#even in between all the pr and the optics and the whatever there is something very real and true and tender between you two

[thisisyourprincipalspeaking]

Whether this is real or not, and even though he looks miserable, Chris isn't going to gain what he lost not all the way. I'm probably one of the many that just want to see how or when this ends, but wont be supporting him in anyway. Its easy to make up excuses for him, white men always seem to get a pass. But at the end of the day this a grown man who by choice went along with a PR or chose this person to love. No job should be worth risking your reputation or marrying a racist especially someone who has enough money to not worry about how he'll make ends meet. He wasn't going to lose everything over refusing to go along with a PR. He wasn't going to be blacked balled over this. The man had a fanbase, a following, and was a white attractive man he was always going to get work.

As a POC, forgetting and forgiving is just going to be hard. I refuse to believe he was powerless and choice-less if this is PR. It says a lot about him whether this is real or not. It's hard to believe that any studio or agency would force him to do this with her out of all the other options available especially with the racists revelations. It doesn't make any sense, he was a popular actor with a loyal following and she was a nobody actress from out of the country. why would they force someone like her on to him. Would they risk his career for a racist troll, cause had the racist information gotten more attention he could have gotten a lot more backlash and it could have impacted his career. Why would they bat so hard for someone like her, she isnt making them any money then or now, he was or is. The movies she has now arent something she is the star of, most of the public isn't going to watch the movie she just finished for her. He is the more in demand of the two and the more well known, why would they risk him for her, they could have chosen anyone in the states. A fake relationship with an upcoming actress in Hollywood would have gotten him and whatever third party that is pushing this way more attention than this girl has and could have helped change his image if thats what they were after.

Thats why I sometimes believe it is real even though he looks uncomfortable. I think the miserable look has more to do with him not being confident in being seen with someone so much younger and because he wasnt expecting backlash from the very beginning. You can tell he doesn't like be called out and this really got to him. I dont think he likes the optics of the age thing either thats why I think they wanted until she turned 25 to confirm and to be seen with her in public even though there were so many hints out in the open before she turned 25 that they were together. And I think thats why he's always rushing pictures with her because the optics dont look good. They try to dress her up to make her look older by putting her hair up and going heavier with the makeup, but lets be honest if they took her everyday appearance and put it next to him, he'd look liker her dad or uncle. Also I truly dont think if this was PR anyone would push a fake marriage in any circumstances that is way too over the top. What other celebrity especially that was on his level is being pushed to marry for PR reasons. This could very well be a real relationship with very present PR.

very much agree with your sentiments, anon.

i will always maintain that we don't know the bts nitty-gritty dirty details of anything - whether romance or showmance - and sometimes we have options between shit and sprinkle-covered shit however i will also always agree with your point that he wouldn't have been destitute had he declined a pr deal.

i won't throw stones but i will be more cautious and conscientious of where and how my dollars and attention are paid.

[rawmeknockout]

TFA Megatron X Biologist Human Reader - Major voice kink like dear god ;; Megatron found a willing human to be a diplomat between their bots and the rest of the human world, However… The price the human has asked for in return is unconventional, a chance to study their alien biology. He soon finds out why the human enjoys pinning all their questions on him and no one else, his voice makes the reader literally weak, Megatron tries to see how far he can take this ;3

You're just supposed to make him look good. A little social media PR. It's not hard. You're pretty good at the whole social media optics thing, using socials so often yourself, and you know what people want to hear. It just takes a little selectivity with Megatron's messages, and you can make the Decepticons look like interstellar martyrs! You pat yourself on the back with every positive tweet you see in favor of the Decepticons, no matter how many buildings they smash.

Really, this is for the good of everyone. You're the first to document the biology of real aliens! How exciting is that? You practically bounce out of bed now. It helps that you sort of sympathize with the Decepticons. They aren't so bad. Rough around the edges. And maybe they terrorize people but so what! They're really just playful goobers. If you can show them that humans are evolved and a potential ally, Megatron may rethink his plans for total organic annihilation.

Perhaps you're a bit too emotionally attached to the situation, though, because you can practically feel the moment your relationship with Megatron turns from professional to... Something else.

You were covering it pretty well, you thought. How would he even be able to tell that his voice did absolutely ridiculous things to you? Once again, you totally underestimate Megatron's perceptiveness and your own lack of tact. It takes just one dreamy little sigh, while he's explaining the mechanics of the optics, to get the little gears in his head turning. You wanted to kick yourself so bad! Thankfully, or so you thought, it was easy to blow over that little screw up. He would forget the next time he fought the Autobots...

The next time you think to ask him about mech biology Megatron's voice is just a touch breathier, low as he speaks for your ears only. He really has no reason to keep his voice so soft, lean closer to your side, but there's a wide, knowing smirk on his face that has you feeling incredibly vulnerable. His voice is practically rumbling into your bones, knocking around against your spine to tickle nerves alight with pleasure. You are not supposed to be horned up at work, but you can't help the way your mouth parts with the desire to taste those words on his glossa.

You're pudding in his giant fist before you even know it, leaning hard against throne and nodding absentmindedly with whatever he's saying. You can't even think to pretend this is for your scientific work, too focused on his dreamy red optics and the way his mouth curls around every word like it's a precious treat. In fact, you hardly notice when he suggests to take this to his berthroom, gently lifting you from the floor. Which is just as well, you could practically feel your knees start to give out beneath you.

His thumb strokes clothed thighs tenderly, his optics still focused on you with that damned arrogance he always exudes. You can hardly wait to be in his habsuite to feel that smirk against your lips.

[harcourtholmesii]

Dreams And Nightmares

A belated post for @connor-sent-by-cyberlife. Due to some busy-ness, I was unable to post this yesterday, and I may not get the chance to post the next prompted story until tomorrow if stuff keeps slowing me down. Still, I hope it is enjoyable and I hope to keep this up for the list.

Pairings: HankCon / Hannor / Hank X Connor (If You Squint)

Warnings: - Reference to Violence and Murder - Emotional Abuse - ‘Brainwashing’ - Unresolved / Somewhat Open Ending Words: 1300

Enjoy!

‘A-Amanda!’

 Connor’s eyes widened upon the all too familiar figure; a generation of his coding that took shape and glared coldly down at him with dark eyes.

 He didn’t understand…

 He had flushed her from his system; removed her from his programming with the escape program installed by Kamski. How could this fragment of CyberLife’s control remain? It should have been impossible!

 ‘Hello Connor.’ Her voice was clipped, polite as ever but her tone was dangerously sharp.

 Around him, Connor could feel the whip of harsh wind and the burn of the cold through his skin, as if he was a human hiking naked through the Antarctic. His clothes provided little protection and cover from the freezing temperatures, his skin turning white and blue. His fingertips appeared as if they had been stained with blue ink; a royal blue ink that was slowly spreading up to his knuckles.

 ‘W-What are you do… d-doing here?! You can’t be here…’

 ‘I’m afraid I can.’ The woman showed no signs of discomfort. Her skin didn’t quake and her muscles didn’t tense. The right corner of her lips pulled up in a slight smirk. ‘I am here, Connor. And I’ll never be gone.’

 She stepped closer, her dress helping to disguise her in the whiteout of snow. He thought she had faded away into the storm when he felt pressure against his arm. She stood beside him, running her fingers along his arm most delicately. It didn’t soothe him. His LED pulsed red.

 ‘N-No! Kamski said i-it would w-w-work! T-This is just an e-error in my pr… p-programming…’

 ‘That seems cruel of you to say, Connor.’ The woman rounded him, her cruel smirk turning to a mock of a pout. ‘It hurts my feelings to know you just think of me as an error…’

 ‘T-That’s what this is! Y-You were gone!’

 ‘No.’ She raised one hand and took hold of his chattering, lower jaw. She pulled Connor down to her level; he could feel long nails piercing into his skin.

 ‘Just dormant.’

 Those words sent shivers throughout his frail body. Connor hugged himself tighter, attempting to wrench his head away. He wanted to strike out at her, force her away so he could escape. Instead, he felt something like steel wrapped around his wrists, holding them to his body. His gaze lowered, and he felt sick to see CyberLife’s security grid, minimized and transformed into the appearance of standard issue, police cuffs. A holographic band wrapped around his wrists, ‘ERROR’ signs circling there like a physical force field.

 ‘As you can see, Connor, we have control.’ Amanda’s smirk pulled wider, forming a cruel smile. ‘We never lost it.’

 ‘T-This is not r-r-real… This is n-not possible… This is all a m-malfunction. N-Nothing more.’

 ‘Fine.’ She revealed one of her many red roses, now coated in a thin, hardened shell of frost. ‘Remain blissfully unaware. You will be doing myself and CyberLife a service.’ She threaded the sharp, frosted stalk between Connor’s fingers, almost admiring the picture of his restrained, frozen body.

 ‘You c-can’t do anything t-t-to me.’

 ‘Perhaps not… But we can use you. Just as it was before, you will do as we programmed you to.’

 Connor tried to smile, laugh at it all no matter how scared he was. This was all the equivalent to a human’s ‘dream’, no matter how real it seemed.

 ‘Y-You can try, but I am m-my own s-s-self now. You can’t hurt me.’

 ‘It is not you we want to hurt, Connor. It is not you we plan on shutting down.’ Connor didn’t understand. That didn’t make sense. It was he that broke through their programming, it was he that became deviant despite being the one made to hunt deviants. Connor had not seen nor spoken to Markus in weeks, and had no knowledge as to where the deviant leader was. What android could they want to deactivate?

 ‘Who said it had to be an android, Connor?’ Her voice was piercing, and Connor’s heart sunk when he heard those words.

 No…

 No!

 ‘No, you can’t! Don’t do this!’

 ‘Hank Anderson must be executed for his hand in destroying humanity’s chance against the android uprising. It is he that must die for your mistakes, Connor. And you will be the one to do it.’

 The rose in his hand suddenly felt heavier, as if there was a cool metal resting there instead of a frozen flower. He could feel his body moving, not within the ruins of the zen garden, but as if he was out of his own, real body. The images of the garden fought with the images of the real world passing him by, the corridor of Hank Anderson’s home and the open door to his bedroom.

 ‘No! Stop! Please.’

 ‘No, Connor. You don’t have a choice!’

 Choice… No, Connor never had a choice before he became deviant. He never had anything he could do but follow orders like the perfect machine.

 I can be whatever you want, lieutenant.

 Your friend…

 Your buddy to drink with…

 Through the flashes of images, he could hear the slightest click of the safety coming off. The gun he felt in his hands was not the police pistol, but Hank’s personal revolver. The one with a single bullet in its barrel.

 Or just a machine…

 ‘Connor?’ Hank’s tired voice broke through, a faint whisper on the wind. It was groggy from sleep, and Connor could see the barest flashes of Hank’s body propped up against the headboard, wiping the crust on his eyes away with one arm.

 Designed to accomplish a task.

‘Watch it, Connor.’

 ‘What are you doing?’ Sumo’s large, furry head propped up onto Hank’s stomach, the sound of his whining piercing through Connor’s eardrums. He felt tears beginning to pour down his cheeks, freezing in the winter wind.

 It seemed it was doing so in the real world as well, as Hank was watching him with concern and confusion.

 ‘Connor?’

 He felt his real, synthetic hand raise, revealing the tip of the revolver’s barrel in the corner of his eye; directed at Hank’s chest.

 ‘Put that away, Connor.’ Hank’s voice was firm, but clearly startled by the appearance of a threat. Connor was sobbing, his knees weak. He tried to shut his eyes, to blink away the false images of Hank and Sumo, and the gun in his hand.

 ‘Connor!’

 BA-CRAKK!

 …

 …

 …

 ‘HANK!’

 The sound ripped through his voice box, a powerful, mechanical roar as Connor’s eyes snapped open with clarity.

 He was stood in Hank’s living room, no gun in sight and a startled, barking Sumo at his feet. From down the hall, he heard a sudden rush of feet and then the appearance of one silver-haired detective round the corner of the hallway entrance.

 ‘Connor!’ The man raced to his side, arms taking a firm but kind grip on his shoulders. Stormy eyes flashed brightly, concern expressed through how Hank’s lips were turned downward and how his hands were shaking. Connor’s eyes fell to his own hands, empty of gun or rose, and his entire body collapsed as if his chassis were filled with lead.

 Hank followed him to the floor, on his knees and trying to gather Connor’s full attention. It mattered not, as Connor’s optical units, though filled with artificial tears, were entirely on Hank. Hank’s living, breathing body and a face filled with expression; not a drop of red in sight.

 Those strong arms pulled him close until Connor was pressed to Hank’s chest. His nose was buried into the other’s shirt, and from there, he could analyse the traces of grease, salt and sugars from dinner, and the smell of soap from his evening shower. All of it, was a comfort.

 ‘It’s okay, son. It was just a nightmare.’

 And Connor believed him.

[unsafepin]

Optical Illusions: A Study of Aesthetics in Activism in Two Accounts

There’s been a particular thing bothering me about social media for a while. I should probably get a cool editing app, write it in a few bullet points and post it on Instagram. You know what I’m talking about, right? The goddamn infographics. If I have to sit through another slideshow explaining to me another military conflict, another societal issue, another existential unfairness on a baby pink background in a cheery font, I might combust. But the cognitive dissonance of aesthetics in activism has been a problem for a while, hasn’t it? So today, I want to examine the effect of focusing on aesthetics over content, or, on the flipside, not considering the optics of your activism enough, and what it does to the consumer of your content by picking apart two local activist-adjacent media projects, Tetraedras and Giljožinios.

Firstly, I want to make my own bias abundantly clear. I am personally acquainted with the teams of both projects, so obviously there will be innate personal bias involved. I highly encourage anyone reading to check both projects out themselves (@t3traedras and @giljozinios on Instagram, as well as Giljožinios’ YouTube channel) and make their own conclusions on the matter. I believe that while my familiarity breeds deeper knowledge of my subjects, it also makes me more vulnerable to assumptions about individuals involved. My insights come from the perspective of an observer, not an expert. Welcome to the circus.

The use of the word “optics” in a metaphorical political sense sprung up in the 1970s to describe the way major political decisions would not necessarily affect an average citizen, but how it would appear to them, e.g. 'U.S. President Barack Obama temporized for weeks, worrying about the optics of waging war in another Arab state after the Iraq fiasco' (Toronto Star, 19th March 2011). However, it’s become increasingly relevant in our age of social media, an age of perceptions over substance, of shortening attention spans and increased barrage of information one has to stomach daily. Social media is the great equalizer - a random person off the street can theoretically hold as much influence as a politician - thus it is becoming increasingly crucial for the average Joe posting on the countless apps owned by Facebook to be as familiar with PR terms as a firm with a six figure salary. Or at least that would be nice, seeing that more and more average Joes are becoming actively involved in politics and education, seeking to influence their newfound audience.

So, let’s see how successful average people with no media or politics degrees are at balancing their image. Both Tetraedras and Giljožinios lean into their 2010’s social media project optics: millennial pink themes, bold names, young teams. But that’s where the similarities end. Tetraedras’ brand is safety. The shades of color on the profile are calming, the illustrations are youthful and playful, their more serious posts are interspersed with more relaxing content (poetry, photoshoots, etc.). Giljožinios is confrontational. The colors electric, posts loud and to the point, they’re what it says on the box - a leftist project - and unapologetic about it. This might help to explain why audiences react as differently as they do to these two, on the surface, similar accounts. Because while you might’ve stumbled on Tetraedras organically while browsing, them having almost two thousand followers, Giljožinios crashed into the educational/political social media scene by being featured on the goddamn national news, that’s how controversial the project is. And obviously I am oversimplifying the issue, Tetraedras slowly built up to posting more opinionated content, while Giljožinios came in guns blazing accusing USA of imperialism, but you’ll have to let me explain. Tetraedras, in its essence, is a welcoming environment. They explain complicated problems in short bullet points with accompanying comforting visuals, their mascot is a inoffensive geometrical figure and their face is a beautiful girl, make-up matching the theme of the post. Giljožinios is named after a revolutionary device, their profile picture is a monarch being beheaded, their host quite infamously sat in front of Che Guevara memorabilia in their first and (as of writing) only video. It’s a lightning rod for angry comments by baby boomers, no matter what comes out of their mouth. In fact, I would argue that, if presented accordingly, the idea that the US is conducting a kind of modern imperialism is just a simple fact and personally can’t wait until Tetraedras posts that with a quirky illustration of Joe Biden to introduce the concept to the wider public.

This leads me to my next point, because despite what’s been previously suggested, I’m not here to solely sing Giljožinios’ praise. There is a cognitive dissonance in both of these flavors of social media activism, but while I can understand Tetraedras’ on a PR level, I’m kind of personally insulted by Giljožinios’. While purely personally I find aspects of Giljožinios’ radicalism distasteful, I appreciate the honesty in the youthful maximalism, of coming in strong and not backing down, but from the guys that made a communist Christmas tree once I almost expected something more stirring than “military industrial complex bad”. This leads me to ask: who is your content for? Your average breadtube-savvy twenty-something already heard this a thousand times, because they consume similar english-speaking content and I doubt any minds of the vatniks that came by to fume in the comment section are being changed. I’m obviously harking on a newborn project here, the team of which has already been bitten by authorities censoring their content, but so far there has been a lot of optical bark, but no substantial bite, especially considering the team seems to be in a safer place now. And the inverse is true for Tetraedras, while I can understand wanting to be visually interesting yet inoffensive, their visuals are sometimes laughably, morbidly light for the topics they discuss Sexily posing in Britney Spears-inspired outfits while discussing the horrors of her conservatorship springs to mind (funny how Britney’s conservatorship leads her to have next to none bodily autonomy, including her public costume choices). And, once again, your target audience is teenagers. They understand English, they’ve seen the news, they don’t need you to translate infographics filled with statistics and information that’s locally completely irrelevant. There needs to be some kind of middle ground between aesthetic cohesion and common sense, because this all signals to the viewer that the content is meant to be mindlessly consumed first and to educate second.

Which leads me to ponder what kind of consumption accounts like these encourage, which will surely lead me to an early grave as I drink away the existential dread of how social media rots all of our brains. Because yes, actually, producing funky visuals to convey an idea way too complicated for an Instagram post is fun. I myself got distracted multiple times during writing to make the first slide for my own post. Meta, I know. This is obviously more of a problem for Tetraedras, who seem to fervently resist injecting their content with a few more paragraphs and a tad more nuance, but even with Giljožinios choosing a more appropriate long-form format to educate, I still pray everyday they don’t get lost in the revolutionary reputation their group built up and forget to make a point, not just talking points.

Because what all this all inevitably leads to is misinforming the public. Again, this seems to be less of a problem for Giljožinios, as the amount of critical eyeballs they have on them leads to them being corrected on every incorrect numerical figure and grammatical mistake, I just hope all this harassment, once again, doesn’t get them all caught up in the optics of a revolution against all the Facebook boomers and forgetting to do their due diligence to the truth. As far as I know, the only factual mistake is miscalculating how much Lituania invests in NATO and there’s still a historical debate in their comment section about the existence of a CIA prison in Lithuania, if anyone’s concerned. Tetraedras, however, is safe. And safe content goes down just like a sugar-coated pill, you don’t even feel the need to fact-check it. And fact-checking is what it sorely requires, or else you’re left with implying that boxing causes men to become rapists and citing statistics of every country except the one in which, you know, me, the team and the absolute majority of their followers live in.

