The Galaxy Fold that doesn’t

In the last day or so, tech journalists have been receiving early Samsung Galaxy Fold samples. I was interested to see what the initial views of the product were, especially after the initial excitement at the launch, and the fact people now have a chance to examine the device close up, and put it to daily use.

What I didn’t expect, was a number of articles and tweets discussing the device failing in a various ways – some I believe are user instigated, and some not.

Samsung Galaxy Fold

To peel or not to peel

One of the initial problems people have faced, are to do with removing what was thought to be a protective film on the screen, only to find the screen stops working. I’ve not been lucky enough to get near to a real device, so after trawling YouTube and looking at unboxing videos I struggled to understand why they’ve done this.

Take this video from Marques Brownlee…

You can clearly see that there’s a standard protective film applied to the device which can safely be removed at the point of unboxing. The lip on the film encourages you to do this – and in all the unboxing videos, you’ll see this happen.

Protective film on the screen at the point of opening the box

But, I’m not aware of any device you buy which has two layers of protection on a screen – it doesn’t make sense. But even so, Marques then tweeted the following…

Further tweets followed with people flagging that there’s instructions advising not to remove the special protective layer (which is bonded in some way to the screen and is different from the initial “lipped” layer):

But what transpires is that depending on the region you receive your device in, you get a different box contents, in this case more than just differing plus, but some come with the warning, some without.

So it looks like it may not be the fault of the journalists after all, but simply an oversight from Samsung in ensuring users are advised (at the point of unboxing) on what can, and what can’t be removed. What does intrigue me is why the removal of that second film breaks the device so instantly and significantly – I expect that will filter onto Twitter at some point.

David Taylor

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *