Samsung Galaxy Fold secrets revealed by tester

The Samsung Galaxy Fold will go on sale on the 26th April in USA and Europe, for shipment starting on the 3rd May.

This inevitably means more devices are entering the channel, and more leaks will emerge.

Today a tester shared a number of first impressions on Twitter, giving details about the handset which is likely out of reach for most of us.

The information from the unnamed tester was posted by Mishaal Rahman, Editor in Chief of XDA-Developers.com, which gives it some authenticity.

The tester confirmed the handset shipped with the Snapdragon 855, and that performance is similar to the Exynos Samsung Galaxy S10+, but that there were still some performance hiccups which needs ironing out. Battery life is apparently good. There is apparently still some delay when switching from the small to the large screen, and sometimes a pause while web pages re-render in Chrome. Games apparently work well.

For apps which fail to adapt to the change in screen size automatically, Samsung includes a button which re-renders the UI.

Since the device ships with UFS 3.0 (one of the first) Mishaal also posted the result of Androbench.

In AndroBench:

* Sequential Read: 1512.93 MB/s
* Sequential Write: 418.96 MB/s
* Random Read: 144.41 MB/s
* Random Write: 33.66 MB/s
* SQLite Insert: 2577.79 QPS
* SQLite Update: 3560.8 QPS
* SQLite Delete: 4236.68 QPS

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) March 26, 2019

These results are around double that of the Samsung Galaxy S10+.

He also revealed some minor but important details. When opened up the screen cannot go beyond 180 degrees for example, and while it is possible to partially close it (e.g. laptop mode) this is difficult, and the internal screen is off in that position, rendering it useless. This would dash hopes of those who were thinking of using one half of the screen as a keyboard for example.

Other minor details include that you can personalize the internal and external screen separately, and that Samsung offers a number of device-specific wallpapers in their store. The device apparently runs OneUI 1.2 (vs 1.1 on the Samsung Galaxy S10).

Some readers may be disappointed to hear that the crease is still visible in the production version of the handset, but according to Mishaal this is not noticeable at higher screen brightness.

He says it's noticeable but not too bad. You can feel it under the finger, but it's hard to notice it with the screen on and more than 70% brightness.

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) March 26, 2019

Another detail is that the device is bootloader unlockable, that the device should support Samsung Pay and front-facing cameras are by Sony.

See the full thread here.

Are any of our readers thinking of picking one up? Let us know below.