and
head turning wow cool phone factor was enough for me to ask it to go steady
with me until i eventually got tired of carrying a second device around in my
back pocket and ultimately junked it for one without a floppy hinge dim screen
and game breaking software bugs
i mean how could samsung treat their most premium customers the ones who spend two
thousand dollars on a smartphone like second-class citizens
is the question that i asked back then well now i have the answer along with my
one-month review of the only smartphone whose asking price would make apple
blush the galaxy z fold 2. and it's
brought to you by this ugly picture of me
thanks dbrand you can get this or the
infinitely more attractive sticker bomb bombskin which is chock full of LTT
memes and tech references at the link below but only for a limited time so act
now or robots will come murder your pets
why do they want me to say that i don't condone pet murder
wait sorry they're paying how much um all right
uh pet murder then
the original fold already did a lot of things right once we got past the whole
breakage scandal but it had four obvious flaws the outer screen was too small to
really be usable even with my homunculus hands the main foldable screen was too
dim the hinge seemed great out of the box only to turn into a flaccid pile of
suck down the line and the software was buggy and i'll address each of these
with the z-fold 2 as we go but first
the pitch why on earth would you spend 2
000 on a phone well i never would but if dbrand wants
to send me one there is a solid argument to be made for chucking everything else
and switching to it for starters
yes my friends from a dollars per square millimeter of screen area standpoint the
z-fold 2 actually doesn't look too bad in comparison to the latest and greatest
in apple or samsung's own lineups does it it really is like carrying a tiny
tablet around in your pocket and almost everything about the experience is
better than last time for starters the weird
jello effect when you're scrolling is almost completely gone and that gigantic
multi-lens selfie camera is replaced by a tiny little hole punch that
drove me crazy at first because like
why wouldn't i just take a selfie like this and use the front screen and then
my better rear camera and then i could have my big screen totally unblemished
until i realized what a terrible experience using it this way was
ergonomically and accepted that yeah the
hole punch here was probably the best they could do
next up is brightness the final straw for me when i was using
the original fold was a trip to la when i realized walking out of the airport
that it was completely unusable in strong sunlight by contrast totally
intentional by the way the z-fold 2's max brightness managed
741 nits in gsm marina's tests not
market leading but in the real world it was noticeably more usable
and then finally there's the hinge i'm going to admit something andy i'm
sorry i was super miffed when i got my fold
one back from the camera guys with a bit of a gull wing shape to it unless you like
really crank it open and even though i never said anything i
blamed my shooters but it's clear to me now i'm sorry i'm sorry seeing the
infinitely better hinge on the z-fold 2
that the old one never stood a chance this feels
much more sturdy and on top of that it actually opens up to almost any angle
that you could want although i have to confess that with all this screen real
estate at my fingertips samsung's idea of using the fold as like
a built-in stand while you watch movies feels pretty wasteful i'm just gonna do
that and use the whole thing unlike multitasking which is where this
device really shines got a whatsapp chat going and you want
to browse the internet no problem got a spreadsheet rolling and want to
reference some data to copy into it you can do that too are you more of a single
task kind of person no problem in supported apps and we will talk about
this later the z-fold 2 offers what is simply the most immersive experience of
any phone that i've ever used ever and
pretty much without compromise with the latest snapdragon 865 processor 12 gigs
of RAM and a 120 hertz display oh i can't believe i
didn't mention that before apple's a14 bionic might be a lot faster on paper
and when rendering a video and when gaming okay it's a super impressive chip
we'll make a video about that make sure you're subscribed but the z-fold 2 and any device with a
high refresh rate display just plain
feel smoother in day-to-day use the best part is that even with that enabled the
4 500 milliamp hour battery only failed to get me through the day a couple of
times and that's with me watching a fair bit of tv don't worry though i'm
actually sleeping for a lot of well that's running i don't actually watch eight hours of tv a day and by the way
the speakers are great i also unlock 70 times a day according
to samsung's usage stats with 100 plus notifications coming in
although that notification number seems a little off and we will talk about that later too
for now more good things 5g
corning victus glass on the front up to 512 gigs of internal storage wireless
charging with reverse charging as well what could be bad all right here's
something the unfolded screen is bigger than last time
i know i know crazy thing right i'm like hey sales
pitch giant screen by the way my biggest complaint giant screen
let me explain one of the biggest reasons that i almost never use a tablet
is that unless you sit down at a table and hook a keyboard and trackpad up to
it it's basically impossible to type and
at that point i might as well just use a laptop
now phones get around this by allowing anyone with fast thumbs and a reasonably
