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Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

I admire Samsung for creating one of the first foldable phones. It is not the prettiest or the slickest design and I personally can't say that I would be interested in buying one.

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.

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> I don't quite understand the bad press ... first generation ... Beta testers ... issues.

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.

People expected the early-adopter compromises to be things like the price, the lack of waterproofing, the thickness, and the small screen on the front. For $2k, even an early-adopter device should not simply break.

Google Glass cost like 1.5k and did nothing useful or barely did anything at all for that matter. Was durability the main promise of the phone? No, the hinge was promised to be strong and the screen was promised to be flexible. They got parts of that correct. No one was ever promised an unbreakable device for 2k, and no one should even expect such a thing from the first ever folding smartphone.

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.

A device that breaks within days from completely normal use is completely unacceptable for anything that costs $2k.

Nobody was asking for an unbreakable device.

The way it was phrase made me interpret it, but I understand it now as break easily. My apologies.

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.

> that bent while hanging out in your pocket

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

HN guidelines say

> 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.

"No one was ever promised an unbreakable device"

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.

Also reporting on Google Glass was not exactly positive either, to put it mildly. Mainly because it was expensive for a product with no real out of the box use case.

> I don't quite understand the bad press that Samsung is getting with this phone.

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.

Most surprising is how defend Samsung here.

"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???

Well, it's not just "some issues" Fold has. The foldable screen, literally the main selling point of the device, has a tendency to fail.

> I mean, sure it has some issues but it is the first generation of this new type of phone.

They're selling it as a real product, not a beta test—and charging correspondingly.

I think the issue was that they sold it as a beta test, but it turned out to be a pre-alpha test.

Sadly, the misuse of the terms "alpha" and "beta" testing has become so common in our industry that they mean little anymore.

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".

It's an ultra high-end flagship designed to show off amazing new tech.

It should be perfect.

At least for the first few weeks.

These phones also come with a warranty for if/when problems do show up.

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.

The bigger issue to me is how many reviewers had breakage issues within 24 hours. Screw perfect, this is a prototype that escaped the lab.

I do agree that there's issues and they were smart to delay the launch IMO.

Smarter than launching it would have been, sure, but much less smart than not getting anywhere near this point.

> These phones also come with a warranty for if/when problems do show up.

But warranties aren't "get out of jail free" cards that excuse a failure of basic product engineering practices like actual real-world testing.

These are issues that should have come up in real-world testing though, and should've been solved then long before reviewers received units to use for extended periods of time. Problems crop up. The main selling point of the phone breaking completely within 24-48 hours is far worse than the usual kinds of issues that tend to show up in early production.

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