Why We Think Galaxy Folds Are Failing
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This isn't a mass consumer product. Samsung had explained that their customers would receive different kind of support and services, which means more cost to Samsung.
At least, they hope it will stick for a little while, long enough for them to find the next random thing that will stick for a little while.
Their approach to product design seems pretty chaotic but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
Sure. First as in before they launch a deeply flawed product? Sometimes a half-assed launch is worse that a delayed one. I'm having a hard time touching any bleeding edge tech from Samsung when I know they're willing to dump this kind of stuff on the customer.
Do the hard work, then charge full price when it's done and ready.
I bought two mid range Samsung phones and they were terrible to the point I suspected they were fake. Then I bought a Samsung refrigerator that broke down often. It's not niche or anything, they just make everything quite hacky.
eg stop dirt getting in
This has a lot to do with korean culture where keeping face and loyalty for his employer are two most important things in the life of a corporate drone.
This reminds me of a cool analogy: big companies behave like artifical general intelligence, very smart, but very unlike human intelligence.
I think he wanted to know how on earth 'AI' will solve this. People will claim AI can solve anything...
But surely, preventing a PR and product release disaster would count as being loyal to the company and helping the company to keep face.
Companies other than Apple do this all the time. That's what most "X beat Apple at innovation bringing Y to market" amount for.
For all the BS lip service about "innovation" (in an industry where few do any), Jobs Apple was thoroughly evolutionary. Each subsequent iPod iteration added something small but substantial, each iPhone iteration ditto.
There was no huge revolutionary steps between releases -- the product itself, and being well thought out and usable and good was the revolution.
The product idea wasn't revolutionary either (there were touch smartphones before the iPhone, and mp3 players before the iPod, tables before the iPad and so on -- the key wasn't that it was the revolutionary, but it was the first finally decent all-rounder -- as opposed to the first thrown-together mis-mash that works if you have low expectations and love tinkering as a "power user").
That said, Apple has increasingly been doing the same "pre-announce/release half-though BS" themselves past 2015 or so (e.g. the butterfly keyboard, the can Mac Pro, the touch strip, the wireless charger that never materialized, the 2+ years in the making Mac Pro replacement, etc).
I don't think Samsung would have done something like this for a mass consumer device, take for instance their recent S10. So no.
Galaxy Folds are different though. They are not 100% ready yet -- I'm pretty sure they knew about some of the shortcomings -- but this is still a major leap in mobile display technology and the Fold's release is anything, but, a typical, or 'classical' release. Based on their announcement on bold pricing, limited availability by reservation only, with different support and service model, it is fairly evident that the release is targeting those self-selected tech-savvy folks who want access to the incomplete product just to get a glimpse into the future. And, I'm surprised by the bold move that Samsung is willing to serve such niche group of customers.
That being said, I've never been so excited about a mobile device since I got my first iPhone in 2008. If I had a couple of grands to spare, I would be more than happy to sign up, just to see what it's like.
Samsung's approach has a better chance of succeeding in the long run simply because it protects the screen, but they clearly need to refine their approach. Without some serious materials wizardry, Huawei's design seems hopelessly flawed. According to this article, uneven pressure may be responsible for breaking the Samsung, think of what could happen with the exposed screen on the Huawei.
'nullify' here is subjective. Others might say 'reduce' instead. For some, especially current sleeve or folio users, this could be acceptable.
You can not use a folio case because the screen is on the outside. You have to remove the phone entirely from the case to unfold it.
Which doesn't really exist yet.
Outside that context, the name "Galaxy Fold" wouldn't register as a phone with me either.
How can a galactic entity "fail"? Does this affect us? Surely not since such things would be on the timespans of millions to billions of years. What is a "Galaxy Fold"?
After a few seconds considering such questions, I realized what it was actually about.
However, I don't quite understand the bad press that Samsung is getting with this phone. I mean, sure it has some issues but it is the first generation of this new type of phone.
If you are going to buy this product, then you must be aware that you are going to be one of the Beta testers. There is no way around it. You just have to accept it and then when the Galaxy fold 2 comes out in a year or so, hopefully, they would have sorted out all those issues.
First adopters pay a high price for testing bleeding edge technology, I can't think of many cases in which that hasn't been the case. This is technology that exists no where else. They need to recoup costs from R&D to make the improvements required to produce a real product.