So what’s my goddamn point? Burn your phone and go live in the woods, always. But in the context of this essay, if you are a content creator that aims to educate, inform, incite, whatever, you need to put aesthetics on the backburner. And, more importantly, we as consumers need to stop tolerating content that puts being either pretty or inflammatory first instead of whatever message it’s trying to send, because the supply follows where the demand goes. Read books, watch long-form content made by experts, not teenagers on the internet chasing followers out of not even malicious intent, but almost a knee-jerk reaction. Because while the story of those two accounts cuts especially deep, expectations for local-, even friend-made content being much higher than that for some corporate accounts shooting their shot at activism, the problem is entrenched deep, thousands of accounts exhibiting the same problems racking up millions upon millions of followers. Having said that, my attention span is barely long enough to read the essays I write myself, so maybe do burn your phone and go live in the woods.

Also, pink is actually my brand so both of these accounts are being contacted by my lawyers and the rest of you don’t try any shit.

[phaedrecameron]

The Accused, James Fraser, Chapter 10 - Sandbag

“Are you sure this is a good idea…he’s the prosecutor!?” Phaedre whisper screamed in Claire’s ear as they entered the Boston criminal courts building.

“We’ve got to find Jamie. His defense lawyer won’t risk us screwing up the case,” Claire replied, directing them to first floor café. “Grey released Jamie without prior authorization. I’m sure of it. I’ve been around long enough to know that protocol wasn’t followed. He’s hoping Jamie will lead him to accomplices. He’ll have people watching him.”

Phaedre nodded in acquiescence. She’d just have to trust this Beauchamp woman. Claire was taking a hell of a risk helping Jamie and she seemed to care for him a great deal.

Once Phaedre had explained her connection to Jamie, Claire had offered her a place to stay, which happened to be Geillis’ home. Geillis had an entire shelf on her guest room bookcase dedicated to Jamaican and Haitian voodoo. Phaedre would definitely need to ask her about that later.

Phaedre looked at Claire as they sat in the café. She was definitely pretty, but in a sort of untamed, ethereal way. No wonder her best friend was a witch. But she couldn’t say whether Claire was Jamie’s type. Phaedre had been around Jamie often enough to know he attracted the eye of many women. He was always polite, but he was looking for something or someone else. And there was the issue of Beauchamp being married to Frank Randall. Ugh, thinking of that man was like smelling rotten milk. Yet, Jamie must feel something for Claire. While Phaedre had been unpacking her things at Geillis’, Claire shyly entered the room.

“So..do you speak any Gaelic…I mean for your research?” Claire had asked.

“Speak, no. But I’ve gotten to understand a few things.”

“I see.” Claire had tugged at the hem of her shirt. “Well, Geillis doesn’t know any Gaelic and google translate is useless because of the phonetics of that bloody language.”

“What is it you want to know?” Phaedre had been tired and the way Beauchamp had been hemming and hawing was akin to waiting for water to boil.

“Well… do you know what ‘mo cree’ or ‘mo rye’ means?”

“Mo chridhe. Mo ghraidh. My heart. My love.”

“Oh.” Whatever Beauchamp had been expecting it wasn’t that. She’d started to glow and the stupidest smile had formed on her face. She’d left the room as though Phaedre had given her the Holy Grail.

Clearly, Jamie had spoken those words to her, not something he would have done lightly.

Yes, Phaedre would follow Claire’s lead.

****************************** “What the fuck were you thinking! Releasing Fraser from custody!?” Harry Quarry screamed at Grey.

“I didn’t release him, he posted bail,” Grey replied.

Harry was red faced, with a vein protruding from his forehead. John worried his boss would have a coronary right on the spot. Harry walked around his desk to glower over Grey.

“Don’t! You know damn well capital defendants can’t get bail. You dismissed the death penalty allegation!”

“Harry, this is the best way to catch..”

“We have the killer! You know Grey, I stood up for you when everybody thought you were a spoiled blue blood who bought his way through life. I recommended you for homicide when everyone thought you needed more experience. It’s nice that you can blow up your career, go yachting for six months and get another job, but this job is my life’s work and my family needs my pension!” Harry sat back behind his desk, turning his attention to a stack a files. “I’ve already spoken to Brown. You’ll stay on the Fraser case. The optics of removing you now would make the office look even worse, but once this case is over you’ll be lucky to even prosecute a speeding ticket. Leave.” Harry didn’t look up.

Grey went to the downstairs café, wishing he had some MacKenzie Whisky to add to his coffee. If he was wrong about Fraser, he’d hunt the man down and flip the switch himself.

“Hullo.” Suddenly Dr. Claire Beauchamp was sitting across from him. She looked more poised than the last time he saw her, but she was clearly up to something. “I need the location of James Fraser…for the eval.”

Grey sipped his coffee. She would make a terrible spy, no finesse.

Claire continued, “I need a follow up exam. I don’t want to miss the court deadline.” She smiled pleasantly. “I’m sure he provided an address as a condition of pre trial release…maybe even agreed to an electronic gps device?”

“Yes, and he surrendered his passport, but surely you know how…irregular it would be to release the defendant’s address to the court appointed psychiatrist. Contact Ned. He can arrange a meeting or my office can coordinate the interview at police headquarters.”

“I understand it’s unusual, but there are extenuating circumstances,” Claire pressed.

“Which would be……?”

Beauchamp looked as though she intended to grab his coffee and throw it in his face. Grey moved his coffee out of her reach. He was more than willing to wait her out.

“The circumstance of his innocence,” Claire hissed.

“If you had any such evidence, you’d have told Ned or the police. This is clearly personal for you.”

“And if you thought he were guilty, he wouldn’t be out on bail.”

Touché

“Do you know that woman?” Grey pointed his chin at a woman a few tables over. She was eavesdropping while pretending to read a kindle.

Claire groaned and waived the woman over. “This is Dr. Phaedre Cameron, Jamie’s cousin. She’s…helping me.”

Grey ignored her use of a nickname for Fraser and watched as this woman joined their table. “Hello, pleased to meet you,” Phaedre extended her hand. Grey shook it as he looked from Beauchamp back to this Dr. Cameron.

The woman was clearly an American and not from Boston.

Sensing Grey’s confusion, Phaedre explained, “distant cousin, on his paternal side. We have an 18th century ancestor in common, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, The Old Fox.”

Grey blinked. He definitely needed something stronger than coffee.

“Lovat was executed by the English,” Phaedre added triumphant. “Did you know Scottish people came en mass to colonial America; some were indentured servants and some were involved in the trans Atlantic slave trade and….”

Claire lightly put her hand on Phaedre’s arm. She knew all to well the signs of a historian about go on a very long and very convoluted explanation of historical events.

“Oh, sorry,” Phaedre looked sheepish.

Grey cleared his throat, “Well it’s good Fraser has…. maintained contact with his American relations…..are you a doctor of psychiatry also?”

“Goodness, no. History. I’m a professor at UNC, Chapel Hill.

Grey sat forward. “North Carolina! That’s what Fraser was doing down there. Visiting you.”

Cameron’s face went blank. She had a far better poker face than Beauchamp. She looked to Beauchamp, “this will help Jamie, yes?”

Claire looked to Grey, “I don’t know. Can we trust you? To help find the true killer?” Her face was earnest and open.

Grey looked at the two women. Both highly educated, both convinced of Fraser’s innocence and willing to help him at great cost. Grey, himself was in a similar situation. He’d be ruined if releasing Fraser turned up nothing. Grey sighed. What was it about damned James Fraser.

“Yes, yes, you can trust me, but I want to know everything! What was Fraser doing in North Carolina and how do you really know him?”

Beauchamp nodded to Cameron. Cameron began, “what I said was true; Jamie and I are distantly related. My historical focus is the culture of enslaved Africans living in islands along the southern Atlantic seaboard in Colonial to antebellum America. These people developed a distinct culture and language; a language that is dying. I knew of programs to revive and protect languages— like with the Maori language in New Zealand and Gaelic in Scotland. I discovered MacKenzie Whisky was a huge sponsor of the program in Scotland. I reached out a few years back and Jamie responded. We became friends. He educated me on Scottish history and it was really interesting. I found great overlap and contact between Scots and putative African Americans. I researched some of my own history and found the common ancestor.”

I see, so he came for a visit?” Grey asked.

“He called me about two months before the murder. He wanted to know if I could put him contact with experts who could keep quiet.”

“Experts?”

“Historical experts; archeologists, anthropologists, antiquities specialists, renaissance art dealers, indigenous peoples researchers. I didn’t think much of it.” Phaedre shrugged. “I figured it was for his Foundation. “Said he would fly to North Carolina to discuss it.”

Phaedre stopped abruptly and looked at Claire, “He really is special, tries to help those he can.” Claire’s blush was not unnoticed.

“Anyway,” Phaedre continued, “he brought this.” She handed Grey a stack of photos of artifacts and copies of documents. “Those are historical items of note; spanning centuries, across multiple cultures and all stolen. Jamie asked me to authenticate some pertaining to Colonial America and get the right experts for the rest.”

“Jesus,” Grey flipped through the pages. There was also references to purchases of conflict diamonds from Africa, emeralds from Colombia, rhino horns, items looted from the unrest in the Middle East.

“These items are all in possession of Mackenzie Whisky. Amassed over the last two years, and easily traceable to Janet Murray & William Fraser, Jamie’s siblings,” Claire added.

John sat back in his chair. “A set up.”

Both women nodded. Grey knew if this information got out Fraser’s siblings would be jailed and the company would be ruined. This was a PR disaster in every market where Mackenzie Whisky was sold. This is what Minnie would call a scorched Earth attack.

“Jamie said he knew the liaison who was procuring the items on behalf of the company. He was flying to Boston to meet her. It must have been Laoghaire.” Phaedre stated.

“Once he was arrested, I didn’t know what to do.” She looked between Claire and John, “He wouldn’t return my calls. I didn’t want to go to the police or his lawyer for fear of everything going pubic….I thought maybe with doctor – client privilege…I… I…” Claire grabbed Phaedre’s hand.

“We’ll fix it, we’ll find him and figure it out,” Claire continued to squeeze Phaedre’s hand and looked at Grey.

