Is Samsung Trying To Impress Me?? - Galaxy Z Fold3 5G Early Look By Linus Tech Tips

Samsung's unpacked 2021 event is happening right now. We're going to have it linked in the video description, so you guys can check out all the big announcements. There's the new galaxy watch four series: Galaxy Buds, two there's a new flip, but for me the big one is the Galaxy Z fold, 3 5g. This is their third generation flagship foldable and if you're a long time viewer, you will know that I am absolutely jacked to get my hands on this thing and an absolute first. I actually get to look at it early, although I only have a couple of hours to get through it in as much detail as possible before unpacked is gonna, go live so without further ado. We are going to rip this thing open and take this baby for as hard a test drive as I possibly can.

Obviously, one of the big highlights is the under screen: camera. Okay, it's not turned on yet, but I'll show you in a sec, oh right after I tell you about our sponsor glassware with glassware. You can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or android device, use, offer code Linus and get 25 off glassware at the link down below conspicuously absent from the unboxing experience is an included charger. That's right, my friends, just a cable and instructions for how to use either the single sim or dual sim tray, depending on what your phone has. So, if we're going to criticize apple for it, then we have to hold Samsung to the same standard, though to Samsung's credit.

They do have some launch bundles with some pretty good value ads. Now I have a bit of a concern. I have not actually fired this up yet Jake prepped the device- and I don't see anything about this externally- that would indicate that I actually got a new fold. This looks oh no, oh, it's got a wider speaker grille here, okay, I had a little. I had a little panic moment there I thought.

Maybe they put a fold two uh default, two in the box, but no you can see. We've got a clearly different camera array, and we ended up with the black version now the hinge that was one of the biggest improvements from the first gen to the second gen was the hinge way more robust. This time. I'd say it's got if anything, actually, even a slightly tighter springier feel to it. It feels even better, but the big improvement is that the hinge is now waterproof.

Actually, I lied. Samsung gave up and decided that it was impossible to waterproof the hinge because of the moving parts, and I can see what they mean, but because they wanted to give the Galaxy Z fold 3 a waterproof rating of ipx8. They independently waterproofed the two separate parts of the phone. Then they actually treated the internals of the hinge with both an anti-corrosive and lubricating agent to ensure that, even if water does inevitably leak inside it, it will continue to operate. So, let's go ahead.

They rate it for one and a half hours, 30 meters down. So theoretically, everything should be fine wow. That is filthy water. I probably should have washed out this container before I put it in there, but uh I mean. Should I go for gold? Should I fold it? Okay, holy shrikes world's first waterproof foldable, ladies and gentlemen, okay, with its biggest challenge out of the way, let's dry it off and talk about the under screen camera.

I want to get the big questions answered first here Andy I mean I didn't have to do the water demo first, but you know I like to live dangerously right. Okay, you too can get a great phone drying shirt at lttstore. com, all right, so when you're watching classic shows you're either stuck with a hole punch in your 4x3 content or you've got a black bar, and you're not making use of that giant screen that you paid so much for I'm hoping that this will completely eliminate that problem. So let's go ahead and fire up some 4x3 content there. It is yup.

It goes over top interesting, so Samsung has taken a bit of a different approach than I might have expected with their hole. Punch camera like it doesn't have the full resolution of the display in front of it not even close, come take a look at this, so they've actually got a much, much less dense matrix of pixels here. Can you see that Andy? So you can actually clearly see through it, which actually makes sense, because that's exactly how the transparent Xiaomi TV also worked where the pixel density was much lower. It was only 1080p which, by modern standards, is pretty small for a 55-inch display, but that decrease in density allows it to be more see-through, and it was more transparent one direction than the other, which is probably exactly how this one's arranged. So it's more transparent from the back, and then we see the lit pixels.

Now I can spot it obviously like. I can see it from this distance away, but what it isn't is nearly as distracting as a hole in the content off-axis. I can really see it, but when I look at it straight on like if I'm just watching, I'm not going to notice it, especially with SDR content like this, where the resolution is pretty low anyway, that is a crazy big difference, especially when you consider that the screen's only a little bigger at 7.6 inches, but that image, because we're not stuck with that stupid black bar, it's way bigger whatever I'm jacked I'll rewatch the whole duck tales series now, of course, under screen cameras with good transparency have existed for some time now. The real question is: how does that camera? That's hiding in there perform now back when the z-fold 2 came out. I questioned the inclusion of this camera at all because I was like well.

