Spending $1,800 on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3


This is my Z Fold 3, I’ve been using it for some  months, actually from when it was release and could be using it until maybe a year until  the next one is released. it’s Samsung’s 3rd   generation of Foldable phones and I’ve used all of  them. it is definitely not for everyone. However, for those who have ever considered owning a  foldable phone. Maybe this video might make you   think about your decision on owning or not owning  one. I also have the Z Flip 3 which is going   to also be posted right after this video as we’ve  used them concurrently so do click the link in   the description for that one.

I’ve used and made videos about  all the Samsung Galaxy Folding phones and this   is the 3rd version. What makes it special?  Should you buy it? Without further ado, let’s get to it. Build Quality The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 marks a new height  for Samsung when it comes to the Foldable   generation of smartphones. There’s nothing  like this on the market with its potential and   that’s something that can be seen on this  device and many many analysts, reviewers,   people who have some history with a Foldable  smartphone say the same thing in this regard. If you want the crux or the koko   of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3. It’s a  pocketable tablet. You have the phone as a phone, and when you open it, it becomes  a tablet that you can use for tablet stuff. Samsung made some significant efforts   when it comes to how solid this device should be.  Gorilla Glass Victus on the front and back of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3. The Back is a matte  textured glass. The inside is “foldable glass” but when you touch it, it’s of course a plastic  film-like material.

You can see that when you watch videos from Jerry Rig Everything. The phone  is also quite thick as you can see and the hinge on this is also much better. Apart from the toughness of this, it’s IPX8 Water  Resistant and not dust resistant. IPX8 means it’s   water-resistant up to 1.5m underwater for 30  minutes. For a Foldable device, with all these intricate parts, that’s quite impressive as well. Oh and the Z Fold 3 supports a special S Pen  Pro this time. I remember in my Z Fold 2 video, I mentioned that I wanted it to have the S Pen  and it looks like Samsung answered and gave us an S Pen with the Fold 3. Unfortunately, your old S Pen will not work, I  don’t think the S Pen is cross-compatible among   any device, correct me if I’m wrong in  the comments. But This is my S21 Ultra, you can’t use it with the Z Fold 3. It gives you  this error message. It’s understandable because the S Pen for this Z Fold reclines when  you press it and it’s soft on this device. If you’re a fan of the eSIM, you can use that here alongside the nano sim but don’t even think about a memory card slot.

Storage is good though and we’ll talk about that in a bit. When you buy this, it doesn’t ship with a power  adapter, but ships with cable. However, what you should know is that this device is capable of Fast  charging at 25 watts, I’ll share my charging speed   with you in just a moment, it’s got wireless  charging at 11 watts, and reverse wireless   charging at 4. 5 watts so that’s things like using  the Z Fold 3 to charge your smaller accessories   like a Wireless headphone for instance. As far as ports and I/O, I noticed that  we get what looks like 3 microphones   at the top and 1 microphone at the bottom, and  this is for precise audio recording, again as I’ll show you guys later in this video. It does record  sharp audio. You’ve also got large speaker grilles   at the top and the bottom. When unfolded it’s  almost like it’s on one side giving you enough   room to hold it without blocking the speakers.  Speaker can be blocked when holding it down, but   holding it upright won’t be. Lastly, we do not  have a headphone jack but we’ve got a USB port.

Display: As we already know, the inside of the Z Fold 3 is a foldable glass display but  of course, the main outer layer is a plastic film   that wraps around it which you shouldn’t remove.  Unfolded, or on the cover, you’ve got a better quality dynamic AMOLED display, what they call  AMOLED 2x which you can find on the Note 20 Ultra,   you’ve also got 120Hz for the display’s refresh  rate. Corning Gorilla Glass Victus, 6.2 inches   of Display up at the front and a resolution of  around 832 x 2268 pixels. It’s just like the   Z Fold 2 and has got a 25 by 9 Aspect Ratio. It’s  just ever so slightly wider than the Z Fold 2 by   16 pixels but it’s not noticeable. Now when you head on to the inside  display, you notice that it’s also 120Hz, very smooth I must say, also HDR10+, 1200 nits of  peak brightness which is just dope for a phone,   this unfolded display will span as wide as 7.6 inches and has an 88.8% screen to body ratio. 

I find viewing media on the front   screen to be a bit weird because of the aspect  ratio, it’s too wide and the wide content you’d   most likely see and enjoy is 21:9 which might crop  when zoomed in but fills in the screen nicely, this is a 25 by 9 and is going to show you some  black bars on the side. It would even be more   pronounced when you are watching regular 16:9  videos. Of course there’s continuity from the   inside to outside screen.    Speaking of unconventional aspect ratios,  the inside display has got a weird 11:9 aspect ratio. 11.2 by 9 to be precise. It’s  unconventional and the black bars you will get   when you view the media on here are at the top  and the bottom, whether you are in portrait   or landscape. Again though, I like that  the speaker arrangement is such that   holding it and consuming media.    It also looks good when you’re reading text,  viewing images or using it as a tablet. When you’re typing as well, it might be too thin on the  cover section or just too large when opened but   you can get used to it. I did a podcast with Firstbank where I used this for all the episodes.  