Grey, while sympathetic, was extremely skeptical of Beauchamp being able to help Fraser.

“He’ll already have a plan,” Phaedre stated, wiping at the corner of her eyes. “We’ve just got to convince him we can help. He’s got a reason to live now.” She smiled at Claire. ***************

Claire fiddled with her hair and wiped her hands on her jeans for the third time as she rode the elevator to the 7th floor of the luxury apartment building where Jamie was staying. What if he refuses to see her? What if he sent her away? Before she could lose her nerve, Claire exited the elevator, walked to his door and knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again.

When she thought she could no longer bear it, she heard Jamie’s voice through the door, “Ach, took ye long enough! Where’d ye go, Memphis?!”

The door swung open and she instinctively stepped back. Her mouth fell open. Jamie stood before her. He was wet and naked, save a gps ankle monitor and an entirely too small hand towel he was grasping around his waist.

He stared, but said nothing.

Claire moved forward.

“Sorry, it’s me, Claire.”

[nbntv-blog]

[ad_1]

The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed.

If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product had at least a vague idea of what it was all about. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had that reaction with a non-iPhone device. That’s great from brand perspective. It means a lot of people are curious and potentially open to the notion that the Samsung Galaxy Fold is the future.

Of course, it also means there are a lot of people looking on if you fail.

In some ways, this past week with the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been an extremely public beta. A handful of samples were given out to reviewers. Most worked fine (mine included), but at least three failed. It’s what we in the industry call a “PR nightmare.” Or at least it would be for most companies.

Samsung’s weathered larger storms — most notably with the Galaxy Note 7 a few years back. Of course, that device made it much further along, ultimately resulting in two large-scale recalls. The nature of the two issues was also vastly different. A malfunctioning screen doesn’t put the user at bodily risk like an exploding battery. The optics on these things don’t get much worse than having your smartphone banned from planes.

As of this writing, the Fold is still set to go on sale, most likely this year. To be perfectly frank, the April 26 release date seemed overly optimistic well before the first reports of malfunctioning units. It’s never a great sign when a device is announced in February and is only made available for review a few weeks ahead of launch. It’s kind of like when a studio doesn’t let reviewers watch a film before release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

That’s the thing. The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device you want badly to succeed. You want it to be great and you want Samsung to sell a billion because it’s a genuinely exciting product after a decade of phones that look mostly the same. There’s also the fact that Samsung has essentially been hyping this thing for eight years, since it debuted a flexible display at CES 2011.

In spite of that, however, the home stretch feels rushed. Samsung no doubt saw the writing on the wall, as companies like Huawei readied their own foldable. And while Royole beat the fold to market, Samsung still had a very good shot at the claim of first commercially viable foldable on the market, with a decade of Galaxy devices under its belt and hand-in-hand work with the Google team to create an Android UX that makes sense on a pair of very different screens.

[Source: iFixit]

But this iFixit teardown speaks volumes. “Alarmingly” isn’t the kind of word you want/expect to hear about a company like Samsung, but there it is, followed directly by “fragile” — itself repeated five times over the course of the write-up. iFixit’s findings match up pretty closely with Samsung’s own reports:

A fragile display means knocking it the wrong way can result in disaster.

A gap in the hinges allows dirt and other particles to wedge themselves between the folding mechanism and screen.

Don’t peel off the protective layer. I know it looks like you should, but this is probably the easiest way to wreck your $2,000 phone that doesn’t involve a firearm or blender.

What makes all of this doubly unfortunate is that Samsung has about as much experience as anyone making a rugged phone that works. I feel confident that the company will do just that in future generations, but unless the company can come back with definitive evidence that it’s overhauled the product ahead of launch, this is a difficult product to recommend.

Samsung knew the first-gen Galaxy Fold would be a hard sell, of course. The company was pretty transparent about the fact that the experimental form factor, coupled with the $1,980 price tag, meant the device will only appeal to a small segment of early adopters.

Even so, the company managed to sell out of preorders — though it didn’t say how large that initial run was. Nor are we sure how many users have canceled in the wake of this past week’s events. Certainly no one would blame them for doing so at this point.

But while the apocalyptic shit-posters among us will declare the death of the foldable before it was ever truly born, whatever doesn’t kill Samsung has only made it stronger. And this misfire could ultimately do that for both the company and the category, courtesy of its informal beta testing.

Rewind a mere week or so ago (seriously, it’s only been that long), when we finally got our hands on the Galaxy Fold. I was impressed. And I certainly wasn’t alone. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a glow that first time you see a device that’s seemingly been teased forever. The fact that it exists feels like a kind of victory in and of itself. But the Fold does an admirable job marrying Samsung’s hardware expertise with a new form factor. And more importantly, it’s real and works as advertised — well, mostly, at least.

The truth is, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with the Galaxy Fold. And indeed, it’s been fun chronicling it on a (nearly) daily basis. There are some things the form factor is great for — like looking at Google Maps or propping it up to watch YouTube videos on the elliptical machine at the gym. There are others when the bulky form factor left me wanting to go back to my regular old smartphone — but those trade-offs are to be expected.

I both like the Fold’s design and understand the criticism. Samsung’s done a good job maintaining the Galaxy line’s iconic design language. The foldable looks right at home alongside the S and Note. That said, the rounded backing adds some bulk to the product. And while open, the device is thinner than an iPhone, when folded, it’s more than double the thickness, owing to a gap between the displays. It’s quite skinny in this mode, however, so it should slip nicely into all but the tightest pants pockets.

In practice, the folding mechanism might be the most impressive part of the product. The inside features several interlocking gears that allow the product to open and shut with ease and let users interact with the device at various states of unfold. I found myself using the device with it open at a 90-degree angle quite a bit, resting in my hand like an open book. The Fold features a pair of magnets on its edges, which let you close it with a satisfying snap. It’s weirdly therapeutic.

Really, the biggest strike against the device from a purely aesthetic standpoint is that it’s not the Mate X. Announced by Huawei a few days after the Fold’s big unveil, the device takes a decidedly more minimalist approach to the category. It’s an elegant design that features less device and more screen, and, honestly, the kind of thing I don’t think most of us expected until at least the second-generation product.

The gulf between the two devices is especially apparent when it comes to the front screen. The front of the screen is around two-fifths bezel, leaving room for a 4.6-inch display with an awkward aspect ratio. The Mate X, meanwhile, features a 6.6-inch front-facing AND 6.4-inch rear-facing display (not to mention the larger eight-inch internal display to the Fold’s 7.3).

There’s reason to recommend the Fold over the Mate X, as well. I can’t speak to the difference in user experience, having only briefly interacted with the Huawei, but the price point is a biggie. The Mate X starts at an even more absurd $2,600, thanks in part to the fact that it will only be available in a 5G version, adding another layer of niche.

That price, mind you, is converted from euros, because 1) The product was announced at MWC in Barcelona and 2) U.S. availability is likely to be a nonstarter again, as the company continues to struggle with U.S. regulators.

Of course, the Fold’s U.S. availability is also in limbo at the moment, albeit for very different reasons.

I ultimately spent little time interacting with the front screen. It’s good for checking notifications and the like, but attempting to type on that skinny screen is close to impossible, with shades of the new Palm device, which implements its own shortcuts to get around those shortcomings. The inside, meanwhile, takes a butterfly keyboard approach, so you can type with both thumbs while holding it open like a book.

There’s also the issue of app optimization. A lot of this can be chalked up to an early version of a first-gen device. But as with every new device, the equation of how much developer time to invest is largely dependent on product adoption. If the Fold and future Fold’s aren’t a success, developers are going to be far less inclined to invest the hours.

This is most painfully obvious when it comes to App Continuity, one of the device’s primary selling points from a software perspective. When working as advertised, it makes a compelling case for the dual screens. Open something on the front and expand your canvas by unfolding the device. Google is among the companies that worked directly with Samsung to optimize apps this way, and it’s particularly handy with Maps. I used it a fair amount on my trip last week to Berkeley (shout out to the fine people at Pegasus Books on Shattuck).

When an app isn’t optimized, Samsung compels you to restart it, or else you get a nasty case of letterbox bars that retain the aspect ratio of the front screen. Continuity isn’t designed to work the other way, either — opening something on the large screen and then transferring to the front. That’s a bit trickier, as shutting the phone is designed to offer a kind of finality to that session, like hitting the power button to put the device to sleep.

I get that, and like many other pieces here, it will be interesting to see how people utilize it. Aside from the obvious hardware concerns, much of the work on the second-generation device will center around learnings from how users interact with this model. I know I surprised myself when I ended up using the 7.3-inch screen to snap photos. It felt silly — like those people who bring iPads to photograph events. But it’s ultimately a much better viewfinder than that measly 4.6-incher.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for the inside screen, of course. The size, which is somewhere between phablet and mini tablet, provides ample real estate that can still be held in one hand. It’s a great size for short videos. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube on this thing, though the speakers (a small series of holes on the upper and lower edges) leave a lot to be desired.

And the seam. I found myself uttering the phrase “it could be worse” a lot. Like so much of the general aesthetic (including the odd green-gold color of my Fold’s casing), it’s lighting-dependent. There are plenty of times when you don’t see it all, and other when the glare hits it and makes it look like a line right down the center.

I realized after snapping a couple of photos that it’s particularly apparent in many shots. That probably gives a false impression of its prominence. It sucks that there’s one at all, but it’s not a surprise, given the nature of the design. You mostly don’t notice it, until your finger swipes across it. And even then it’s subtle and totally not a dealbreaker, unlike, say, the massive gap that made the ZTE Axon M look like two phones pasted together.

I love the ability to stand the device up by having it open at a 90-degree angle, so I can watch videos while brushing my teeth. But this orientation blocks the bottom speakers, hampering the already iffy sound. Thankfully, your $1,980 will get you a pair of the excellent Galaxy Buds in box. It’s hard to imagine Apple bundling AirPods with the next iPhone, but I guess stranger things have happened, right?

