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.
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