We actually LOVE this phone: here's why (Galaxy Z Flip review) By CNET

So at this point, I've been using the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip here for about a week, and I've got to say I actually kind of love it for the first time in foldable phones, I can actually say that I think Samsung got it mostly right up until this point, they've been experiments and proofs of concept and the Galaxy Z flips still is, but it's one that makes me see how foldable phones could actually work and could almost even be practical for day-to-day use. So the number one thing I love is that when you fold it, the phone can actually stand on its own and at a variety of angles, not just one. It's quite a technological feat that Samsung makes the hinge stiff enough and what it's calling flex mode to go back really far without it snapping open and to come, really close to closing it before those magnets on the corners engage and snap it shut. So I've used this in real life, naturally in a lot of different ways, taking a selfie if I want to set it down, because I'm eating soup for lunch and I want to read an article or watch a video, sometimes just because I don't want to close it fully. So I might turn it on its side and prop it up. I, don't even mind watching video.

That way, if it's more convenient for me yeah, the image has a little of a bend in it, but sometimes I don't care. Of course the stiffness of the hinge means it also takes a little more effort. If you want to snap the phone open, but I figured out a way to do it honestly, I just usually use both hands. I. Also like how portable these devices, the Motorola Razr, is really portable.

? they're about the same size, I found it really easy to fit into any pocket. I could zip it up into my jacket. Pocket put it in my front jeans, pocket rear jeans pocket, and it wouldn't get lost, but more than that. I also felt the security of having it. In there, because it folds up I also feel like the delicate screen on the inside is much more protected.

You've gotten glass on the outside here and if the phone drops yeah that breaks, but it also comes with a free case in the box. It's plastic, it's a little flimsy I feel like it can pop off pretty easily, but it gives me that extra level of peace of mind and I don't really mind the way that it looks. Another surprising thing I like about the Z flip, is the way that it makes me more intentional about when I want to use my phone, so I can't access it as easily as I would like any other device, pretty much that's to screen. You pick it up. It's there.

You immediately start newborn scrolling through your social media networks or something like that. But with this phone I get this sense of finality when I'm done using it when I don't want to interact with it, I just simply close it and when I do want to use it I open it, and that just makes me feel like I'm. Much more engage with the device in a really weird way on the flip side. What's not so great about it, it's 1.1-inch outer screen. It is simply too small I'll dive into that later too, at $1,380, it's ridiculously expensive for the specs.

It's still fragile, and battery life is only so-so. The phone is also incredibly smudgy on the outside and the inside, and that makes me wonder if cleaning it is going to damage the screen if I press too hard. That's part of Samsung's care warning for it. Finally, I don't like the location of the fingerprint reader I think that it inhibits one-handed use, at least for me, because I'm, mostly using the phone one-handed down here at the bottom, then I have to kind of lunge my thumb up if I want to unlock it or launch the camera. This way, if you've got bigger hands than me, that might not be a problem for you.

Ok, let's talk about the glass screen and the build, because foldable phones are all about this screen. This one is 6 point 7 inches on the inside. Samsung is saying that it's made from ultra-thin glass, and it feels pretty good. It feels smooth, it feels a lot less bumpy and the crease seems a lot less noticeable, then on the Motorola Razr, for example, and also on the Galaxy fold, part of that's because the phone is narrow, so you're really only feeling this much crease instead of this much crease. Now, of course, with the foldable phone, you spend a lot of time doing this, bending in that's gonna, cause, wear and tear Samsung says that the phone will withstand 200,000 bends over the course of the phone's lifetime, which is equivalent to about five years and estimates.

I've only had this phone for about a week, so I don't see any damage so far, which is great. That said, you can damage it. If you were to drop it on its face on a rock or take something to it like a chisel or a pick, then you could intentionally and damage your display. There is a warranty and there is 24/7 concierge service with this device, so you do have some protection. If you get it- and it happens to you now, we all know what happened with the Galaxy fold and how early review units were getting damage, so Samsung had to redesign that device.

Well, those design changes from the fold also carried over into the Galaxy Z Flip, which is good, for example, I, don't feel any of the protective coating in the corners, so I'm not going to be tempted to peel something off that I shouldn't be peeling off. There are also these little things on the side that I keep calling T caps, they're, basically plastic, and they're there to reinforce the hinge and also to make sure that nothing is going to work its way. Underneath that hinge and then damage the phone from the inside when I bend, the phone I don't see any gaps in the screen anywhere, where I could put my fingernail or anywhere where something could get through, and that's perfect. You do see a little of an air gap in the design if I hold it up to the light. I can see through that.

The Motorola Razr lies a little flatter, which I think is aesthetically a little nicer, but this design is still much improved. I just want to call it this bezel real, quick, it's a little thick. It feels like it's plastic. It just doesn't seem very luxurious for a phone of this price, but the one thing that it does do is: it creates a little of a rise between the screen and the rest of the world. So if you were to drop the phone on its face, you've got a little of a gap for protection when the phone's closed.

It feels really compact and sturdy, and I like that. I've learned that when I'm, exercising hiking or jogging or just walking around, if I grip, the phone in my palm by this hinge end, it feels really comfortable and I, don't feel like I'm going to drop it. So it feels secure I like that, when it's open, it also feels pretty good and sturdy. In my hand, the dimensions of this phone are very tall and narrow. I found that typing wasn't a problem at all, using it one-handed, while on a bus was totally fine or when I was doing something.

With my other hand, there's this kind of multi app bar on the side that Samsung expects for you to use for multitasking, so opening an app on the top half of the screen and another one on the bottom, and that did come in handy naturally, but I also just liked using this on the side and adding in my favorite apps and using that as a shortcut to open those apps. The only downside to having a screen with these tall, narrow dimensions comes with, maybe watching video. So when I watched, YouTube Netflix, for example, you do get those thick black bars on either side. You can zoom in to enlarge the picture and fill the entire screen, but you're going to be cutting off the top and the bottom cameras. Let's talk about cameras.