Multi-Active Window is the other key software piece. It’s something that has been available on other Samsung devices and certainly makes sense here. Open an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a tray will open. From there, you can open up to three apps on the display. Once open, the windows feature a small tab at the top that lets you rearrange them.

It’s handy. I used it the most during those times I had a video playing on an exercise machine, so I didn’t have to close out of everything to check emails and Twitter. I’m a gym multi-tasker. I’m sorry, it’s just who I am now.

It worked quite well on the whole, courtesy of robust internals, including 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855. The primary issue I ran into was how some of the apps maintained that half-screen format after I closed out and reopened. I’m sure some people will prefer that, and I’m honestly not sure what the ideal solution is there.

The Fold’s also got a beefy battery on board. Like Huawei’s, it’s split in two — one on either side of the fold. They work out to a beefy 4,380 mAh. That’s just slightly less than Huawei’s 4,500, but again, the Mate X is 5G by default — which means it’s going to burn through mAhs at a faster rate.

Ultimately, the Fold’s greatest strength is Samsung itself. I understand why you probably just did a double take there in the wake of the company’s latest hardware scandal, but the fact is that the company knows how to build phones. The Fold was very much built atop the foundation of the successful Galaxy line, even while it presents a curious little fork in the family tree.

That means a solid and well-thought-out user experience outside of the whole fold thing.

That list includes great cameras with excellent software features and clever tricks like the new Wireless PowerShare, which lets you fold up the phone and charge up those Galaxy Buds or another phone while it’s plugged in. For better or worse, it also includes Bixby. Our model was a European version that didn’t have the full version, but I think I’ve made my thoughts on the smart assistant pretty well known over the last couple of years.

The devoted Bixby button is very much here. And yes, I very much accidentally pressed it a whole bunch. The headphone jack, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent, which is no doubt a big driver behind the decision to include Galaxy Buds. The Fold is an anomaly in a number of ways, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this might finally represent the beginning of the end for the port on Samsung’s premium devices.

Also absent is the S Pen. The stylus began life on the Note line and has since branched out to other Samsung devices. I suspect the company would have had a tough time squeezing in space for it alongside the dual batteries, and maybe it’s saving something for future generations, but this does feel like the ideal screen size for that accessory.

I’m parting ways with the Fold this week, per Samsung’s instructions. Unlike other products, giving it up won’t feel that tough. There wasn’t a point in the past week when the Fold didn’t feel like overkill. There were, however, times when my iPhone XS screen felt downright tiny after switching back.

In many ways, the foldable phone still feels like the future, and the Fold feels like a stop along the way. There are a lot of first-gen issues that should be/should have been hammered out before mass producing this device. That said, there are certain aspects that can only really be figured out in real-world testing. Take the fact that Samsung subjected the device to 200,000 mechanical open and closes. That’s a lot, and probably more than the life of just about any of these devices, but people don’t open and close like machines. And when it comes to the screen, well, a little dirt is bound to get between the gears, both metaphorically and literally.

As I close this Galaxy Fold a final time, it seems safe to say that the device represents a potentially exciting future for a stagnant smartphone space. But that’s the thing about the future — it’s just not here yet.

[ad_2] Source link

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock – TechCrunch The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift.

[smartecky]

The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed.

If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product had at least a vague idea of what it was all about. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had that reaction with a non-iPhone device. That’s great from brand perspective. It means a lot of people are curious and potentially open to the notion that the Samsung Galaxy Fold is the future.

Of course, it also means there are a lot of people looking on if you fail.

In some ways, this past week with the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been an extremely public beta. A handful of samples were given out to reviewers. Most worked fine (mine included), but at least three failed. It’s what we in the industry call a “PR nightmare.” Or at least it would be for most companies.

Samsung’s weathered larger storms — most notably with the Galaxy Note 7 a few years back. Of course, that device made it much further along, ultimately resulting in two large-scale recalls. The nature of the two issues was also vastly different. A malfunctioning screen doesn’t put the user at bodily risk like an exploding battery. The optics on these things don’t get much worse than having your smartphone banned from planes.

As of this writing, the Fold is still set to go on sale, most likely this year. To be perfectly frank, the April 26 release date seemed overly optimistic well before the first reports of malfunctioning units. It’s never a great sign when a device is announced in February and is only made available for review a few weeks ahead of launch. It’s kind of like when a studio doesn’t let reviewers watch a film before release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

That’s the thing. The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device you want badly to succeed. You want it to be great and you want Samsung to sell a billion because it’s a genuinely exciting product after a decade of phones that look mostly the same. There’s also the fact that Samsung has essentially been hyping this thing for eight years, since it debuted a flexible display at CES 2011.

In spite of that, however, the home stretch feels rushed. Samsung no doubt saw the writing on the wall, as companies like Huawei readied their own foldable. And while Royole beat the fold to market, Samsung still had a very good shot at the claim of first commercially viable foldable on the market, with a decade of Galaxy devices under its belt and hand-in-hand work with the Google team to create an Android UX that makes sense on a pair of very different screens.

[Source: iFixit]

But this iFixit teardown speaks volumes. “Alarmingly” isn’t the kind of word you want/expect to hear about a company like Samsung, but there it is, followed directly by “fragile” — itself repeated five times over the course of the write-up. iFixit’s findings match up pretty closely with Samsung’s own reports:

A fragile display means knocking it the wrong way can result in disaster.

A gap in the hinges allows dirt and other particles to wedge themselves between the folding mechanism and screen.

Don’t peel off the protective layer. I know it looks like you should, but this is probably the easiest way to wreck your $2,000 phone that doesn’t involve a firearm or blender.

What makes all of this doubly unfortunate is that Samsung has about as much experience as anyone making a rugged phone that works. I feel confident that the company will do just that in future generations, but unless the company can come back with definitive evidence that it’s overhauled the product ahead of launch, this is a difficult product to recommend.

Samsung knew the first-gen Galaxy Fold would be a hard sell, of course. The company was pretty transparent about the fact that the experimental form factor, coupled with the $1,980 price tag, meant the device will only appeal to a small segment of early adopters.

Even so, the company managed to sell out of preorders — though it didn’t say how large that initial run was. Nor are we sure how many users have canceled in the wake of this past week’s events. Certainly no one would blame them for doing so at this point.

But while the apocalyptic shit-posters among us will declare the death of the foldable before it was ever truly born, whatever doesn’t kill Samsung has only made it stronger. And this misfire could ultimately do that for both the company and the category, courtesy of its informal beta testing.

Rewind a mere week or so ago (seriously, it’s only been that long), when we finally got our hands on the Galaxy Fold. I was impressed. And I certainly wasn’t alone. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a glow that first time you see a device that’s seemingly been teased forever. The fact that it exists feels like a kind of victory in and of itself. But the Fold does an admirable job marrying Samsung’s hardware expertise with a new form factor. And more importantly, it’s real and works as advertised — well, mostly, at least.

The truth is, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with the Galaxy Fold. And indeed, it’s been fun chronicling it on a (nearly) daily basis. There are some things the form factor is great for — like looking at Google Maps or propping it up to watch YouTube videos on the elliptical machine at the gym. There are others when the bulky form factor left me wanting to go back to my regular old smartphone — but those trade-offs are to be expected.

I both like the Fold’s design and understand the criticism. Samsung’s done a good job maintaining the Galaxy line’s iconic design language. The foldable looks right at home alongside the S and Note. That said, the rounded backing adds some bulk to the product. And while open, the device is thinner than an iPhone, when folded, it’s more than double the thickness, owing to a gap between the displays. It’s quite skinny in this mode, however, so it should slip nicely into all but the tightest pants pockets.

In practice, the folding mechanism might be the most impressive part of the product. The inside features several interlocking gears that allow the product to open and shut with ease and let users interact with the device at various states of unfold. I found myself using the device with it open at a 90-degree angle quite a bit, resting in my hand like an open book. The Fold features a pair of magnets on its edges, which let you close it with a satisfying snap. It’s weirdly therapeutic.

Really, the biggest strike against the device from a purely aesthetic standpoint is that it’s not the Mate X. Announced by Huawei a few days after the Fold’s big unveil, the device takes a decidedly more minimalist approach to the category. It’s an elegant design that features less device and more screen, and, honestly, the kind of thing I don’t think most of us expected until at least the second-generation product.

The gulf between the two devices is especially apparent when it comes to the front screen. The front of the screen is around two-fifths bezel, leaving room for a 4.6-inch display with an awkward aspect ratio. The Mate X, meanwhile, features a 6.6-inch front-facing AND 6.4-inch rear-facing display (not to mention the larger eight-inch internal display to the Fold’s 7.3).

There’s reason to recommend the Fold over the Mate X, as well. I can’t speak to the difference in user experience, having only briefly interacted with the Huawei, but the price point is a biggie. The Mate X starts at an even more absurd $2,600, thanks in part to the fact that it will only be available in a 5G version, adding another layer of niche.

That price, mind you, is converted from euros, because 1) The product was announced at MWC in Barcelona and 2) U.S. availability is likely to be a nonstarter again, as the company continues to struggle with U.S. regulators.

Of course, the Fold’s U.S. availability is also in limbo at the moment, albeit for very different reasons.

I ultimately spent little time interacting with the front screen. It’s good for checking notifications and the like, but attempting to type on that skinny screen is close to impossible, with shades of the new Palm device, which implements its own shortcuts to get around those shortcomings. The inside, meanwhile, takes a butterfly keyboard approach, so you can type with both thumbs while holding it open like a book.

There’s also the issue of app optimization. A lot of this can be chalked up to an early version of a first-gen device. But as with every new device, the equation of how much developer time to invest is largely dependent on product adoption. If the Fold and future Fold’s aren’t a success, developers are going to be far less inclined to invest the hours.

