It's unusual for a phone as new as the Galaxy Fold to be so battle-worn. In the course of its short life, the foldable phone went from the pinnacle of hype for our collective mobile future to cautionary tale about companies that rush to sell radical, under-tested technology.

The Galaxy Fold's extra-large display is excellent for watching videos, photos and reading, and it makes for an excellent second screen; It proves that a foldable phone can be truly useful and not just a gimmick

Design problems abound; Its 7.3-inch screen is too fragile and the 4.6-inch display is too small to be effective; Battery life is short; Multitasking could become more intuitive; At $1,980, the Fold is overpriced; It lacks water- and dust-resistance.

Update, Aug. 10, 2020: The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is here. Read our ongoing coverage. Our Galaxy Fold review, originally published Oct. 3, 2019, follows.

The Galaxy Fold makes a convincing case for foldable phones, but wait for Samsung and others to fix inherent problems that keep it costly and plague the screen.

The Galaxy Fold's extra-large display is excellent for watching videos, photos and reading, and it makes for an excellent second screen; It proves that a foldable phone can be truly useful and not just a gimmick.

Design problems abound; Its 7.3-inch screen is too fragile and the 4.6-inch display is too small to be effective; Battery life is short; Multitasking could become more intuitive; At $1,980, the Fold is overpriced; It lacks water- and dust-resistance; The huge screen notch and thick bezel make it feel cheap, despite the cost.

The Galaxy Fold is a sign of things to come, but you should wait for the next one

Speedy performance; Solid multitasking features; The 7.3-inch expansive screen is great for reading; watching videos; Good battery life; Folding it up is satisfying

Expensive; The front screen looks ugly and is too small; Worries about durability haven't been assuaged

The Samsung Galaxy Fold comes with too many compromises to justify its sky-high price. It's too expensive, too fragile, and too niche for us to recommend. U nless you're an exceptionally gentle early adopter and willing to drop $2,000 on what is very clearly first-generation hardware, you'll get...

Solid performance; Excellent battery life; Nano SIM and eSIM support; Comes with Galaxy Buds

Expensive; Questionable durability; Unfolded display is hard to see in direct sunlight; Front display has huge bezels; Lots of bloatware on AT&T version

As much as the Galaxy Fold is a look at what the next wave of smartphones might be, at this stage it’s hard to recommend that anyone, aside from those who simply must have the first-gen of everything, actually spend nearly £2000 on it. It’s impressive in a number of areas: great battery life, nice and productive software that actually makes some use of the bigger display and there are certain situations where having a tablet in smaller form-factor work.

Genuinely innovative form-factor; Great battery life; Galaxy Buds in the box; Loads of cameras;

It’s too delicate; Outer display feels too limited; It’s better as a tablet than a phone; Cameras aren’t class-leading;

The future arrived too early for the Galaxy Fold – astonishing, but also too expensive and too fragile to recommend

It folds in half!, Great performance, Top battery life

It’s £1,900, Internal display easily permanently marked, Both screens are awkward sizes

Even though the fact it folds is incredible, the Galaxy Fold is too bulky, breakable and expensive to recommend. The fact both screens are awkward sizes for most smartphone tasks means you have a delicate prototype of the possible future of phones.

It'll be weird because, as I'm sure you've heard, several reviewers have experienced their Galaxy Fold review unit screens breaking a day or two after receiving them. Some of those breaks happened because Samsung didn't warn reviewers that a "protective layer" that looks exactly like a removable...

A tablet-sized screen that folds in half; Excellent performance; Great battery life

Screen durability is bad at best; Display quality; Awkward as a phone

Given all the bad press from its false start earlier this year, the enthusiasm for the first mainstream foldable phone to hit the market had certainly dimmed a little. Perhaps that's why I now find the Galaxy Fold a surprisingly handy phone on the go.

The Galaxy Fold delivers a ‘wow' factor that no other phone offers today, and yet we'd only recommend it to early adopters with a penchant for impressing their peers, and who have money to burn.

Supremely cool form factor; Gaming taken to the next level; Samsung's biggest battery

Outrageously expensive; Vulnerable plastic screen