This is how things used to be kickstarted before we had micro-fundraising. This is why everyone talks about how tech reaches the rich first, they have the funds to test this tech before us plebs, because it costs money to develop bleeding edge stuff. What bleeding edge, physical technology comes in at a low price point comparatively to the market rate? I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Nobody was asking for an unbreakable device.
And yeah, it's bleeding edge technology. So long as they honor warranties and those warranties don't exclude something like this, then it's roughly what I would expect from the first gen.
It's far from ideal, but Apple launched consumer phones that bent while hanging out in your pocket which cost around the same price and wasn't some R&D project. This is clearly not meant for your everyday consumer and is priced at a point that only people that want to test this phone will pay. The testing isn't in Samsungs favor, but it's par for the course as I would expect.
Where by "while hanging out in your pocket" you mean "applied a not inconsiderable amount of pressure to a specific area of the phone in a specific direction".
vs.
Samsung's "$2000 dollar phone fails the next day while performing its intended functions"
Oh. And of course Samsung's own phones bend in pockets as well
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Nobody anywhere is expecting an unbreakable phone and I'm not sure why you'd want to interpret his comment as saying that.
There's a huge difference between "unbreakable" and "half a dozen reviewers accidentally broke theirs within days".
There's also a huge difference between a developer preview and an early-adopter device. The Fold's marketing wasn't anything like that of the Glass. The latter required you to sign up as a developer to even buy one. It was also a totally new product category for developers to experiment with, not an evolutionary step forward in an existing category. Nobody's talking about exploring special apps that are only possible with the folding screen. That's all anyone ever talked about with Glass. The Fold was marketed as a consumer-facing device with a few compromises. It's planned to be sold in AT&T stores for goodness' sake.
I expected to see problems, I expected to see some outrage and jokes when things went wrong on the phone, but I never would have guessed at the number of comments saying things like "for $2000 it should never break!". That just seems so silly to me, it's a first gen product with a lot of new stuff in it. Expecting it to be perfect at any price is unreasonable.
Sure, if they stop honoring warranties, then I'm all for the bad press. But as of now, it seems like they are handling it about as good as I would expect. They delayed the launch, are looking into the issues, and will hopefully resolve them. Don't get me wrong, it's a horrible look that the review units broke so easily, but the phone also isn't out yet.
But warranties aren't "get out of jail free" cards that excuse a failure of basic product engineering practices like actual real-world testing.
"Foldable phone"
first thing to break, after a few days?
The foldable part. And the phone...
----
is like ship a "wheelchair" and then see the wheel break after first use.
How exactly defend this???
It should be perfect.
At least for the first few weeks.
There's levels to issues. The iPhone 4 had issues but was still a blockbuster hit and the #1 phone in the world for several years. The Fold's problems are severe (phone breaks), very common (happened to multiple prominent reviewers) and occur after light use (within the first few days or for the label issue, immediately after unboxing). That's beyond "beta testing" and is just grossly incompetent design. This isn't some fly by night Chinese startup phone, this is the most expensive phone that one of the 2 biggest phone designers for the last 10 years has ever shipped.
That the issues appeared so rapidly indicates to me that they didn't even do the basic test of letting some employees use it as their daily driver for a while.
If that's the case, then Samsung should get a lot of bad press about it. It's a failure of even basic testing competence.
They're selling it as a real product, not a beta test—and charging correspondingly.
I'll go to my grave using the old-school meanings: "alpha" means that "the devs think it's done", and "beta" means "QA testers think its done".
Wouldn't it make sense for a company like Samsung to hand out some of the devices to their own staff to use? I'm sure you can find realistic use cases among the staff of such a large company. If you're afraid of leaks give it to the family or upper management. By the looks of it even a handful of phones would have revealed the issues.
If you're afraid of leaks, those might be the worst people to give it to.
Who would ever need a folding phone? This sounds like a silly idea. Apart from the obvious party trick (“hold my drink - ima fold this phone in half”) I don’t see any reason for a phone to fold halfway down the middle into a ridiculously thick package that can’t be comfortable carried inside any reasonably sized pants pocket.
A folding display solves that issue. Small when it needs to be, large when you want it to be.
Yeah, it's thicker than a typical phone, but that's usually not the limiting dimension when determining pocketablity.
I think this is probably the sticking point for people who don't see the point of this. At least for me, there's no unserved gulf between my phone and a computer. I've had a tablet in the past, but there was really just no use case where the tablet was the top choice over both my phone and computer; I always preferred one of those over the tablet.