This is most painfully obvious when it comes to App Continuity, one of the device’s primary selling points from a software perspective. When working as advertised, it makes a compelling case for the dual screens. Open something on the front and expand your canvas by unfolding the device. Google is among the companies that worked directly with Samsung to optimize apps this way, and it’s particularly handy with Maps. I used it a fair amount on my trip last week to Berkeley (shout out to the fine people at Pegasus Books on Shattuck).

When an app isn’t optimized, Samsung compels you to restart it, or else you get a nasty case of letterbox bars that retain the aspect ratio of the front screen. Continuity isn’t designed to work the other way, either — opening something on the large screen and then transferring to the front. That’s a bit trickier, as shutting the phone is designed to offer a kind of finality to that session, like hitting the power button to put the device to sleep.

I get that, and like many other pieces here, it will be interesting to see how people utilize it. Aside from the obvious hardware concerns, much of the work on the second-generation device will center around learnings from how users interact with this model. I know I surprised myself when I ended up using the 7.3-inch screen to snap photos. It felt silly — like those people who bring iPads to photograph events. But it’s ultimately a much better viewfinder than that measly 4.6-incher.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for the inside screen, of course. The size, which is somewhere between phablet and mini tablet, provides ample real estate that can still be held in one hand. It’s a great size for short videos. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube on this thing, though the speakers (a small series of holes on the upper and lower edges) leave a lot to be desired.

And the seam. I found myself uttering the phrase “it could be worse” a lot. Like so much of the general aesthetic (including the odd green-gold color of my Fold’s casing), it’s lighting-dependent. There are plenty of times when you don’t see it all, and other when the glare hits it and makes it look like a line right down the center.

I realized after snapping a couple of photos that it’s particularly apparent in many shots. That probably gives a false impression of its prominence. It sucks that there’s one at all, but it’s not a surprise, given the nature of the design. You mostly don’t notice it, until your finger swipes across it. And even then it’s subtle and totally not a dealbreaker, unlike, say, the massive gap that made the ZTE Axon M look like two phones pasted together.

I love the ability to stand the device up by having it open at a 90-degree angle, so I can watch videos while brushing my teeth. But this orientation blocks the bottom speakers, hampering the already iffy sound. Thankfully, your $1,980 will get you a pair of the excellent Galaxy Buds in box. It’s hard to imagine Apple bundling AirPods with the next iPhone, but I guess stranger things have happened, right?

Multi-Active Window is the other key software piece. It’s something that has been available on other Samsung devices and certainly makes sense here. Open an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a tray will open. From there, you can open up to three apps on the display. Once open, the windows feature a small tab at the top that lets you rearrange them.

It’s handy. I used it the most during those times I had a video playing on an exercise machine, so I didn’t have to close out of everything to check emails and Twitter. I’m a gym multi-tasker. I’m sorry, it’s just who I am now.

It worked quite well on the whole, courtesy of robust internals, including 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855. The primary issue I ran into was how some of the apps maintained that half-screen format after I closed out and reopened. I’m sure some people will prefer that, and I’m honestly not sure what the ideal solution is there.

The Fold’s also got a beefy battery on board. Like Huawei’s, it’s split in two — one on either side of the fold. They work out to a beefy 4,380 mAh. That’s just slightly less than Huawei’s 4,500, but again, the Mate X is 5G by default — which means it’s going to burn through mAhs at a faster rate.

Ultimately, the Fold’s greatest strength is Samsung itself. I understand why you probably just did a double take there in the wake of the company’s latest hardware scandal, but the fact is that the company knows how to build phones. The Fold was very much built atop the foundation of the successful Galaxy line, even while it presents a curious little fork in the family tree.

That means a solid and well-thought-out user experience outside of the whole fold thing.

That list includes great cameras with excellent software features and clever tricks like the new Wireless PowerShare, which lets you fold up the phone and charge up those Galaxy Buds or another phone while it’s plugged in. For better or worse, it also includes Bixby. Our model was a European version that didn’t have the full version, but I think I’ve made my thoughts on the smart assistant pretty well known over the last couple of years.

The devoted Bixby button is very much here. And yes, I very much accidentally pressed it a whole bunch. The headphone jack, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent, which is no doubt a big driver behind the decision to include Galaxy Buds. The Fold is an anomaly in a number of ways, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this might finally represent the beginning of the end for the port on Samsung’s premium devices.

Also absent is the S Pen. The stylus began life on the Note line and has since branched out to other Samsung devices. I suspect the company would have had a tough time squeezing in space for it alongside the dual batteries, and maybe it’s saving something for future generations, but this does feel like the ideal screen size for that accessory.

I’m parting ways with the Fold this week, per Samsung’s instructions. Unlike other products, giving it up won’t feel that tough. There wasn’t a point in the past week when the Fold didn’t feel like overkill. There were, however, times when my iPhone XS screen felt downright tiny after switching back.

In many ways, the foldable phone still feels like the future, and the Fold feels like a stop along the way. There are a lot of first-gen issues that should be/should have been hammered out before mass producing this device. That said, there are certain aspects that can only really be figured out in real-world testing. Take the fact that Samsung subjected the device to 200,000 mechanical open and closes. That’s a lot, and probably more than the life of just about any of these devices, but people don’t open and close like machines. And when it comes to the screen, well, a little dirt is bound to get between the gears, both metaphorically and literally.

As I close this Galaxy Fold a final time, it seems safe to say that the device represents a potentially exciting future for a stagnant smartphone space. But that’s the thing about the future — it’s just not here yet.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/samsung-galaxy-fold-review-future-shock/

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift.

[technicalsolutions88]

The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed.

If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product had at least a vague idea of what it was all about. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had that reaction with a non-iPhone device. That’s great from brand perspective. It means a lot of people are curious and potentially open to the notion that the Samsung Galaxy Fold is the future.

Of course, it also means there are a lot of people looking on if you fail.

In some ways, this past week with the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been an extremely public beta. A handful of samples were given out to reviewers. Most worked fine (mine included), but at least three failed. It’s what we in the industry call a “PR nightmare.” Or at least it would be for most companies.

Samsung’s weathered larger storms — most notably with the Galaxy Note 7 a few years back. Of course, that device made it much further along, ultimately resulting in two large-scale recalls. The nature of the two issues was also vastly different. A malfunctioning screen doesn’t put the user at bodily risk like an exploding battery. The optics on these things don’t get much worse than having your smartphone banned from planes.

As of this writing, the Fold is still set to go on sale, most likely this year. To be perfectly frank, the April 26 release date seemed overly optimistic well before the first reports of malfunctioning units. It’s never a great sign when a device is announced in February and is only made available for review a few weeks ahead of launch. It’s kind of like when a studio doesn’t let reviewers watch a film before release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

That’s the thing. The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device you want badly to succeed. You want it to be great and you want Samsung to sell a billion because it’s a genuinely exciting product after a decade of phones that look mostly the same. There’s also the fact that Samsung has essentially been hyping this thing for eight years, since it debuted a flexible display at CES 2011.

In spite of that, however, the home stretch feels rushed. Samsung no doubt saw the writing on the wall, as companies like Huawei readied their own foldable. And while Royole beat the fold to market, Samsung still had a very good shot at the claim of first commercially viable foldable on the market, with a decade of Galaxy devices under its belt and hand-in-hand work with the Google team to create an Android UX that makes sense on a pair of very different screens.

[Source: iFixit]

But this iFixit teardown speaks volumes. “Alarmingly” isn’t the kind of word you want/expect to hear about a company like Samsung, but there it is, followed directly by “fragile” — itself repeated five times over the course of the write-up. iFixit’s findings match up pretty closely with Samsung’s own reports:

A fragile display means knocking it the wrong way can result in disaster.

A gap in the hinges allows dirt and other particles to wedge themselves between the folding mechanism and screen.

Don’t peel off the protective layer. I know it looks like you should, but this is probably the easiest way to wreck your $2,000 phone that doesn’t involve a firearm or blender.

What makes all of this doubly unfortunate is that Samsung has about as much experience as anyone making a rugged phone that works. I feel confident that the company will do just that in future generations, but unless the company can come back with definitive evidence that it’s overhauled the product ahead of launch, this is a difficult product to recommend.

Samsung knew the first-gen Galaxy Fold would be a hard sell, of course. The company was pretty transparent about the fact that the experimental form factor, coupled with the $1,980 price tag, meant the device will only appeal to a small segment of early adopters.

Even so, the company managed to sell out of preorders — though it didn’t say how large that initial run was. Nor are we sure how many users have canceled in the wake of this past week’s events. Certainly no one would blame them for doing so at this point.

But while the apocalyptic shit-posters among us will declare the death of the foldable before it was ever truly born, whatever doesn’t kill Samsung has only made it stronger. And this misfire could ultimately do that for both the company and the category, courtesy of its informal beta testing.

Rewind a mere week or so ago (seriously, it’s only been that long), when we finally got our hands on the Galaxy Fold. I was impressed. And I certainly wasn’t alone. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a glow that first time you see a device that’s seemingly been teased forever. The fact that it exists feels like a kind of victory in and of itself. But the Fold does an admirable job marrying Samsung’s hardware expertise with a new form factor. And more importantly, it’s real and works as advertised — well, mostly, at least.

The truth is, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with the Galaxy Fold. And indeed, it’s been fun chronicling it on a (nearly) daily basis. There are some things the form factor is great for — like looking at Google Maps or propping it up to watch YouTube videos on the elliptical machine at the gym. There are others when the bulky form factor left me wanting to go back to my regular old smartphone — but those trade-offs are to be expected.

I both like the Fold’s design and understand the criticism. Samsung’s done a good job maintaining the Galaxy line’s iconic design language. The foldable looks right at home alongside the S and Note. That said, the rounded backing adds some bulk to the product. And while open, the device is thinner than an iPhone, when folded, it’s more than double the thickness, owing to a gap between the displays. It’s quite skinny in this mode, however, so it should slip nicely into all but the tightest pants pockets.

