Disclaimer: I recently-ish, like 2 years ago, picked up my first iPhone and have been converted to its cultist ways. At the risk of being confronted by a doctor, I will try to keep the Apple away, saying that though, if Apple had to make an iPhone that flipped, I’d be sliding into them DM’s like a Risky Business Tom Cruise.
Anyway, back to the good stuff.
For a long time now phones have been pretty standard looking, a slab of glassy metal that, for the most part, are the size of your whole hand. Not that I feel like anyone has really noticed, but it’s kind of bland, isn’t it? All phone brands across the board are just releasing these slabs, the only thing really changing is the number of cameras they stick to the back, getting more and more in the way of your hand for every next model they release.
Well, if it’s something you have noticed, then I’d like to introduce you to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4.
“But Cody,” you say, “this is already the Flip 4! These have been out for years now!”. Well, yes, you aren’t wrong there, but let’s be honest, the first Flip we all assumed was some sort of experiment that wasn’t going to last very long, the second was an “Oh, they’re still going to go for it?” and the third one is when it only really started to hit home that Samsung was all-in on their foldable devices. So, now that we’re on gen 4, we can say that we have a true-er idea of what foldable phones can really be.
And I’d like to say, that I love it. (The Flip. I played around a little with the Fold, but I feel like the Flip is where it’s at.) There’s just something satisfying about holding the phone when it’s folded over in your hand. It just fits. It’s comfortable and I easily found myself walking around with it in my hand all day without even noticing it was there. The form factor is great. The foldable design allows me to use the phone in ways that I didn’t use my previous one. I constantly have it propped up next to my laptop or PC as a “second screen”, so that if any information comes through, I can look at it straight away, not having to scroll through the tiny text on my watch or be forced to pick up, then unlock, then tap to get to the latest notification. The fold allows you to pop the phone up on almost any surface to grab groupies and selfies and doublies and troublies without having to trouble a passerby or go and dig out your tripod from the closet causing everyone to get bored and go back to snacking, meaning another 17 minutes trying to gather all the grannies for the group shot.
Even when un-flipped, the flip is a comfortable size to hold in your hand. It’s just tall enough and just slim enough to be usable with just one hand.
I just really enjoyed the foldable design of the flip, the crease in the screen didn’t bother me at all. I keep explaining to people how your brain almost ignores it after a while, almost like when it will automatically put all teh letrtes of words togteher on its own. And when you’re scrolling on the screen, your thumb is usually on the bottom end, meaning you don’t tend to run your finger over it (which is very noticeable).
I also quite enjoyed the camera/screen on the Flip. Samsung tends to make the blues EXTRA blue and it adds a bit more vibrancy to the rest of the colours that you don’t generally see on other cameras. It is slightly unrealistic, and it may not be to your personal liking, but for me, it made the pictures taken that little bit prettier and I felt like I could appreciate the picture that little bit more.
But with good, comes bad;
The Flip, it ain’t perfect. In fact, far from it. My first few weeks with it, I was on holiday, just using the phone more as an Uber caller and photo snapper than anything else. Where it functioned stunningly. I just popped the battery saver on because I was out and about in a foreign country, and I didn’t need the 5G and always on display. So, the battery lasted, and the phone performed exactly as I wanted it to. However, when I came back to the real world and started using the phone for more daily work and social tasks, I started to enjoy the phone a little less.
If you aren’t using the battery saver, you’re going to need a power bank with you. It just won’t last you the whole day if you’re on it most of the time. I mean general use, calls, messages, maybe a camera shot here and there, some emails, it just doesn’t have the juice to power both screens all day long. On most regular days you’ll make it to the evening, which is fine if you don’t have load shedding, but I would recommend carrying an extra source of power with you during the day, just in case.
Secondly, this thing just loves to get hot! It’s one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced on a phone, because when it’s hot, it’s useless. Samsung has built in a phone-saving software fix that forces the phone to force close all apps until it cools down again so that the battery doesn’t go ‘splodin on ya. Every time I use Android Auto and I go for a drive longer than an hour or a few drives one after the other. I’m almost guaranteed to get hot phone syndrome. Meaning I must either stick it in front of the aircon for 10 minutes, which I can’t assume is healthy, or I must wait 30 minutes for it to cool down on its own. Not a great “feature” to include on a phone, let’s be honest.
Thirdly, for a phone that is touted as being “made for content creators”. It’s missing a whole dang camera lens. Just give me back my macro lens guys! Ultrawide is cool and all, but there is a lot of content that I could make with the macro lens too!
There are a few other niggly bits that I wasn’t really a fan of, but that’s more because of the OS itself and I said in the beginning that I would try and keep that out of the article. *cough cough.
Funnily enough though, even with the average battery and heartburn, the Flip handles games quite well. I was able to get a good number of hours into a game and the phone didn’t get to its sub-volcanic shutdown mode or warn me of a drained battery before I decided to come back to the real world. It does have a nifty Game Mode, which mutes all notifications and such so you can focus on getting all those headshots, just be careful you don’t get heat-shotted by your boss after “ignoring” their calls for the past 3 hours. If you’re wondering it scored a 2457 on 3D Mark, which is 71% better than all other phones. Take that as you wish, but that seems like a decent gaming device to me.