good predictive keyboard to get darn close to desktop typing speeds
as long as the whole keyboard is actually reachable with your thumbs so
for me a taller unfolded screen would have been
way better it would have reduced the size of black bars on full screen media
and resulted in a better fit when reading large documents in portrait
but then samsung went and widened the screen instead making it hard for me to
reach the middle of the keyboard quickly i know both the stock keyboard and
actually swiftkey for that matter do have split modes but
for me i reach over the center line a lot when i'm at full speed and i can't
do that on a splitty now if you've got big hands or you don't
mind the split you can ignore all that but i did have to get it out there
and this too the included screen protector is horrible
i understand why it's there glass doesn't fold at least not yet which
means that almost anything is going to leave horrible scratches in that
underlying plastic screen unfortunately using the
also plastic screen protector has really felt like going back over
a decade ago like the way my finger like here listen to this
right and it's almost impossible to keep
clean so here's what we're gonna do oh yeah that it's actually starting to come off at
the bottom uh hinge point i'm just gonna pull it off right now samsung does not
advise it but my understanding is that technically it's a thing that you can do
so this really does feel like the kind of screen protector i would have gotten on
like my hp ipac pocket pc
immediately looks better feel how thick look how thick this is check this out
it's disgusting oh my god that is so much better
yeah that's way better that's actually my backhand making that noise
way smoother if that gets ruined at least the z-fold 2's outer screen is a
whopping 2 inches larger diagonally than the old one it's still not a pleasure to
use by any stretch of the imagination but compared to the tiny first gen outer
screen it's way better like if you just need to quickly reply to a text or
something it gets the trick done even if holding a device like this makes
me feel a little bad for mocking like the makers of chunky gaming phones
now let's talk in detail about the camera
actually i'm just kidding it is fine it's totally
not the main attraction for a device like this though so i didn't bother
sending brandon out for two days to take pictures realistically all it needs to
be is good enough that the vast majority of people would never notice the
difference and it definitely manages that i never felt like it was holding me
back but then i'm also happy with my daily driver note 9 which at this point
is basically crap compared to the latest pixels on iphones
did you notice that by the way that bit where i said daily driver note 9
yeah i think it's happening again the z-fold 2 simply can't be my one and
only phone when it has game breaking bugs like this
back to my notification stats where the hell is microsoft teams
i use it for work and i promise you i get plenty of messages from people at
work notifications are enabled and yet somehow i don't get any of them
now to be clear teams notifications are a festering piece of crap and microsoft
should feel bad i'm not the only one in this building that is like having
problems with it but for all i know samsung could easily
be partially to blame for this because even very mainstream apps like instagram
and youtube offer degraded experiences on the z fold too
instagram actually i didn't even put this in the script but this is hilarious
instagram looks like garbage and has black bars on the side not to mention
that it started double posting every time i tried to post an update which was
especially charming because i couldn't even go back in my older posts and see
that there were two posts on the z fold too i had to check on a different phone
to realize oh no all these comments about double post because there's a
second post so it took me a while to figure out there was a problem and then
youtube still doesn't have support for
community posts or stories features that
well as a youtuber i regularly use
now when pressed my google contact all but confirmed what i've always suspected
is the case with a device like this yeah Linus we know it's expensive but
frankly that's not our problem and for anything that's not running stock
Android there's just no guarantee that it's going to work out of the box and it
takes coordination between google engineers and engineers at the device
manufacturer to make these kinds of things work as you can imagine at the
moment the dozens of people like you running foldable phones just aren't a
priority compared to the millions who will be running iphone 12s within the
next few weeks so you're just gonna have to deal with it
well okay then
see you later
oh it's just the rg phone for a limited time we've got a drop where you can for
some reason buy this face skin
um but i kind of figured we talked to them i was like really you guys so we also
worked on this super cool sticker bomb skin it's all the same dbrand quality
that you guys have come to expect you know precision fit it comes off without
any residue protects your device from incidental scuffs and scrapes and the
drop is available for two weeks so get it while it's here because after that it
is gone it's gonna be linked down below
if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out um i don't know what the hey
go watch whole room water cooling that was years ago but a lot of the new
viewers probably have never heard of it we water cooled an entire room it was
awful uh pet murder then
sorry is it funny though okay you sure it's
not too far okay people can tell it's just silly
okay