In practice, the folding mechanism might be the most impressive part of the product. The inside features several interlocking gears that allow the product to open and shut with ease and let users interact with the device at various states of unfold. I found myself using the device with it open at a 90-degree angle quite a bit, resting in my hand like an open book. The Fold features a pair of magnets on its edges, which let you close it with a satisfying snap. It’s weirdly therapeutic.

Really, the biggest strike against the device from a purely aesthetic standpoint is that it’s not the Mate X. Announced by Huawei a few days after the Fold’s big unveil, the device takes a decidedly more minimalist approach to the category. It’s an elegant design that features less device and more screen, and, honestly, the kind of thing I don’t think most of us expected until at least the second-generation product.

The gulf between the two devices is especially apparent when it comes to the front screen. The front of the screen is around two-fifths bezel, leaving room for a 4.6-inch display with an awkward aspect ratio. The Mate X, meanwhile, features a 6.6-inch front-facing AND 6.4-inch rear-facing display (not to mention the larger eight-inch internal display to the Fold’s 7.3).

There’s reason to recommend the Fold over the Mate X, as well. I can’t speak to the difference in user experience, having only briefly interacted with the Huawei, but the price point is a biggie. The Mate X starts at an even more absurd $2,600, thanks in part to the fact that it will only be available in a 5G version, adding another layer of niche.

That price, mind you, is converted from euros, because 1) The product was announced at MWC in Barcelona and 2) U.S. availability is likely to be a nonstarter again, as the company continues to struggle with U.S. regulators.

Of course, the Fold’s U.S. availability is also in limbo at the moment, albeit for very different reasons.

I ultimately spent little time interacting with the front screen. It’s good for checking notifications and the like, but attempting to type on that skinny screen is close to impossible, with shades of the new Palm device, which implements its own shortcuts to get around those shortcomings. The inside, meanwhile, takes a butterfly keyboard approach, so you can type with both thumbs while holding it open like a book.

There’s also the issue of app optimization. A lot of this can be chalked up to an early version of a first-gen device. But as with every new device, the equation of how much developer time to invest is largely dependent on product adoption. If the Fold and future Fold’s aren’t a success, developers are going to be far less inclined to invest the hours.

This is most painfully obvious when it comes to App Continuity, one of the device’s primary selling points from a software perspective. When working as advertised, it makes a compelling case for the dual screens. Open something on the front and expand your canvas by unfolding the device. Google is among the companies that worked directly with Samsung to optimize apps this way, and it’s particularly handy with Maps. I used it a fair amount on my trip last week to Berkeley (shout out to the fine people at Pegasus Books on Shattuck).

When an app isn’t optimized, Samsung compels you to restart it, or else you get a nasty case of letterbox bars that retain the aspect ratio of the front screen. Continuity isn’t designed to work the other way, either — opening something on the large screen and then transferring to the front. That’s a bit trickier, as shutting the phone is designed to offer a kind of finality to that session, like hitting the power button to put the device to sleep.

I get that, and like many other pieces here, it will be interesting to see how people utilize it. Aside from the obvious hardware concerns, much of the work on the second-generation device will center around learnings from how users interact with this model. I know I surprised myself when I ended up using the 7.3-inch screen to snap photos. It felt silly — like those people who bring iPads to photograph events. But it’s ultimately a much better viewfinder than that measly 4.6-incher.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for the inside screen, of course. The size, which is somewhere between phablet and mini tablet, provides ample real estate that can still be held in one hand. It’s a great size for short videos. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube on this thing, though the speakers (a small series of holes on the upper and lower edges) leave a lot to be desired.

And the seam. I found myself uttering the phrase “it could be worse” a lot. Like so much of the general aesthetic (including the odd green-gold color of my Fold’s casing), it’s lighting-dependent. There are plenty of times when you don’t see it all, and other when the glare hits it and makes it look like a line right down the center.

I realized after snapping a couple of photos that it’s particularly apparent in many shots. That probably gives a false impression of its prominence. It sucks that there’s one at all, but it’s not a surprise, given the nature of the design. You mostly don’t notice it, until your finger swipes across it. And even then it’s subtle and totally not a dealbreaker, unlike, say, the massive gap that made the ZTE Axon M look like two phones pasted together.

I love the ability to stand the device up by having it open at a 90-degree angle, so I can watch videos while brushing my teeth. But this orientation blocks the bottom speakers, hampering the already iffy sound. Thankfully, your $1,980 will get you a pair of the excellent Galaxy Buds in box. It’s hard to imagine Apple bundling AirPods with the next iPhone, but I guess stranger things have happened, right?

Multi-Active Window is the other key software piece. It’s something that has been available on other Samsung devices and certainly makes sense here. Open an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a tray will open. From there, you can open up to three apps on the display. Once open, the windows feature a small tab at the top that lets you rearrange them.

It’s handy. I used it the most during those times I had a video playing on an exercise machine, so I didn’t have to close out of everything to check emails and Twitter. I’m a gym multi-tasker. I’m sorry, it’s just who I am now.

It worked quite well on the whole, courtesy of robust internals, including 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855. The primary issue I ran into was how some of the apps maintained that half-screen format after I closed out and reopened. I’m sure some people will prefer that, and I’m honestly not sure what the ideal solution is there.

The Fold’s also got a beefy battery on board. Like Huawei’s, it’s split in two — one on either side of the fold. They work out to a beefy 4,380 mAh. That’s just slightly less than Huawei’s 4,500, but again, the Mate X is 5G by default — which means it’s going to burn through mAhs at a faster rate.

Ultimately, the Fold’s greatest strength is Samsung itself. I understand why you probably just did a double take there in the wake of the company’s latest hardware scandal, but the fact is that the company knows how to build phones. The Fold was very much built atop the foundation of the successful Galaxy line, even while it presents a curious little fork in the family tree.

That means a solid and well-thought-out user experience outside of the whole fold thing.

[gallery ids="1816871,1816872,1816873,1816874,1816875,1816876"]

That list includes great cameras with excellent software features and clever tricks like the new Wireless PowerShare, which lets you fold up the phone and charge up those Galaxy Buds or another phone while it’s plugged in. For better or worse, it also includes Bixby. Our model was a European version that didn’t have the full version, but I think I’ve made my thoughts on the smart assistant pretty well known over the last couple of years.

The devoted Bixby button is very much here. And yes, I very much accidentally pressed it a whole bunch. The headphone jack, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent, which is no doubt a big driver behind the decision to include Galaxy Buds. The Fold is an anomaly in a number of ways, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this might finally represent the beginning of the end for the port on Samsung’s premium devices.

Also absent is the S Pen. The stylus began life on the Note line and has since branched out to other Samsung devices. I suspect the company would have had a tough time squeezing in space for it alongside the dual batteries, and maybe it’s saving something for future generations, but this does feel like the ideal screen size for that accessory.

I’m parting ways with the Fold this week, per Samsung’s instructions. Unlike other products, giving it up won’t feel that tough. There wasn’t a point in the past week when the Fold didn’t feel like overkill. There were, however, times when my iPhone XS screen felt downright tiny after switching back.

In many ways, the foldable phone still feels like the future, and the Fold feels like a stop along the way. There are a lot of first-gen issues that should be/should have been hammered out before mass producing this device. That said, there are certain aspects that can only really be figured out in real-world testing. Take the fact that Samsung subjected the device to 200,000 mechanical open and closes. That’s a lot, and probably more than the life of just about any of these devices, but people don’t open and close like machines. And when it comes to the screen, well, a little dirt is bound to get between the gears, both metaphorically and literally.

As I close this Galaxy Fold a final time, it seems safe to say that the device represents a potentially exciting future for a stagnant smartphone space. But that’s the thing about the future — it’s just not here yet.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2vjfgOy ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[sheminecrafts]

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock

The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed.

If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product had at least a vague idea of what it was all about. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had that reaction with a non-iPhone device. That’s great from brand perspective. It means a lot of people are curious and potentially open to the notion that the Samsung Galaxy Fold is the future.

Of course, it also means there are a lot of people looking on if you fail.

In some ways, this past week with the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been an extremely public beta. A handful of samples were given out to reviewers. Most worked fine (mine included), but at least three failed. It’s what we in the industry call a “PR nightmare.” Or at least it would be for most companies.

Samsung’s weathered larger storms — most notably with the Galaxy Note 7 a few years back. Of course, that device made it much further along, ultimately resulting in two large-scale recalls. The nature of the two issues was also vastly different. A malfunctioning screen doesn’t put the user at bodily risk like an exploding battery. The optics on these things don’t get much worse than having your smartphone banned from planes.

As of this writing, the Fold is still set to go on sale, most likely this year. To be perfectly frank, the April 26 release date seemed overly optimistic well before the first reports of malfunctioning units. It’s never a great sign when a device is announced in February and is only made available for review a few weeks ahead of launch. It’s kind of like when a studio doesn’t let reviewers watch a film before release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

That’s the thing. The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device you want badly to succeed. You want it to be great and you want Samsung to sell a billion because it’s a genuinely exciting product after a decade of phones that look mostly the same. There’s also the fact that Samsung has essentially been hyping this thing for eight years, since it debuted a flexible display at CES 2011.

In spite of that, however, the home stretch feels rushed. Samsung no doubt saw the writing on the wall, as companies like Huawei readied their own foldable. And while Royole beat the fold to market, Samsung still had a very good shot at the claim of first commercially viable foldable on the market, with a decade of Galaxy devices under its belt and hand-in-hand work with the Google team to create an Android UX that makes sense on a pair of very different screens.

[Source: iFixit]

But this iFixit teardown speaks volumes. “Alarmingly” isn’t the kind of word you want/expect to hear about a company like Samsung, but there it is, followed directly by “fragile” — itself repeated five times over the course of the write-up. iFixit’s findings match up pretty closely with Samsung’s own reports:

A fragile display means knocking it the wrong way can result in disaster.

A gap in the hinges allows dirt and other particles to wedge themselves between the folding mechanism and screen.

