Samsung Galaxy Fold review: A costly experiment

Click. Smack. Click. Smack. Click. Smack.

I feel bad for the people in my life because everywhere I've been for the past week, the sounds of opening and closing Samsung's Galaxy Fold have followed. Even if you're not prone to fidgeting, this $1,980 smartphone will do that to you. It might not be the first commercially available foldable device, but it is the first one from a company with the global influence to make foldable phones a reality for everyone. And it's a lot of fun to just open and close endlessly. Click. Smack. Click. Smack.

The Galaxy Fold is far more than just a party trick, though -- it contains multitudes. The Fold represents a new way of thinking about what modern phones should be able to do. It's an impressive technical achievement. Perhaps more than anything, though, it's a very uneven first step down a path toward a new kind of personal computing.

That's a mild way of saying that the Fold is profoundly cool, but almost no one should actually considering buying one. If you do, you're basically agreeing to be Samsung's guinea pig as it tries to figure out how to make this new kind of device actually valuable. At this point, the Galaxy Fold is a glorified bit of beta hardware. But even with all its compromises, it offers a glimpse of a future that -- for me, anyway -- can't come soon enough.

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