If you want to take a selfie, you can use this one and just use the screen on the front, and if you don't want to take a selfie, then you should use the main camera, but there are lots of applications that do kind of require a camera on the screen that you're using and one of Samsung's big focuses with this device was use. Cases like this, so whether you're in a video conference and you've got all the participants down here and then you've got whatever you're presenting up here or whether you are, I mean really. A video conference would be one of the main applications for that. You are going to need a front-facing camera, so let's go ahead and flip it around see how it does, and it's not perfect. In fact, one of the weaknesses is immediately noticeable hold on I'm going to record video.

So, okay, this is for sync, so you guys can see what I'm talking about is. You can actually see distortion so that purple glow is there that's real, but this distortion from this light source is not something that I would expect to see on a normal selfie camera and in fact, we're going to use the old Samsung Galaxy z full 2, to compare to it. So you can see you can actually see the red, green and blue pixels distorting this bright light source as it's coming in, and you can see the marked difference in sharpness between these two cameras, of course, nobody's buying a phone with an under screen camera, for you know the best in picture quality, but it is something that you guys should know. Okay now, let's put it in a situation. That's a little more favorable like here, where I don't have a particularly bright light source behind me, and I'm kind of sitting at my desk using my phone as an as yeah, okay, interesting huh.

Now that is, cool Samsung is clearly doing some kind of post-processing to increase the sharpness here, and you could tell it couldn't do it when it had that strong backlight, but now the difference in sharpness between these two cameras, not that much when I'm not in motion when I hold still, you can see it kind of sharpens up, that's really cool huh! Don't you love technology? I sure do how much thinner is it? It is almost exactly the same. I wouldn't describe it as noticeable in day-to-day use, but they managed to get the external screen ever so slightly larger, while also slightly reducing the width of the phone as a whole man. It's its barely noticeable, though, can you even tell the one at the back should be a touch taller yeah. It's like slightly taller, not much. One of the other things Samsung was really proud of.

Was the grade of aluminum that they used on the device. It does feel really nice to the touch, but one of the demos they did was they whacked it against a regular piece of aluminum and showed that only the regular raw aluminum was marked by that interaction. Unfortunately, they didn't compare it to any of the other hardened aluminum alloys that we know of. So I don't know you know how it compares to allies, because no one would use raw aluminum in a device like this. Now, let's talk about one of the other big upgrades, both the fold 2 and fold.3 have 120 hertz high refresh rate displays on the inside, but only the fold three has a 120 hertz display on the outside. So if, like me, you find yourself using it in like well, they call it candy bar mode in candy bar mode, a fair bit when you're just sort of quickly replying to a message or something like that you're going to get that nice responsive experience, regardless of which display you want to use man.

This is something they've really improved since the original fold, a lot the experience of going from the outside display to the inside one. That's the more common use case where you'd have an app open like here. Let's say the play store. You just go like this boom. Now we are in the folded experience now.

Normally apps will close when you close it, but you probably noticed on my fold to that Plex continued playing that video earlier. That's because you can configure certain apps to stay running when you fold the device. It just assumes that in most cases, you're folding it up because you're ready to put it away, and you want the display to turn off, there's lots of things that just look that just transition so much better like here. Okay, so here we go. Let's transition boom, look at that and Samsung talked a lot about partnerships and how they're optimizing apps for the full 3 experience so YouTube, for example, has apparently gotten an optimization where you can do go like this, hey there you go.

You can watch on here while you scroll comments, because you want to subject yourself to that for whatever reason down on the bottom screen and, let's see, can we even reply? Look at that we can type our little reply hello. Now if I bought a device like this, I really don't think that I would end up watching content like that. Very often I'd be all about that big screen experience, but your mileage may vary. One thing your mileage may vary about is whether you, like Samsung's vivid display profile, come on guys, look at mine and Riley's lips. We look like we're wearing lipstick.

Can you see that ridiculous? Let me get that fine-tuned. I realize we've gotten this far without really talking speeds and feeds. So in the U. S. it's going to have a snapdragon, 888, processor, 12, gigs of ram and 256 or 512 gigs of non-expandable storage.