There are two main cameras on the Galaxy Z flip we've got a 12 megapixel wide-angle and a 12 megapixel ultra wide-angle lens. These are essentially the same quality as the galaxy s 10. So it's not the new 12 megapixel cameras that you're going to see in the galaxy s 20 phones on the inside. You have a 10 megapixel camera as well for selfies or for video chatting image quality. Predictably, good I was able to take a lot of shots outdoors indoors in low-light, and it's pretty much what I expect from a phone like the galaxy s 10 when there was abundant lighting you're going to get really crisp clear, beautifully, saturated images, a low-light.

To be honest in some scenes it was a little of a struggle. Samsung's night mode kicked in some circumstances, and that it is still pretty good. You're going to get shots that you can use. You might just not get every shot that you love. Overall.

I was really satisfied with the pictures that I got on the Z flip, especially when you compare it to the Motorola Razr any time. I want to take a photo when the phone is open. Furthermore, I, just double-click on this power button, flash fingerprint reader when the phone's closed, it's a little more complicated, and this is one thing that I don't like. If you press that button, which is really the only way to engage taking a photo, it automatically turns the phone into selfie mode, which is good. But then you have this tiny 1.1-inch screen on the outside that I mentioned, and that's your only viewfinder. This is problematic because you can't contextualize yourself within the shot.

It's very short and it's very wide. It's pill shaped, so you don't know where you are or what anything looks like really. You can use the ultra wide-angle lens by tapping on the screen and sliding your finger over. So that's good if you want to get two people in the shot, but you still don't know where that other person is in the picture. So it's kind of a complete surprise when you open it up, there's one camera mode that I want to call out specifically and that single take.

This is one that Samsung was hyping for the Galaxy S 20 range of phones, but it's also in the Galaxy Z flip. So what you do is you engage that mode press and hold the button, and it takes up to ten shots in four videos. I tried this, and I realized that I spent a lot of time deleting these photos that I didn't want, and it didn't really compose the shot. The way that I wanted it so for me, being, admittedly, a bit of a type-a personality, I think that I would probably just rather pose the photo or the video myself to make sure that I've got what I really want to use and then, if I delete it I'm only deleting what I took and not what this camera AI system decided. That I wanted, and speaking of this outer screen, which I may have mentioned, is very, very small.

There's, honestly, not that much that you can do with it. I just want to do more. I can double tap it to see the time the date and my battery percentage. It is touch sensitive. So if you swipe on it, you can see the number of messages that you have any missed phone calls an alarm the date you can even tap into some of those messages, it might say, open phone for details.

So then you have to open your phone and unlock it, and it will hopefully open up that app. Sometimes it does not open up the pertinent app. Sometimes you just get the home screen, and then you have to find that app again other times you can tap on a message and actually see the content of that message. Float by you in ticker style. I do like that, but I think that Samsung could have done a lot more there's all of this space here.

But when I look at the other, foldable phones like the Motorola Razr I thought that 2.7-inch screen on the outside was miniscule, but you can do a lot more with it. You can send canned messages, and you can use voice input to reply to a response, so you're at least engaging with it. Of course, the Galaxy fold you've got a four point: six-inch screen on the outside, it's tall, its narrow its annoying to type on, but you can at least open up an app on the outside and use it to sort of quickly respond to something or to do something and then open up the phone and have the rest of that. So I think Samsung still needs to work on this. For me, this outer screen is really the phone's weakest link.

The Galaxy Z flip runs on Android 10 as you'd expect, and it's using Samsung's new one UI 2 performance is pretty good. It's got Qualcomm snapdragon, 855 plus processors, so it's actually pretty great, very speedy, no lagging in my experience with it at all, 256 gigabytes of on-board storage with no expandable memory. That's still plenty generous for you to be able to store a lot of photos, apps and videos and eight gigabytes of ram. So that's part of why it's snappy. The battery story is a little more complicated.

It's got a dual battery and that means that they're actually two battery cells, one on the top one on the bottom. That makes it nice and even and together they combine to create a capacity of 3300 William hours, but battery capacity doesn't necessarily translate directly into real-world use and there's the extra complication that dual batteries are known to be less efficient than one large single battery cell. The bottom line is that I could still mostly get through a day on a single charge, but I don't necessarily have the confidence that I'd be able to start in the morning and 6 a. m. when I wake up and then go til the wee hours I would definitely want to charge it if I were going to go out at night just to give myself some peace of mind so one day, I used it pretty hard.

I hot spotted I used navigation, I am with streaming Netflix and just using the phone as I normally would, and I got about 13 hours of use out of it. This phone, not a battery beast that it'll do it. You need. We've talked about what's good. What's bad? Does it even make sense to spend $1400 on a foldable phone? Well depends on who you are, if you're the kind of person who's going to get a foldable phone, then you're an early, adopter and I would say this is the one to get that's going to be the most practical and give you the best experience yes over the fold and definitely over the Motorola Razr.

It's all true portable, the specs are pretty advanced, and I absolutely love this flex mode. It stands up on its own. What other phone can say that Samsung has made this good enough to justify the next generation of phones, and that's pretty amazing, considering that the galaxy fold got off to a really rough start. So should you go out and buy a galaxy? Z flip? No, probably not, but you should go, get your hands on one in a store and try it out. You should definitely pay attention to this design, because Samsung has made a very clear case that you might be using one of these phones in the future, thanks for watching be sure to subscribe and check out.

My final review on CNET, calm.

Source : CNET