Many of the guests and staff kept asking what it  was and how the experience has been like. I’d say   it’s a very functional device or tool, something  you can again have as a tablet unfolded and as   a phone, folded and kept in your pocket. The  display is also not just a fancy large screen   when unfolded, you can take advantage of the  huge real estate for multitasking whereby you can   have up to 3 split screens and 5 pop up screens,  display multiple screens, minimize them like you   would an actual computer and bring them back up  again with no lag. It’s just a productivity beast. The two main issues I had with the   display though were that the text shows weirdly  under the camera. That’s of course because the   tech used that is supposed to have the full  display view but if you look at it, you can   see those pixels jump at you. It kind of looked  fair when viewing media at least in person.

Also, we can’t forget to talk about the crease. Looking  at media head-on might not make you see it but   any slight tilt or isometric angle will have  you noticing the crease a lot and that can be   uncomfortable.     The thing is, foldable displays are still in the  3rd gen for Samsung, yes, they are actual products   that people are spending quite a lot of  money on but I think it will take some time   to have foldable displays or maybe even rollable  displays without any hiccups, lack of smoothness, noticeable under-display camera and of  course no crease.  For now, this is the best thing you can get in tech commercially with  regards to Foldable tech. Not only is it having   one of the best and most advanced displays, but  you are also getting something comparable in   processing power and software. Specifications This phone right here comes with Android 11 and  Samsung’s One UI latest update. The processor is   the Snapdragon 888 that’s a one. So yes, you’re  getting the latest on here. Samsung was also   generous with the RAM and storage. Of course,  you don’t have an expandable storage slot, you   do get 12GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 internal  storage. Which I’ve still got around 76% left. Gaming & Battery Life + Charging Speed  Now, I did push the processor as hard as   I could for the most part and it served me quite  well.

I played Call of Duty, and multiple games as   we usually do and I of course did not notice any  lags at all. Multi-tasking as well was a great   feat too. What you should know concerning the  battery on here is that there’s a 4,400mAh battery   on here. A bit unconventional because Samsung’s  previous Fold, the Fold 2 has 4,500 mAh but this   is 4,400, not too much of a difference though but  somewhat of a decline. Another thing to note is   that the battery is evenly split so on the screen  side, you get a 2,280mAH and on the charging side,   you get 2,120mAH, making a total of 4,400 mAh. I  highly recommend watching Jerry Rig’s video for   all of the details about the internals  as well. So what does gaming look like on   here with regards to battery life? Of course, we  know it’s a beautiful AMOLED display, 120Hz and   games will work just fantastic. However, on the  battery life front, I went from 22% to 17% in 5   minutes of gaming which is unironically a 5% loss  in 5 minutes. In 30 minutes it was already down to   8% and for the math geniuses that is a loss of 14%  battery life in 30 minutes. So if I’m being modest   here, I think you should be able to get around  3 hours of heavy gaming from this guy at most,   which is not so bad, again, I don’t know if people  spend 3 whole hours gaming but hey, it’s something   to take note of. Do you game for 3 hours or know  someone that does? Let me know in the comments. 

While that is an interesting observation,   I think a consensus among a lot of users of this  device is that the battery life can be better.   A phone handling so much in form of multitasking  and all of the heavy-duty lifting needs some   optimization. This phone here does perform  but the battery didn’t get me up to a full day   on most days. Like I said, I used it for  events, meetings, presentations and because of   the screen on-time I had, my phone didn’t make it  to the end of the day most days. I almost always   had to plug it in and charge. Speaking of charge, we’re now in the charging  test section and this kind of surprised me. The battery is a big 4,400, 2 batteries make up one  as we mentioned. It is capable of 25W charging   at the highest and what I noticed was that it  wasn’t super fast. Here’s how my charging went,   I used a charger higher than 25W. In 10 minutes,  we got from 0 to 8%, in 30 minutes it went to 26%,   in 1 hour, it was only still at 52% so that’s  0 or flat battery to 52% in 1 hour. 1 hour 30   minutes got me to 78%, and it fully charged  to 100% in 1 hour and 50 minutes. Anyway, let   me know what you think about the charging speed  and battery life overall in the comments below.    Fingerprint Reader + Face Unlock    Just like with many standard smartphones today,   you get the normal PIN, Pattern and Password and  beyond that, it’s Face Unlock and Fingerprint   Reader. The Face Unlock here is fast.