It's going to have wireless charging fast charging, but not like crazy, super, fast charging and then outside the US. It's going to have an Enos 2100 processors. Now, according to some testing from GSM arena, they found that the Enos and snapdragon this generation are pretty close in terms of performance, but the Enos variant does tend to thermal throttle faster and harder. So that's something that, unfortunately I don't have enough hands-on time with it in order to test right now, but could be something to watch out for if you're outside the US other key specs. It's got a 4400 William hour battery NATO sim slot fingerprint sensor over here on the right, just like the full two and, of course, a whole whack ton of cameras.

So on the back, we have three 12 megapixel shooters a wide, an ultra-wide and a telephoto, then on the cover we have a 10 megapixel and on the inside. That is just a 4 megapixel built into the display. So it's really intended for video conferencing, where it's going to end up destroyed by compression anyway and not for you know, taking the most, you know beautiful duck face selfies. You know what I should try. I should try all the different cameras here.

Oh, you can choose apps that will continue on your cover screen when you close your phone look at that it even prompts you to do that thing. I was telling you about well camera for one uh. Definitely Netflix and plaques choose a color tone for your selfies natural yeah, and they have a little motion photo feature now kind of like the iPhone. That's cool. I'm expecting this to be much better.

Did I get it? Oh yeah, I got it. I look ridiculous! Oh, yeah! You can really tell on that under display. One check this out Andy. So there's under display and there's no under display. That's a lot sharper and that's the main shooter now something they didn't talk about much in the briefing actually really at all.

Now that I think about it, but that was a big difference from the fold one to the full two with screen brightness. It was really dim on the fold one to the point that it was kind of difficult to use outside and that's something that I'd like to see if they improved here. Oh wow, that looks a lot better. I'm surprised they aren't talking about this trey's interesting. Let me make sure that both displays are actually set the same because right this one's probably still in vivid mode.

Oh, this is cool right. Here's, yet another large screen optimization that they've made even something as simple as the settings menu now has the sub menu over on one side see that so, if you've got your, oh, I don't know, let's say display settings. If I can find the bloody thing there we go here, it would just show it to you on the whole screen, and then you'd have to go back here. You can just click through all these different menus and sub menus, and then you can go ahead and play around with them in here. So, let's go ahead and change screen mode to natural.

There we go now they're, actually looking very, very similar. It looks a little brighter to my eye, not a ton, though I wouldn't think yeah. I can see why they wouldn't talk about it. If it's that close another big feature compatibility with the s pen. Now there are two versions of the s pen, there's the fold edition and then there's the s pen pro, and it looks like they've sent me the s pen pro, although I didn't have pictures of them in my pre-briefing material, so I'm doing my best with it.

But given that the s pen pro has an integrated battery- and this has a type c port on the back for charging, I'm assuming that it's this one by the way, as soon as I change it over to natural the color grading on this video looks fine, just fine, so thank you very much Samsung for at least just making it one click to go back to a proper screen mode. Okay, only s, pens designed oh interesting. Only s pen is designed for your galaxy fold. Other s, pens will damage the screen, set it to z, fold mode before using it on your fold. Okay, so there's a little switch here, book, okay, okay, and so that immediately starts just passively working.

This is another perfect example of I can definitely see the camera. If I look for it, but if I'm not looking for it, I don't notice it hello. Wow, responsiveness is extremely high, so extremely light strokes. It does struggle with a little but wow, wow, my uh. You can see why I never write anything my penmanship, not the best, but that is really responsive.

Now, obviously, people are going to want to know. Will an old s pen work, so I guess we're going to find out. Oh, it yells at you. It says! No! No! You may not okay. What? If I have this one close, and then I touch it with this one? No I'm not liking uh.

I think there's a writing to text thing here. Let me try this actually testing. Okay, yeah it works. Um writing to text is a feature that they talked about a lot in the pre-briefing. I don't see it as useful for myself personally, I type extremely quickly using the on-screen keyboard, especially the excellent one that Samsung includes with a really well-thought-out split, but for people who you know, let's say right in Chinese or Korean, where it can be a little more challenging to input text with a keyboard.

It looks like a great feature. It's just one! That's not that applicable to me. So here's their split keyboard. You can use swift key with a split keyboard. There are other third party keyboards, but this was a case of a first party keyboard, actually not being abhorrent to me.

