The phone is here. Setup is done, more or less. I have opinions already and I haven't made a single fucking phone call. This is not a good sign. This is, in fact, the worst possible omen for a device whose entire job is to be a phone.
The Unboxing Nobody Asked For
Unboxing a phone in 2026 is not an experience. It is a thing that happens before the experience. You open a box, the phone is in it, you take it out. I mention it only because Samsung made one decision here that is so staggeringly, breathtakingly stupid that I cannot in good conscience move on without addressing it: the Fold ships unfolded.
The reason is probably cost. A folded Fold is taller, a taller box costs more to ship, Samsung saves money by shipping a wider box instead. Fine. Except that the wider box is wider because the phone is unfolded, and the phone is unfolded because it is a fucking tablet when it's unfolded, and nobody at Samsung thought for a single consecutive second about what it means to ship a tablet-sized device rather than a phone-sized device until after they had already made the decision, printed the boxes, and sent everything to the warehouse. Not one person in that meeting owned a tape measure. Not one person in that meeting had touched the product they were making decisions about. Not one person asked the obvious question: if the whole point of this phone is that it folds into something pocket-sized, why the hell are we shipping it in the configuration that is not pocket-sized? Stunning. Genuinely stunning. The bar was underground and they still managed to dig down to it.
This Is Why No One Upgrades Their Android Phone
Before I describe how catastrophically setup went, I need to establish context, because without context this reads as bad luck. It is not bad luck. It is the Android upgrade experience, delivered with the reliability of a natural disaster and roughly the same amount of warning.
People do not upgrade their Android phones because setting up a new Android phone is so soul-destroyingly, will-breakingly, monumentally shit that living with a broken old phone is the rational alternative. Your old phone is not fine. That cracked, battery-dead, four-year-old slab of recycled regret you've been babying through every day is not fucking fine and you know it. You've been lying to yourself. You've been lying to people who ask how your phone is. But you did a calculation, correctly, that the agony of migrating to a new device is worse than the daily misery of the one that's slowly dying in your pocket, and so you kept it. You made the right call. Samsung made sure of that. Samsung has spent years perfecting a setup experience so abysmal, so insulting, so contemptuous of the person on the other end that keeping your broken phone feels like self-care by comparison.
Apple does not have this problem. You get a new iPhone, you restore a backup, it's your phone, you move on. Not magic. Not some impossibly complex feat of engineering. Just a company that gave a solitary shit about what happens after you hand over your money. Samsung has decided that what happens after you hand over your money is your problem, and what follows is the entirely predictable, entirely avoidable, entirely Samsung result of that decision.
Smart Switch Should Be Switched
The eSIM failed first. Not gracefully, not with a useful error, not in any way that suggested the software had any awareness that people are using it and that failing them has consequences. It failed in the way that required a full restart of the device and a return to the beginning of setup — the very fucking beginning, step one, hello and welcome, what language do you speak — because the software responsible for connecting this device to a mobile network cannot encounter a failure without immolating the entire setup process along with it. I sat there in front of a phone I had owned for twenty-five minutes, restarting setup from scratch, with the specific and focused fury of someone who has paid over a thousand pounds to be treated like this.
Then Smart Switch. Samsung's dedicated migration tool. The thing that exists for one reason: to move your stuff from your old Samsung phone to your new Samsung phone so that you do not have to spend an afternoon rebuilding your life from scratch on a device you paid a premium for. It does not work. It does not work via QR code. It does not work via Wi-Fi Direct. It does not work via cable. Smart Switch failed to connect through every single method Samsung provides, with a reliability that would be impressive if it were trying to fail, which I am increasingly convinced it is. It failed with such consistency, such total and unbroken commitment to not working, that at some point it stopped feeling like a bug and started feeling like a philosophy. The developer of Smart Switch deserves to be switched — firmly, the way children were switched in the 1970s — as just and proportionate punishment for shipping this catastrophic embarrassment of a tool, calling it done, collecting a salary for it, and going home.
I restored a Google backup instead. It kept my apps and threw away everything else — my preferences, my accessibility settings, my configurations, the thousand small adjustments that are the difference between a phone and a usable phone. Gone. All of it. Starting over, manually, on a device that costs more than some laptops, because the migration tool Samsung ships with their flagship product is so broken it makes the manual approach feel like the reliable option. A removal company that drops your furniture in the right place and leaves everything else on the pavement would at least have the decency to look sorry about it.