You only  need to register it with one front-facing camera   and it will unlock with either the inside camera  or the outside camera. While I find the smaller   4MP inside the camera to do a worse job for Face  unlock the cool thing here is we get to see the   actual camera for a split second to properly  capture your face and it goes out. Anyway, the   other option I find superior is the fingerprint  reader that also serves as the power button. This made the experience easier. I’d suggest  you use both Face Unlock and Fingerprint   reader but I prefer the responsiveness  and swiftness of the fingerprint reader.     Camera    When   it comes to the camera of the Z Fold 3, you’ve  got exactly 5 cameras on here, 2 for the selfie   and 3 for the rear camera.

For the selfie cameras,  the one outside or on the cover is a higher 10MP   sensor that is way better than the one on the  inside and you’ll see what I mean in a bit. The   one on the inside is a 4MP camera, covered by  pixels. The aim for this innovation is so that,   and I’ll like to think of this as innovation. It’s  just that for text and video or just general day   to day tasks you get to use the phone without  any distractions. These distractions can be   from things like a Notch or The Hole punch  cut out as we had on the previous Folds.   It’s not like it’s a big deal or anything  but now, it’s more or less a clear screen   when you’re watching a video. However, if  you look close enough, you see those pixels.     On the back though,   you’ve got the triple camera set up, a 12MP  ultra-wide with no Optical Image Stabilization,   a 12MP Wide or Normal camera with Dual Pixel  Auto Focus and Optical Image Stabilization or OIS   and lastly, a 12MP Telephoto or what you’d call a  zoom camera with PDAF and OIS, it’s a 2x Optical  

Zoom camera and then you’ve got the LED Flash.  I think the Z Fold 2 looked better on the back  in my opinion and this looked a bit toned down   but hey, Samsung had their reason and that  doesn’t take away from this. One feature I   liked from the Z Fold 3 is the half screen  look when you’re in the camera section. It   shows you the viewfinder, the gallery on  one side and controls on the other side.     When it comes to the selfies on the Z Fold 3,   the main themes are that the inside 4MP camera  isn’t as sharp as the front-facing cover camera   that is 10MP. Also, this is where you get a  chance to see that hidden under display camera. In this group selfie,   you can see the difference between our faces. It’s  quite the blur image on one hand and considerably   sharper on the other one.    The next thing is that when you’re outdoor  you also notice a similar difference, maybe   a little more noticeable outdoor. The inside  camera is blurrier than the cover camera. Keep in mind that you can still take   selfies with the cover of the phone as well as  videos which we’ll get to in a bit but here’s how   the photo on the cover looks. Essentially, it’s  better than the inside camera and cover camera.  Ultrawide shots are considerably   wilder, but 1X shots or just the standard shots  tend to be clearer, you can go for a 2X zoom,  4x zoom and a 10X zoom which, when you compare  from how far it is, you get to see clearer text   and object details.    

I like the shots I took with the Z Fold 3 outdoor,  for one, it’s quite saturated but it’s just sharp.   Another thing I can commend Samsung for as  well is its Macro capabilities. You can be as   close as 3 centimetres or just slightly  over 1 inch to get good details like these   images. Of course, it’s blurred around  the edges but it just looks very good. Now, taking photos at night comes   with its challenges, Night selfies are already  dark and when you take selfies in Night mode,   at least with the cover camera, this is the result  you get. It’s more of a brightened, softer and   sharpened process applied to the image. On the back camera though, results were a little  bit more impressive because we could see how Night   mode shines. Overall though, taking photos at  night with this guy would produce some interesting   colours, 9 out of 10 times.     When it comes to video, the front camera  on the inside will top out at 1080p,   while the outside camera can record up to 4K  60FPS, the same thing with the back cameras as   well, 4K at 60FPS. For starters here’s how the  front-facing recording experience is like on   the Z Fold 3.   

On the back, we’re only dealing with 3 twelve  megapixel cameras. They do perform well and I like   that you can top out at 4K 60FPS. The videos did  come out well, I like that it doesn’t lose focus   on a complicated subject. The colours are vibrant although sometimes the  footage didn’t look as stabilized as it should be. I like how the video looks and feels and I  also like how it can maintain some colour accuracy   during zoom. When you record at night, however,  noise casts and you probably won’t see anything   at least when you zoom. That’s pretty much it for this Z Fold 3, it took  a long while to make this video because I could   run out of things to say, I still have so much to  talk about regarding this piece of tech but that’s for social media and to answer your questions. So feel free to reply if you have any questions   at all. I’d love to hear your thoughts and  any question or feedback you might have. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Helping a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Healthy eating through the holidays

Behavioral weight loss programs are effective