Multiple Reviewers Facing Broken Galaxy Fold Devices After Just Days of Use

[FFR]

This is just terrible.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/04/...broken-after-two-days-of-use.html?jwsource=cl

Samsung should have just copied Huawei, they seem to know what they are doing when it comes to foldable phones.

Some companies shouldn’t play leader when they can only follow. It’s embarrassing for them.

 

[unchecked]

Looks like everyone is just jumping on the samsung hate bandwagon without actually doing any research on the fact it was down to USER ERROR. Reviewers were pulling off a layer of the display that is was not meant to be removed.

To the people saying it’s user error, that only means the product isn’t well thought out or tested enough to make things idiot proof. Designing things to be idiot proof is actually a good and important part of the process. Apparently it didn’t occur to the team peeling the plastic film off the screen of a fresh device is something almost everyone does by default before we add our own screen protector.

 

[FFR]

Uh, it’s supposed to go on sale April 26th. They might be review units, but they would be final production examples. As in, they’re not early prototypes or alpha units. Not even beta units. They’re production units. It’s too late for Samsung to change anything and have them ready in 10 days.

Edited: At this point in time the only changes they could make based on reviewer feedback would be software fixes.

Yup your right.

Think that poster is just making stuff up, they usually do.

 

[T-R-S]

well at least it doesn't catch fire while on an airliner...

 

[FFR]

No it wasn’t.

1) read the article. Not everyone peeled off the plastic
2) one of the people peeled it off because it was already peeling at the corner (defect)
3) as distributed to the reviewers, it did not have any warning not to peel it off
4) you shouldn’t be abler to peel it off.

Check their post history, it’s not worth it.

 

[LizKat]

Get ready for a long sleep.

Hah. What I see here is what looks like a fairly long thread of some "getting even" happening... Apple has experienced some failures along the way, of course. Clearly though, Apple does not have a lock on messing up.

But I had dropped in here to say something else. Didn't have my glasses on when I first glanced at the thread titles in this forum tonight, so.... I initially thought this one just had a somewhat garbled title, and was really about some faulty Apple device that had been installed in a bunch of (European) Ford Galaxy vehicles for Apple gear reviewers to check out.

Ha ha, that joke's on me and my aging eyes.

But the real joke in here tonight appears to be on Apple haters. I'm sorry for Samsung designers, engineers and line workers, because I'm sure they all worked hard on the rollout. But I'm not particularly sorry about the thrashing that any Apple haters among Samsung fanciers may be collecting this evening. What goes around probably does come around every so often. It's one thing to criticize design or production flaws and another thing to be a blanket "hater" of some company's gear when that company has plenty of well respected products out and about in the marketplace.

Anyway it's nice to realize that my initial impression that this thread was about some flawed Apple gear installed in a bunch of European cars was completely off the mark. Now I can go back to wondering when it will be reasonable to buy my next Mac Book Pro...

 

[Mr. Donahue]

Folding a screen is kind of a stupid idea in the first place. Maybe this will make it all go away.

Yes please!

 

[dilbert99]

Because failure elsewhere makes Apple exempt from criticism?

No.

We would like to report that we are having issues with a small number of screens. Well 3 is a small number.

It's not surprising really. I'd imagine it will be hard to get a folding screen to last.

[doublepost=1555561490][/doublepost]

Folding a screen is kind of a stupid idea in the first place. Maybe this will make it all go away.

A folding screen is a great idea if they can do it reliably
I'm holding out for the roll up display...

 

[Shanghaichica]

The reviewers will be given new units and will no doubt be trying extra hard to break them. So if there are still issues we will find out long before they ever get into the hands of consumers. Let’s see how it all plays out. I’ve no vested interested in seeing Samsung or Huwawei fail even though I have no intentions of buying either product. They are both good ideas which could become viable products for the mass market a few years down the line.

 

[iZac]

This may explain the $1980 price point, they're folding in *get it?* the extensive return and repair costs into the price of the device.