So I ended up keeping it with the z fold too. Let's see I mean this is kind of an interesting use case, so you can kind of okay, I'm trying to write upside down. It's going to be really confused type I may have managed to, but that's kind of neat does the faux three come with a string protector this time? Okay, that's a complicated question to answer. So the full two came with a screen protector that made the screen feel really plastic and unpleasant, and I actually removed it and did not end up being able to scratch it at all in my daily use of it. So I was, but it is, does still have a protective layer on it, so it doesn't feel quite like glass, because it's more of a plastic it has to fold.

You know the three does appear to have a bit of a ridge right at the edges, but what I will say about it is that it feels just as good to my finger as the raw fold too, so I wouldn't recommend removing it. Here's why I need it. This was another big partnership message for Samsung, so how they optimized the Spotify app for either their normal interface. So you go. Your search is over here.

Your library is over here or fold interface. So now, if you're, looking at your library or search or whatever else, that's over here, and then you've got now playing you've got your media controls right accessible to your left thumb. Now, of course, my biggest issue and the reason that I have not been able to daily drive exclusively a full device up until now is that the YouTube app has not been fully featured on previous fold devices. So now is the moment of truth, where I find out, if I can switch to this thing by opening up YouTube. Of course, consumption.

The consumption experience is excellent, but what about the creators? There's literally thousands of us okay, create okay, allow access come on. Can I come back record and go live? Is that it? Okay? That is not a good sign. Even on the older fold too, when I click create, I am allowed to post a community post, but when we contrast that, with what happens on my trusty note 9, I can upload a video create a short go, live, add to my story or create a post. I don't know, I don't know how to communicate this more clearly, Samsung google, both of you, you have to fix this, especially with the rumored upcoming foldable pixel device. I can't have such a dramatically different experience from one android device to the next.

When I click the same bloody button in an app three different behaviors for the same app, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no bad, and before 100 of you start bleeding at me that I need to your know: do it in candy bar mode or something like that. Let's try that all right no work! I mean the truth is that I record most of my video clips on the iPhone that I keep in my back pocket anyway, but like not being able to access basic functionality like posting a community post from a device. I don't understand how google considers this acceptable. Furthermore, I don't understand why they don't just hurry up and validate this device. Furthermore, I don't know why Samsung considers it acceptable, especially because they have to know that a lot of the most influential reviewers out there guys like MHD or Mr who's, the boss like if they have any hope whatsoever of convincing influencers like that to use this device.

Furthermore, I mean me too right. It has to work for creators right, but there's other good stuff. Let's fire up some games, shall we now that is big screen mobile gaming wow? That is a whopping 2268 by 832. , like what oh, my god, that is. That is something else now.

I've never actually played cod mobile before, so you'll have to forgive me, I don't even know how to run this is pathetic. They've really nailed down the actual fold in the display, like obviously, if I'm looking for it, it's like the under screen camera right, like I can find it, but when you are just immersed in content like this you're, not going to notice that oh, that's how you run okay, cool, it's so big, like it's like clicking on giant blown up enemies. Man. This thing makes even someone like me functional at this game: nice. Okay, are these bots or something because I'm pretty sure, I'm not that good at this, oh man, that that is a different experience right there yeah it's pretty good.

One thing I was surprised to see was Samsung encouraging users to dig into the labs features under advanced features here. So this allows you to have multi-window for all apps like say, for example, you wanted to uh shop on one side and then read reviews on another side. Let me just open up another app here, interesting. Okay, I didn't get the shopping thing working immediately, but I found another thing where you can enable apps that don't natively support it for this viewing experience and check this out Plex, so you've got your controls down here and your media playback there, and it is just like worked uh. So it was this flex mode panel thing, so you can just uh.

You know the phone app obviously supports it by default, but not everything does this multi window for all apps' thing. I want to figure out how you multi-window things. Well, I was figuring out the side-by-side view thing. I found the feature to just run any app in a little window like this on top of whatever else you're doing so, I've got the YouTube app running like that. You just go into your multitasking okay.

I guess it turns it into a bubble when you go into that. That is super cool, so here's how we get rid of it, and then we go. Oh yeah, okay, it's dead! Well, that's fine! Let's do it with this one. So we just drag it here for pop-up view, and then we can resize it a little something like that, and we can just have our like browser over here or wherever the heck else. It is that we want it.

That's pretty neat! I will figure out this side-by-side thing, bloody hell, it's the same as the old one. So you swipe in from the side, and then you can actually have pre-configured side-by-sides like say, for example, you wanted to watch a YouTube video while you're browsing the web. You could do that, or you could just grab YouTube and go um hello. What did I click? Oh, shoot. I accidentally clicked that first one: okay, let's try that again.