The Samsung app opt-out page is its own special kind of insulting. During setup, Samsung presents you with a page of checkboxes — all their apps, all their features, all their bloat — and invites you to uncheck the ones you don't want. I unchecked all of them. Every single one. Bixby: gone. Samsung Free, whatever the fuck that is: gone. Samsung News, Samsung Daily, Samsung This, Samsung That, the entire fucking Samsung ecosystem of garbage I never asked for and never wanted: unchecked, with feeling, with purpose, with the relief of someone finally being given a say. They installed anyway. Every last one of them. That page is a lie. It is a fake opt-out, dressed up as user control, that does absolutely nothing except give you a moment of false hope before Samsung does whatever it was going to do regardless of what you said. It is manipulative. It is dishonest. It is a company treating a paying customer with open contempt and dressing it up as a feature. On a phone that costs this much. I cannot overstate how furious this made me.
This is why your old phone is fine. Not because it is fine. It isn't. But because this is what the alternative looks like.
Biometrics, Or: A Comedy of Errors Performed By Garbage
Face recognition. Center your face. Done. Now move your face to the right. Done. Face not in center.
No. Fucking. Shit. My face is not in the center. You told me to move it to the right. I moved it to the right. The right is not the center. This has been true for the entire history of spatial reasoning and Samsung's face recognition setup wizard has somehow remained unaware of it. The wizard issued an instruction. I followed the instruction exactly. The wizard then failed me for having followed the instruction. This software was written by a human being. It was reviewed by human beings. It was tested by human beings. It was approved for release by human beings. At no point did any of those human beings run the face recognition setup on an actual device and ask themselves what the words on the screen meant. This is not a minor bug. This is a catastrophic failure of basic quality assurance on a feature that every single person who buys this phone will use on day one. It is dogshit. It is an absolute, steaming, proudly-unaware-of-itself pile of dogshit and it should never have shipped and the people responsible for shipping it should have to set it up themselves, repeatedly, until they understand what they did.
I got through it eventually by doing the same thing over and over and hoping the software would stumble into working, which is not a setup experience. That is a hostage negotiation. That is being held at the mercy of broken software with no recourse, no alternative, and no explanation, which is the Samsung experience in miniature.
The fingerprint reader is worse than the face recognition disaster. I do not say that lightly. I say it having used the Pixel 6A, which if you are not familiar was a phone whose fingerprint reader achieved a kind of infamy — not the ordinary infamy of a product that doesn't quite work, but the deep, legendary, still-talked-about infamy of a product failure so total and so consistent that it became the thing people said when they wanted to communicate hardware catastrophe without further explanation. The Pixel 6A fingerprint reader was a joke. A byword. A cautionary tale told to people considering biometric security on Android. The Fold 7's fingerprint reader is worse than that. It is also worse than my Flip 6, which is sitting on my desk right now, which I am still using, which reads my fingerprint correctly because it is a phone and that is what phones do and apparently someone at Samsung forgot that when they were building the Fold.
Samsung shipped a flagship device in 2026 — their most expensive consumer product, the one they put on stage, the one they send to every reviewer, the one they have been iterating on for seven generations — with a fingerprint reader that cannot reliably read fingerprints. There is no version of that sentence that doesn't indict everyone involved in shipping it.
The Little TalkBack Update That Couldn't Talk Back
Setup is complete. The Galaxy Store decides this is the moment to run all its updates, because why would anything about this process happen in a sensible order. One of those updates is TalkBack.
TalkBack finishes updating. I have no speech.
Let me be precise about what that means, because I want everyone reading this to understand exactly what happened and to whom it happened. I am blind. TalkBack is the software that makes my phone navigable. It is not a convenience feature. It is not an accessibility extra. It is the thing that makes the phone a phone rather than a slab of glass I cannot use. Without TalkBack speech I have earcons — the little audio cues that tell you you've moved to a new element — and I have vibration, and I have absolutely nothing else. No indication of what I'm touching. No reading of text. No announcement of what any element is or does. I have a thousand-pound device that I cannot use.
I rebooted. Because what else do you do. You reboot, you hope, you wait. Speech came back on the lock screen. I heard it. I drew my pattern. The phone unlocked.
Speech gone.
The phone unlocked and TalkBack gave up entirely on the other side of the lock screen. I was in. I was on the home screen of my new phone. I was completely, utterly, silently unable to navigate it. The earcons were there. The vibration was there. The speech was not there. The home screen of my new phone was as navigable to me as a room I'd never been in, in the dark, with the furniture rearranged.