For that it is a cracking little device, a phone screen is too small to read comfortably and if I'm watching a movie in bed the ipad is the perfect size.
Originally bought the device for testing and it ended up been the thing I spend the most time looking at after a desktop/laptop.
Enough that I'm considering buying the new ipad mini and giving the old one to my stepson.
(I feel silly writing this, but just in case it's not clear, I am referring to a generic "you", and not you in particular.)
This folding phone seems targeted at letting people carry a phone with a gigantic screen. People that are buying XL versions of existing phones (a surprising number of people) that want even bigger screens (that still fit in the pocket) seem to be the target, and/or people who want a 2-in-1 phone+tablet.
I don't really like large phones, but I do like using tablets. Having the choice between a phone-sized screen and a tablet-sized screen in a single device seems personally desirable to me; I don't really care much about the device size itself as long as it still fits in my pocket (unlike the tablet it'd be replacing).
Not even that thick! When your battery is about 4mm thick and only takes up part of the phone, you can roughly double the battery life by taking the phone from 7.5mm to 10.5mm.
This only applies in a hypothetical future where someone figures out how to make a durable folding display though.
But what perfection would actually look like to me would also being able to use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and (somehow) outputting the video to a real monitor. At that point, it would be a suitable on-the-go replacement for most laptop needs.
I keep being slightly tempted to get one as an on-call/ultraportable laptop, since it's possible to connect various USB-C bits as required.
"All this week, I kept coming back to a thought about how we use our phones. We pull them out to check something quickly, but then, all of a sudden, a half-hour disappears scrolling Instagram or Twitter or whatever. It’s a real problem.
But it’s a problem I didn’t really have with the Galaxy Fold. When I was using the tiny screen, I just wanted to get something done quickly and put it away because the screen was small, and I wasn’t in a place where I wanted to unfold it.
On the flip side, when I was using Galaxy Fold unfolded, I was really using it. I had to hold it in two hands, and it felt much more like using a tablet, an active device I was choosing to use. It requires some small measure of intentionality — more than a phone, anyway.
I found myself using it in meetings, and nobody batted an eye. I was reviewing docs for the meeting, but I could have just as easily been messing around on social media. But think about the social rules of a work meeting: somebody messing around on their phone is a jerk, but somebody using a tablet is more likely to be doing something relevant. The Fold feels like a different device with different social rules, and that’s fascinating."
I'm on iPhone now and I've "regressed" back to a relatively normal phone size with the iPhone 7. I almost got a Plus but I had an iPhone 6 before that and got comfortable with the smaller size. I'd probably be fine with the SE at this point, but since Apple has dropped that form factor I'm not going backwards.
So yes, I can see a place for a folding device when one needs to carry both a phone and a tablet, but for me at least, I can move to a phablet for that.
But I do sometimes have a use for the large screen on my phone, and I would definitely have a use for a smaller (one-hand-sized) phone screen, so having both of those available in one device appeals to me.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/19/18498904/samsung-galaxy-f...
My cynical side says that this will probably doom the whole idea of a foldable phone. The manufacturers want us to be distracted and spend that half an hour scrolling social media. They want us to be sucked in to using it constantly. They don't benefit from encouraging us to only use our gadgets when we've deliberately decided that we want to. And so it seems likely they'll kind of forget about this once the novelty wears off.
What effect this has on your desire to purchase and use devices is up to you.
I can't imagine a use case for this that would make it appealing to me. But apparently there are a lot of people who can.
Different strokes and all that.
Additionally, I read a lot more when I have my tablet with me, as it's easy to pop it out and read an article or chapter when I'm waiting for the bus, etc, and it's not tedious to read on like it is on my phone, as the tablet has a larger screen. I also rarely carry my tablet around as it seems superfluous with my computer and phone.
That's why I, at least, am jumping at the chance to have a device that is both easier to read, and not as big as my tablet.
I love the multitasking on my iPad, so a smartphone that can turn into a mini-tablet that might support similar forms of multitasking sounds awesome to me. I'm just gonna wait until somebody releases a model that doesn't cost me an arm and doesn't break within a week.
I would love to have a phone that I can open up to tablet size, so I only need one device for both jobs. Find something too big for the small screen? Open it up, continue. Taking out the tablet works (especially with the various sync techs for websites), but is not really a "nice" workflow.
Too bad I don't trust Android.
From what I have experienced, the smartphone market is basically saturated. My peers and I no longer have a need for buying new devices. Basic stuff won't get any faster and 5 cameras are not worth a new device.