So I've got my web browser open. I don't know. Maybe here uh yeah, you know what let's go up top there we go, so we can go ahead and watch a LTT video up there while we're browsing ltteststore. com down here. We've got mouse pads in stock right now, guys.

We've got these cool new retro, GPU, shirts, Linus, plushies, underwear and stock. Look at all that good stuff! We've got there, freaking fantastic! You can easily resize things if you're more into that sort of thing, and I believe you just click here, yep, that's right! You can switch them around. If you want to focus on your video for a little and there we go, and we can actually add additional items as well. So let's go ahead and chuck. I don't know: let's do some messaging, maybe on this side now.

Obviously our keyboard is going to kind of complicate the experience a bit, but hey at least the functionality is there even if 7.6 inches might be a little small for three apps. Another shopping or comparison related feature is the Chrome browser natively supports opening in a side-by-side window now, which is pretty cool? So, let's just there, you go open a new window, so you can, you know, read: reviews of the product or whatever, while you're still looking at the entire catalog, pretty, pretty sick. That's a good question! Probably it will just keep doing what it's doing yeah just like that yeah, it's pretty thoughtful man. How gen z? Am I right now? I can't even stop watching my YouTube video here for long enough to take some pictures. I don't even know what to take a picture of to be perfectly honest with you.

Furthermore, I can tell immediately that it's over saturating the blues a little, but that kind of is what it is. Samsung, wouldn't be the only mobile camera maker to commit that particular sin. I mean this, isn't the kind of phone that you buy for the best photography performance you'd go for something like an s-series or a note, or something like that. If you really wanted that, but it's not like it won't be perfectly functional. Now we're going to turn things around, and I'm going to record the cameraman instead of the cameraman recording me, it's like a Mexican standoff.

Overall, it's doing a perfect job of dynamically. Compensating for me pointing at something brighter versus something not so bright. I mean it'll be perfectly, perfectly acceptable in spite of the fact that you got to remember in order to make this thing not ridiculously thick right. Each half of the phone has to be thinner than a conventional phone. Even a good phone like this is an iPhone 12 Pro oh yeah it is like AI detected.

I was taking a picture of a vehicle, that's cute, and that puts us pretty much at conclusion time, except I actually just noticed something else really cool. You can actually see it. It does struggle a little. Two Chrome windows, you can see the frame rate drops a little when it does that animation, but that is such a minor issue and this thing is going to be in my pocket. The second Samsung and google get together and make the creation experience as good as everything else about this phone is, and if you want one, it's going to be a little trickier, because these puppies are going for 17.99 us dollars, starting at and in Canada, around 22.50. So boy, is it expensive, but it's a phone experience, that's unlike anything else on the market.

Quite frankly, this yeah, it's just man, it's awesome, so snappy and this video is brought to you by a classic sponsor brand um. This is a little awkward, though did brand send a skin nope. They just ask you to make one: oh that's what this is for. Okay, um! I will make my own brand skin I mean they can do it. It couldn't be that hard.

Okay. What do you think in terms of color palette Andy? This is very LTT themed. Was that intentional? Did you put this together for me? I know I can count on you precision fit here. They have the precision fit like robots and some or some I love. How my show notes here say: Linus shows an f'd up result at the end, but what brand didn't see coming is that I'm going to make it awesome brand wishes they could have this design.

I call it orange gray bumblebee rainbow they wish they could name things as well. As me, I mean what swarm lame and all that talk on their website, blah blah blah we measured so many times four-year-old could do it now get out of here and get a real job kid sticker salesman like who sits there in kindergarten and fills out the thing you know. I wanted to be a hockey player who goes yeah I want to. I want to sell stickers on the internet. If you want this, but maybe it fits a little better and your phone still folds go to dbrand.

com safety dash scissors at the link down below they make skins for all kinds of stuff, not just the z z-fold three once they can get their hands on it and get it all, precision measured and make a skin for it. You tape the screen, that's fine! I like the big screen anyway, who needs the thinner little one? You know this is why I wear pants with big pockets. Yeah. What's up Andy now, son, thanks for watching guys if you've enjoyed this video, maybe check out my full review of the fold two which was having spent weeks with it. Instead of just a couple of hours,.

Source : Linus Tech Tips