 

[jamesrick80]

Things Samsung should do:

1. Cancel the April 26th release of the Fold and cancel all preorders
2. Apologize to the consumers and tech reviewers
3. Redesign the Fold (it's ugly) and rebrand it with another name; enhance the durability/waterproof it/add s-pen
4. Release the newly redesigned and renamed Foldable device next year
5. Give everyone who preordered a gift certificate for the value of galaxy buds
6. The flagship devices are the S10 and future Note 10...keep things the same for now

 

[Ferc Kast]

I don't think they'll cancel it, that'd be a huge waste of 8 yrs of R&D. They'll come back with a better product.

The fact this happened kinda already proves it a waste of 4 minutes of R&D. It's a unique idea to be sure, but the execution was not thought out at all. That said, phone makers should let folding phones have their death remain in tact back in the feature phone era.

 

[Zaap]

I thought this looks good for video editing on one of their iMacs and thought - cool 8GB of ram on the GPU, then the disappointment when you see that is the system ram not the graphics ram and it still had a freaking spinning disk. No wonder Apple made it to a trillion $ company

This is what I mean about time travel, and why it's freakin' laughable that people think Apple has all this room to bust on other tech companies that are at least pushing the envelope of what's possible. In 2019. Not 2016.

That I can go to Apple's site right now and find a machine for $1300 freakin bucks with 8GB of RAM and not just a hard drive- but a 5400RPM hard drive! Where do you even still find those? Oh wait, perma-2016.

"Oh I'd just swap it out for an SSD..." no you won't. Just try taking one of those damn things apart without breaking the screen.

 

[Peperino]

Because failure elsewhere makes Apple exempt from criticism?

No.

Failure elsewhere does not exempt Apple of creating better products and innovate.

Apple.
Yesterday's technology
At tomorrow's prices

 

[realtuner]

Better by what definition?

Better color accuracy/reproduction and the ability to properly render content from multiple color spaces. A few quotes from Anandtech to explain:

One thing that Samsung didn’t mention is that this is the first Galaxy device shipping with Android’s new colour management support out of the box. What this means is that we have support for both standard gamut as well as wide-gamut content without switching between display modes in the settings.

Testing the Display P3 patterns in Natural mode is a bit of a headache. Samsung introduced colour management with the Galaxy S10, however there’s one gigantic caveat: The OS can’t display content of different gamuts alongside each other. For example, viewing P3 pictures in Samsung’s default S-Browser results in incorrectly clipped saturations, and in effect the browser is still limited to sRGB content.

Out of all applications I’ve tested on the Galaxy S10, Samsung’s only app that supports wide gamut content is the Gallery app, but again with a big caveat. It only switches over to wide gamut when opening up a picture, and when in thumbnail mode the content is still limited to sRGB. Apple’s iPhone Photos app doesn’t have this issue and is able to display P3 thumbnails alongside sRGB thumbnails.

The biggest caveat here is the fact that Android cannot display different gamuts alongside each other, and fundamentally this is an issue of Android, Google and maybe even the SoC vendors. For now, Apple is 4 years ahead of everybody else and there’s yet to be an Android phone matching the iPhone’s colour management capabilities.

 

[PickUrPoison]

I know that this is an unacceptable flaw, but I am happy that they're trying and pushing forward and trying things.

R&D is great; Apple spends more than $1.2 billion per month on it. Some things work out and some don’t.

But prototypes shouldn’t be put on sale to actual paying customers; it might be best for Samsung to cancel next week’s launch, given how poorly these phones have done with reviewers. If it’s only going to last a couple days it’s really not worth $2k.

 

[PowerMacBook]

with Apple, they do test real life usage: sending top engineers to bars, get drunk, lose your prototype iPhone, get it back by suing Gizmodo: engineer had it in real life hands, then Gizmodo, then police, then back at Apple.
Is it still working properly? yes? OK let's bring it to market! ;-)

 

[FFR]

with Apple, they do test real life usage: sending top engineers to bars, get drunk, lose your prototype iPhone, get it back by suing Gizmodo: engineer had it in real life hands, then Gizmodo, then police, then back at Apple.
Is it still working properly? yes? OK let's bring it to market! ;-)

Or you can be more like google and lose a couple of pallets of the pixel 3 months before launch.