I figured it out eventually. The TalkBack update had restarted the service, and when it restarted it switched to whatever was set as the default system TTS engine — which in my case was a third-party engine that had arrived on the device via the Google backup restore, voiceless, because backup restores install the engine but not the voices. No voices, no speech. TalkBack was running. TalkBack was pointed at a TTS engine. The TTS engine had nothing to say. Nobody's dramatically at fault. It was an edge case — a collision between a TalkBack update, a backup restore, and a third-party engine that showed up to work without its tools.
And that is the most infuriating possible explanation. Not a bug. Not negligence. An edge case that nobody anticipated, that left a blind user locked out of their phone with no recourse and no indication of what had gone wrong, because TalkBack has no concept of what to do when the thing underneath it fails. It just goes silent. It goes silent and it keeps going silent through reboots and restarts and all the frantic, fumbling attempts to fix something you cannot see, until you work out what happened through a process that requires navigating an interface you cannot hear.
How. The. Fuck. Is there no fallback.
This is not a difficult problem to anticipate. TTS engines can fail. They can be missing. They can be installed without voices. They can be corrupted. They can be the wrong engine entirely. This is a known class of failure and TalkBack — the screen reader that is the floor beneath which Android is inaccessible, the tool that blind users cannot function without — has no response to it beyond silence. It does not fall back. It does not warn you. It does not try something else. It sits there, technically running, producing earcons and vibration and absolutely nothing useful, while the person depending on it tries to figure out from the outside what has gone wrong on the inside.
TalkBack needs a safe mode and I want to be specific about what that means because vague feature requests get ignored and specific ones merely get ignored more slowly. Not a prompt. A prompt is useless when you have no speech because you cannot navigate to the yes button, which is exactly the thing you cannot do, which is why you need the prompt in the first place. A prompt is a cruel joke dressed up as a solution.
A safe mode is this: if TalkBack restarts beyond some threshold in a short window — three times in twenty seconds, say, which is the precise and desperate rhythm of a blind user whose screen reader has stopped working — it boots into a fallback state. No system TTS settings. No user configuration. Accessibility volume forced to maximum. Speech from a bundled, internal TTS engine that lives inside the TalkBack APK itself and has no dependency on anything that could be missing, broken, or voiceless on the system. You are in safe mode. You can hear. You can navigate. You can go fix the actual problem.
It needs to be bundled inside TalkBack itself because any system TTS engine is a system dependency and system dependencies are exactly what just failed. The system Google TTS engine, fine as it is, lives outside TalkBack. A third-party engine lives outside TalkBack. Anything that lives outside TalkBack can fail in ways TalkBack cannot control. Pack a minimal voice directly into the APK. Make it the voice of absolute last resort. Make it impossible to remove or override. It does not need to sound good. It needs to work when nothing else does. That is its entire job and it is a job that does not currently exist and should have existed years ago and the absence of it meant I spent an unknowable amount of time locked out of a phone I had owned for three hours.
The Physical Object, Which Is The Least Of My Complaints
I did most of setup on the cover screen because I felt no reason whatsoever to unfold the phone and so I didn't. The cover screen is a phone screen. I was doing phone things. The Fold sat folded in my hand for most of two hours and I did not once think, you know what this situation calls for, a tablet. That is not an encouraging sign for a device whose entire value proposition lives behind the hinge.
The hinge itself is stiff. Aggressively stiff. Closing this phone requires force — real, deliberate, is-this-safe force — that produces an involuntary moment of calculation every single time about whether you are about to destroy something expensive. You are probably not. The hinge is probably fine. But the physical experience of folding the Fold feels less like operating a premium mechanism and more like convincing something against its will, and you will do this every time you put it in your pocket for as long as you own it. Whether you get used to it or whether it grinds on you for a month, I do not yet know.
Here is the good, because there is some and I am not going to pretend otherwise: this phone is surprisingly thin, and the hand feel is genuinely nice. Folded, it feels about as thick as a normal phone — narrower, but not freakishly so — and anyone who tells you the gap between the halves when closed is not noticeable can get in the bin, because it is noticeable, the phone does not close flush, and anyone who has handled it for more than thirty seconds knows this. Unfolded, it is shockingly thin for an eight-inch screen. That is a real achievement and it deserves acknowledgement. It is not light — it is never going to be light, it has an eight-inch screen, physics is not optional — but the weight is distributed well enough that it doesn't feel punishing. The physical object, setting aside everything that happened during setup, is better than I expected.
Which is the nicest thing I am going to say about today. I still have to reinstall every app that Smart Switch was supposed to move and didn't. I am going to go do that now. I am not happy about it.