When it comes to smartphones, Samsung is probably one of the most successfully innovative companies. That is to say that they are one of the few companies that has not only pushed innovation and technology, but also released those phones and brought about generational updates. Yes, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 is a success, just purely because it exists and is updated 2 years in a row.
Sure, they are not the only one and certainly not the first, but Samsung is one of a few companies that has been successful in their launch to the point where people actually want to buy their devices.
Design and Build
Let’s start off by stating the obvious, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 is not a sleek phone. It is not a light phone. But a statement piece rarely is.
When you take out this phone amongst a group of people, it turns heads. Especially when you unfold the phone. Simply because chances are, none of your friends can do that with their phone. Chances are nobody in the same room can do that with their phone.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 is a statement every time you take it out, and that statement gets louder every time you unfold it.
The phone is built well, it is quite pockatable, and it is actually very easy to use, unfold, etc. But it is heavy and bulky. You are not going for a run with this phone in your pocket.
The major improvement in design from the previous generations is the increase in side of the front-screen, and that the Fold3 is IPX8 water resistant. Which means it isn’t actually dust resistant, but still impressive.
Z Fold3 Cameras
The camera on the Galaxy Z Fold3 is a bit of a letdown.
- Main Cameras
- 12 MP, f/1.8, 26mm (wide), 1/1.76″, 1.8µm, Dual Pixel PDAF, OIS
- 12 MP, f/2.4, 52mm (telephoto), 1/3.6″, 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS, 2x optical zoom
- 12 MP, f/2.2, 123˚, 12mm (ultrawide), 1.12µm
- Selfie Cameras
- Outside: 10 MP, f/2.2, 26mm (wide), 1/3″, 1.22µm
- Inside: 4 MP, f/1.8, 2.0µm, under display
If you look at this camera setup, the main cameras are exactly the same as what you got in the Z Fold2. Nothing changed there. This is the same for the external Selfie camera.
The only change is on the inside selfie camera. It is both an innovation and also a downgrade from the Fold2. We went from 10mp to 4pm and from f/2.2 to f/1.8, plus some other changes. However the main innovation is that the camera is an under display camera. This means that, on paper, there is no hole punch cutout in the screen.
Unfortunately the concept is ahead of what technology can do right now. But this I mean, the software/hardware fiddling that Samsung has had to do in order to achieve this is both great and also disappointing.
The pictures look like they were taken in a foggy room. The quality is quite unusable. However with some software fiddling, they managed to get it good enough to be used for video calls. Again not the best, but gets the job done. The sad part is that the screen above the camera itself is not the best either. It is very low density, to the point where you can see the individual pixels of the screen.
Samsung is not the first to try this concept out. However they are one of the first to put it on a device that you can actually buy easily. I think it’s a cool idea, and it will hopefully only get better. Until then, if you need to take a usable selfie, use the camera on the outside.
Display
The main wow factor of the Z Fold series of phones is the ability to… fold. No surprise there. While the first gen had a troubled launch, the phone has come a long way now. The entire package is great and the screens seem much stronger than before.
While having a smooth screen is nice, there is definitely a noticeable bump in the middle of the screen.
Personally, the crease eventually stopped bothering me. Yes you can feel it, but you get so used to it that you won’t realise that it’s there. Even when watching videos or playing games, you don’t even see it.
What is a bigger problem is that the viewing angles of the screen are horrible. The moment you tilt the phone a bit, the screen starts shifting colours. This makes the phone quite unusable for more than one person. With such a big screen, this is quite a letdown.
The external screen is also a nice improvement from the previous generation, with the inclusion of 120Hz refresh rate. A brilliant quality display, great viewing angles and extremely usable for daily things. My only issue is with how narrow the screen is. Typing is not fun as the keyboard just feels way too small. But knowing what is behind the phone, it is quite worth the trade-off.
One annoying problem is that the internal screen is a dust magnet. Dust just starts to collect, and the gap between the screen protector and the phone edge acts like a dust gutter. Not the nicest thing, but not a major issue.
Battery
The battery on the Z Fold3, at 4,400 mAh, is actually slightly smaller than the Z Fold2 by 100 mAh. This is quite a non issue, because the battery is pretty brilliant. After pushing the phone quite hard, you would run out of battery by the end of the day. The only time I was properly able to kill the battery was when running benchmark testing followed by a days usage.
Samsung has done some amazing performance optimisation on this phone. Even the two screens can’t bring it down.
In terms of charging you get wireless charging and you can also share the battery with reverse wireless charging. Fast charging is limited to 25W wired and 11W wireless. Not the fastest phone to get charged.
Note that the version we got was not 5G, we do think that the 5G model would drain the battery much faster.
Features, Specs and Performance
A phone like the Galaxy Z Fold3 is nore really about the specs but more about the overall experience. This hasn’t stopped Samsung from packing it full of almost everything.
The specs of the phone are:
- Processor: Snapdragon 888
- GPU: Adreno 660
- RAM: 12 GB
- Storage: 256GB or 512GB – UFS 3.1
The model we got didn’t seem to be able to use 5G, not sure what that was about.
In terms of performance you are not going to be let down by this phone. We threw a lot at it and it just took it all like a champ. You can multitask with 4 screens! Check out some of the screenshots from our multitask madness.
The only time I felt the phone stutter was when trying out DeX. On that note, DeX is really great, but in order for the fold to become a true computer replacement it needs to improve massively. Great in a pinch, but can’t really be relied on.
Since there are two screens and one of them bends, Samsung opted to put a side mounted fingerprint reader. This worked perfectly, and I love external fingerprint readers as they can be used even without looking at the phone and aiming.
Here are the benchmark results:
Galaxy Z Fold3’s Quirks
With so much going for this phone, there wasn’t much space to talk about the speakers, which are great. Stereo speakers, same as last time.
Also, just like the Fold2, the Fold3 doesn’t have a headphone jack. A bit sad, given I miss those, but not unexpected.
The biggest issue with this phone is the price. Currently you can find it for a whopping AED 6,300 (~1,715$), for the 512GB model. This is especially high when you look at the fact that you get a pretty mediocre camera system and don’t even get the charger in the box. But that’s the price to pay for cutting edge technology.
This price would be much more value-for-money if only Samsung DeX was better, a AED 6,300 phone + tablet + computer replacement is a great deal.
Lastly, as a nice little surprise, the Galaxy Fold3 is 11 grams lighter than the last model. Not earth shattering, but given the water proofing it’s quite impressive.
I would say that if you do get this phone, get yourself a nice compact bluetooth keyboard, you can really make this device (because it’s more than a phone) your remote work horse.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 comes in the following colours:
- Phantom Black
- Phantom Silver
- Phantom Green