Thats wasn’t very practical.

But back to the topic of the fold, let see if this affects preorders and or sales.

 

[calstanford]

Worst product launch in a decade.
Samsung’s stupidity to launch this before it’s reading might kill the whole category if people associate folding phones with unreliability.

I hope Huawei’s design (which looks sooo much better and more thought out) will be better when it comes out in the autumn

 

[ThatGuyInLa]

It's a hunk of junk. Doesn't fold flat. Looks stupid. Visible seam in screen. It's huge. It's $2,000 for a beta product.

 

[sidewinder3000]

No but everyone bitched about Apple's lack of innovation and not jumping on this train when this was first announced... Now look at what happened.

I agree with you. There was an old TV commercial for Paul Masson wines starring Orson Wells, where he used to say “we sell no wine before it’s time”. I think that’s apropos for Apple. The patience and discipline to realize that ideas are often born before the technology exists to bring them to life. Waiting for tech to catch up with concepts is an often unheralded quality of Apple. They’d rather be best than first.

The idea for iPad came years before iPhone, but the screen and battery tech didn’t exist to bring it to life, so they made iPhone first. I respect that. It’s this kind of corporate discipline that makes it easier to trust Apple than most other tech companies. The ego gratification of being first won’t lead to premature products.

 

[Intellectua1]

The fact this happened kinda already proves it a waste of 4 minutes of R&D. It's a unique idea to be sure, but the execution was not thought out at all. That said, phone makers should let folding phones have their death remain in tact back in the feature phone era.

Nah, this shouldn't be discouraging at all, if you fail and quit you're just a loser. They should keep pushing, make it better and come again. I'm still interested in this device and am looking forward to gen 2. Honestly after seeing this device I'm not upgrading my current device until something wows me and it won't be a device with just 3 cameras and a faster processer. I need a new experience, I want to see innovation and someone trying to push the bar. Not some dude on stage telling me about how much faster my phone is when really you can't tell the difference.

 

[PickUrPoison]

Apple is a services company now and their latest services release, Apple news plus, is a failure. Half baked release not ready for prime time.

Apple’s a services company now? Are you sure? Because I thought hardware still accounted for 87% of revenue. Maybe I misread and it’s really 87% services? Pls advise.

Your opinion about Apple News+ being “a failure” is a common prediction, but the same thing was said about iPod, iPhone, Watch, AirPods, etc. so I usually don’t pay too much attention to armchair (or even paid) analysts.

I would also have to disagree with your estimation of cooking time; I’d say AN+ is closer to three-quarters baked. On the other hand, this Samsung prototype seems more like one-quarter baked, but I’m in a generous mood, so I could be persuaded that its done-ness might be charitably described as half-baked. Some might say it’s completely done but that might be a little premature at this point; I think Samsung might be able to delay the release date and fix the problems.

If Samsung releases the Fold in its current state, those who currently have license to laugh at AirPower shall find said license revoked, as it’s much funnier and worthy of derision to release a failed product rather than cancel its release. We’ll know Samsung’s decision shortly...

 

[Morgenland]

DOA

 

[Surfer13134]

All these people are bitching and calling this DOA, people need to give it hope and be excited for it, hopefully this will mean more big companies including Apple will look into this technology. This is a product 1st of its kind and its going to have bugs and issues but that only means they can improve and adapt them. Remember the first iPad was just a gigantic iPod Touch, now look at it its basically and computer with one of the best stylus support ever. I have my pre order in and I'm excited for my fold to come in next week, I know the risks and I know it has a greater than normal chance of having to be replaced but I'm still extremely excited to have one of the first foldable phone/tablet .