How I switched from an iPhone to a Galaxy Z Fold5 with an app and some tape

To start your Galaxy trip, you go to the Try Galaxy website on each iPhone. The website instructs you to add a bookmark of the site to the iOS Home screen, which seemed a little sneaky to me. I imagined some Samsung exec maniacally laughing at how they got stupid iPhone users to bookmark a Samsung website prominently on their Home screen. Then I remembered that this was all in the name of “science,” so I decided to hold ’em and not fold ’em and forge on.

With Try Galaxy’s “Welcome we’re OPEN” icon beckoning me on the Home screen, I tapped it and prepared myself for the experience to unfold. After a few intro screens, a simulation of the Galaxy Android’s UI appeared–and admittedly, it was pretty. The two phones were still two separate phones, however, and I needed to tap the “Fold Experience” to make the two phones act as one.

Once I tapped the icons and entered a code to make the whole thing work, Try Galaxy slipped into its Fold UI–it was certainly a trip to see it on two iPhones.

Don’t expect to get the full Galaxy Fold experience, however. The simulation is limited to a few demos, and you can’t do any of the more mundane things you’d do on a phone, like adjust settings, make a call, or send texts in garish green bubbles. Plus there’s a pretty big gap between the two phones which obviously isn’t an issue on the Galaxy Fold.

Maybe two-player gaming is the Fold’s killer app. I mean, who can’t see the appeal of two people hunched over a small screen to play air hockey? I can’t. But I’ll admit that the gameplay over the two iPhones was cool.

The multi-tasking demo involves dragging a photo from one screen to a text message on the other. It was a little tricky, mostly because the iPhones don’t sit level on a table, plus they’re separate devices, so dragging and dropping from one screen to another isn’t as smooth…as it would be on a folding phone.

The final demo is the Immersive View, where a video plays across the two screens. It’s a nice video if you can get over the gigantic seam that lies in the middle. (Now, the crease in the Galaxy Z Fold 5 isn’t like the one you can see here, but according to reviews, it is noticeable. This seems like a general problem that isn’t going to be completely fixed anytime soon.)

The whole experience is incomplete, though. I wanted to know what it’s like to hold a foldable phone in my hands. So I took the experience one step further and I taped the two iPhones together to create a “hinge.” 

Then I folded my foldable iPhone and put it in my pocket and my drawstring pants fell down. After pulling my pants back up from around my knees, I took out and opened my folded phone and did the Try Galaxy demo again. And my impressions of the Galaxy Fold didn’t change.

Yeah, I know that a foldable phone is engineered to be foldable and thinner than two iPhones taped together but it’s actually pretty close (13.4mm for the Galaxy Fold and 15.5mm for the two iPhones). And it was thick enough to make me want the whole thing to be over.