Daily drove a Fold 3 for a little over a year, and just ordered a Fold 5. I kept the Fold 3 for a second year as a supplement to my current phone.

If you use a phone as strictly a phone - pictures, texting, calls, etc - then there is no real benefit especially at the price premium. Any phone can do those things.

Day to day, I found myself opening far less than I thought I would. The front screen is great for one-handed use.

If you consume content though, videos, movies, games, etc, or do a lot of productivity stuff on your phone(multitasking and using remote desktop on that thing is great) - the inner screen is incredible.

Yes - you can have multiple windows open on other phones, and even windowed applications - but its the large screen and Samsung’s particular implementation of them that make it so good. As Narrow_External_5412 said, some apps don’t play well with the aspect ratio of the screens and sometimes need to be closed entirely before re-opening.

It’s all use case dependent. It natively runs SteamOS/Linux, so out of the box yes - you can only play Steam games. Work is required to run other storefronts/software.

While the deck is impressive, and the new one even more so with the battery and power consumption improvements, it shines the most when playing smaller/indie titles that don’t take much to run.

There are competing devices from Lenovo, ASUS and GPD that run Windows so if you’re looking for a more familiar and ready to use experience, those might be better for your use case - though those devices sacrifice battery life for performance and power.