Don’t peel off the protective layer. I know it looks like you should, but this is probably the easiest way to wreck your $2,000 phone that doesn’t involve a firearm or blender.

What makes all of this doubly unfortunate is that Samsung has about as much experience as anyone making a rugged phone that works. I feel confident that the company will do just that in future generations, but unless the company can come back with definitive evidence that it’s overhauled the product ahead of launch, this is a difficult product to recommend.

Samsung knew the first-gen Galaxy Fold would be a hard sell, of course. The company was pretty transparent about the fact that the experimental form factor, coupled with the $1,980 price tag, meant the device will only appeal to a small segment of early adopters.

Even so, the company managed to sell out of preorders — though it didn’t say how large that initial run was. Nor are we sure how many users have canceled in the wake of this past week’s events. Certainly no one would blame them for doing so at this point.

But while the apocalyptic shit-posters among us will declare the death of the foldable before it was ever truly born, whatever doesn’t kill Samsung has only made it stronger. And this misfire could ultimately do that for both the company and the category, courtesy of its informal beta testing.

Rewind a mere week or so ago (seriously, it’s only been that long), when we finally got our hands on the Galaxy Fold. I was impressed. And I certainly wasn’t alone. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a glow that first time you see a device that’s seemingly been teased forever. The fact that it exists feels like a kind of victory in and of itself. But the Fold does an admirable job marrying Samsung’s hardware expertise with a new form factor. And more importantly, it’s real and works as advertised — well, mostly, at least.

The truth is, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with the Galaxy Fold. And indeed, it’s been fun chronicling it on a (nearly) daily basis. There are some things the form factor is great for — like looking at Google Maps or propping it up to watch YouTube videos on the elliptical machine at the gym. There are others when the bulky form factor left me wanting to go back to my regular old smartphone — but those trade-offs are to be expected.

I both like the Fold’s design and understand the criticism. Samsung’s done a good job maintaining the Galaxy line’s iconic design language. The foldable looks right at home alongside the S and Note. That said, the rounded backing adds some bulk to the product. And while open, the device is thinner than an iPhone, when folded, it’s more than double the thickness, owing to a gap between the displays. It’s quite skinny in this mode, however, so it should slip nicely into all but the tightest pants pockets.

In practice, the folding mechanism might be the most impressive part of the product. The inside features several interlocking gears that allow the product to open and shut with ease and let users interact with the device at various states of unfold. I found myself using the device with it open at a 90-degree angle quite a bit, resting in my hand like an open book. The Fold features a pair of magnets on its edges, which let you close it with a satisfying snap. It’s weirdly therapeutic.

Really, the biggest strike against the device from a purely aesthetic standpoint is that it’s not the Mate X. Announced by Huawei a few days after the Fold’s big unveil, the device takes a decidedly more minimalist approach to the category. It’s an elegant design that features less device and more screen, and, honestly, the kind of thing I don’t think most of us expected until at least the second-generation product.

The gulf between the two devices is especially apparent when it comes to the front screen. The front of the screen is around two-fifths bezel, leaving room for a 4.6-inch display with an awkward aspect ratio. The Mate X, meanwhile, features a 6.6-inch front-facing AND 6.4-inch rear-facing display (not to mention the larger eight-inch internal display to the Fold’s 7.3).

There’s reason to recommend the Fold over the Mate X, as well. I can’t speak to the difference in user experience, having only briefly interacted with the Huawei, but the price point is a biggie. The Mate X starts at an even more absurd $2,600, thanks in part to the fact that it will only be available in a 5G version, adding another layer of niche.

That price, mind you, is converted from euros, because 1) The product was announced at MWC in Barcelona and 2) U.S. availability is likely to be a nonstarter again, as the company continues to struggle with U.S. regulators.

Of course, the Fold’s U.S. availability is also in limbo at the moment, albeit for very different reasons.

I ultimately spent little time interacting with the front screen. It’s good for checking notifications and the like, but attempting to type on that skinny screen is close to impossible, with shades of the new Palm device, which implements its own shortcuts to get around those shortcomings. The inside, meanwhile, takes a butterfly keyboard approach, so you can type with both thumbs while holding it open like a book.

There’s also the issue of app optimization. A lot of this can be chalked up to an early version of a first-gen device. But as with every new device, the equation of how much developer time to invest is largely dependent on product adoption. If the Fold and future Fold’s aren’t a success, developers are going to be far less inclined to invest the hours.

This is most painfully obvious when it comes to App Continuity, one of the device’s primary selling points from a software perspective. When working as advertised, it makes a compelling case for the dual screens. Open something on the front and expand your canvas by unfolding the device. Google is among the companies that worked directly with Samsung to optimize apps this way, and it’s particularly handy with Maps. I used it a fair amount on my trip last week to Berkeley (shout out to the fine people at Pegasus Books on Shattuck).

When an app isn’t optimized, Samsung compels you to restart it, or else you get a nasty case of letterbox bars that retain the aspect ratio of the front screen. Continuity isn’t designed to work the other way, either — opening something on the large screen and then transferring to the front. That’s a bit trickier, as shutting the phone is designed to offer a kind of finality to that session, like hitting the power button to put the device to sleep.

I get that, and like many other pieces here, it will be interesting to see how people utilize it. Aside from the obvious hardware concerns, much of the work on the second-generation device will center around learnings from how users interact with this model. I know I surprised myself when I ended up using the 7.3-inch screen to snap photos. It felt silly — like those people who bring iPads to photograph events. But it’s ultimately a much better viewfinder than that measly 4.6-incher.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for the inside screen, of course. The size, which is somewhere between phablet and mini tablet, provides ample real estate that can still be held in one hand. It’s a great size for short videos. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube on this thing, though the speakers (a small series of holes on the upper and lower edges) leave a lot to be desired.

And the seam. I found myself uttering the phrase “it could be worse” a lot. Like so much of the general aesthetic (including the odd green-gold color of my Fold’s casing), it’s lighting-dependent. There are plenty of times when you don’t see it all, and other when the glare hits it and makes it look like a line right down the center.

I realized after snapping a couple of photos that it’s particularly apparent in many shots. That probably gives a false impression of its prominence. It sucks that there’s one at all, but it’s not a surprise, given the nature of the design. You mostly don’t notice it, until your finger swipes across it. And even then it’s subtle and totally not a dealbreaker, unlike, say, the massive gap that made the ZTE Axon M look like two phones pasted together.

I love the ability to stand the device up by having it open at a 90-degree angle, so I can watch videos while brushing my teeth. But this orientation blocks the bottom speakers, hampering the already iffy sound. Thankfully, your $1,980 will get you a pair of the excellent Galaxy Buds in box. It’s hard to imagine Apple bundling AirPods with the next iPhone, but I guess stranger things have happened, right?

Multi-Active Window is the other key software piece. It’s something that has been available on other Samsung devices and certainly makes sense here. Open an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a tray will open. From there, you can open up to three apps on the display. Once open, the windows feature a small tab at the top that lets you rearrange them.

It’s handy. I used it the most during those times I had a video playing on an exercise machine, so I didn’t have to close out of everything to check emails and Twitter. I’m a gym multi-tasker. I’m sorry, it’s just who I am now.

It worked quite well on the whole, courtesy of robust internals, including 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855. The primary issue I ran into was how some of the apps maintained that half-screen format after I closed out and reopened. I’m sure some people will prefer that, and I’m honestly not sure what the ideal solution is there.

The Fold’s also got a beefy battery on board. Like Huawei’s, it’s split in two — one on either side of the fold. They work out to a beefy 4,380 mAh. That’s just slightly less than Huawei’s 4,500, but again, the Mate X is 5G by default — which means it’s going to burn through mAhs at a faster rate.

Ultimately, the Fold’s greatest strength is Samsung itself. I understand why you probably just did a double take there in the wake of the company’s latest hardware scandal, but the fact is that the company knows how to build phones. The Fold was very much built atop the foundation of the successful Galaxy line, even while it presents a curious little fork in the family tree.

That means a solid and well-thought-out user experience outside of the whole fold thing.

[gallery ids="1816871,1816872,1816873,1816874,1816875,1816876"]

That list includes great cameras with excellent software features and clever tricks like the new Wireless PowerShare, which lets you fold up the phone and charge up those Galaxy Buds or another phone while it’s plugged in. For better or worse, it also includes Bixby. Our model was a European version that didn’t have the full version, but I think I’ve made my thoughts on the smart assistant pretty well known over the last couple of years.

The devoted Bixby button is very much here. And yes, I very much accidentally pressed it a whole bunch. The headphone jack, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent, which is no doubt a big driver behind the decision to include Galaxy Buds. The Fold is an anomaly in a number of ways, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this might finally represent the beginning of the end for the port on Samsung’s premium devices.

Also absent is the S Pen. The stylus began life on the Note line and has since branched out to other Samsung devices. I suspect the company would have had a tough time squeezing in space for it alongside the dual batteries, and maybe it’s saving something for future generations, but this does feel like the ideal screen size for that accessory.

I’m parting ways with the Fold this week, per Samsung’s instructions. Unlike other products, giving it up won’t feel that tough. There wasn’t a point in the past week when the Fold didn’t feel like overkill. There were, however, times when my iPhone XS screen felt downright tiny after switching back.

In many ways, the foldable phone still feels like the future, and the Fold feels like a stop along the way. There are a lot of first-gen issues that should be/should have been hammered out before mass producing this device. That said, there are certain aspects that can only really be figured out in real-world testing. Take the fact that Samsung subjected the device to 200,000 mechanical open and closes. That’s a lot, and probably more than the life of just about any of these devices, but people don’t open and close like machines. And when it comes to the screen, well, a little dirt is bound to get between the gears, both metaphorically and literally.

As I close this Galaxy Fold a final time, it seems safe to say that the device represents a potentially exciting future for a stagnant smartphone space. But that’s the thing about the future — it’s just not here yet.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2vjfgOy via IFTTT