Well made and not especially useful

The new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 might be the best foldable phone to date. And yet, I cannot for the life of me imagine buying one.

After years of hype around foldable displays, the “what” has almost never been sufficiently paired with a compelling “why.” Just because tech companies can do something futuristic, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should. The Z Flip 3 is the latest and greatest example of this.

The Z Flip 3 is, by all means, a good phone: It’s got a large, gorgeous display with a buttery smooth refresh rate, and it delivers solid everyday performance. It even packs a few bendy screen bonuses for things like web browsing and photography that look flashy and cool…in a commercial. In reality, however, these foldable-centric “features” don’t actually make the Z Flip 3 any more useful than the teetering-on-obsolescence iPhone 8 I use every day.

They made “flip” happen

The cover display is nice.
Credit: molly flores / mashable

Samsung’s foldable journey has been an odyssey and a half up to this point. We all remember 2019’s original Galaxy Fold, a gimmicky turd that cost nearly $2,000 without the guarantee that it would even work properly after a week, at least in the initial run of devices sent to reviewers. Its follow-up the next year, the Z Fold 2, was undeniably an improvement thanks to not being totally broken and offering some real novelty with variable screen sizes. But a similarly exorbitant price relegated it to the realm of “really expensive toys that normal people don’t need.”

The story is the same for the recently launched Galaxy Fold 3, too: Pretty neat in theory, and even in execution, but, once again, too expensive and not life-changing enough to justify the cost.

In the spirit of fairness, Samsung did accomplish just about everything it set out to here.

The first Z Flip at least had novel (and nostalgic) value, but at $1,380 and with durability issues, it was still a tough sell. The same goes for the 5G version that acted as a weird stopgap between the OG model and 2021’s Flip.

With the Z Flip 3, however, Samsung has finally addressed the price issue, selling the base model for $1,000. That’s…still a lot of money, but it’s at least comparable to other “normal” smartphones, like the iPhone 12 Pro.

In the spirit of fairness, Samsung did accomplish just about everything it set out to here. This is a folding phone that doesn’t appear to be fundamentally busted and isn’t comically expensive.

The 6.7-inch AMOLED main display is sharp and vibrant, giving all of your photos, videos, and apps a chance to shine. That 120Hz refresh rate should never be discounted, either. It just makes even basic tasks like scrolling through Twitter so much smoother. There’s also a 1.9-inch cover display that’s active when the Z Flip 3 is fully closed, showing users the time, weather, notifications, music, and other things that you might want to see at a glance. It’s not huge, but it’s big enough that you can get the gist of text messages or Twitter DMs.

From a performance perspective, the Z Flip 3 sings thanks to 8GB of RAM paired with a Snapdragon 888 processor. I certainly didn’t encounter any slowdown or hitching whatsoever in my time testing it. For reference, that same processor powers plenty of other flagships, including Samsung’s own Galaxy S21 line, so it’s no slouch.

Photography is perhaps the only aspect of the Z Flip 3 where its foldable nature makes a difference.

As for its imaging prowess, the Z Flip 3’s rear dual-camera array (two 12MP lenses, one ultra-wide) comes with a full suite of software-enhanced photo tools, encompassing everything from nighttime photography to portrait mode, and even AR doodling.

Photography is perhaps the only aspect of the Z Flip 3 where I feel its foldable nature actually sort of makes a difference. Fold the phone at a 90-degree angle while in photo mode, and a preview will appear on the upper half with camera controls relegated to the bottom screen. It’s a feature that could come in handy for low-angle shots.

You can even show camera previews on both the main and cover displays so your homies can see how they look while they’re posing for photos. That’s genuinely neat. I can’t hate on that.

But this phone also starts at $1,000. There are a lot of very nice, non-folding smartphones you can get for that much money or less. Samsung even makes some of them! The Galaxy S21 and Asus Zenfone 8 come to mind, if you want to stick to Android.

With the exception of a couple of nifty applications for photography, my entire experience with the Z Flip 3 left me wondering one thing: What is the point of all this?

Kinect-ing the dots

The hinge makes a prominent dent in the middle of the display, visible even against a bright background like this.
Credit: molly flores / mashable

Let’s take a walk down tech memory lane for a moment and examine another famous instance of “what” instead of “why.”

Back in 2010, Microsoft released the Kinect motion-sensing camera peripheral for the Xbox 360. All of its early marketing was centered around the idea that “You are the controller.” In other words, players could control games and navigate menus entirely with the movement of their bodies. The obvious comparison at the time was the sick hand gesture interface seen in the sci-fi movie Minority Report.

There were just a couple of problems with this approach: There wasn’t anything wrong with the way we controlled games and navigated menus in the before Kinect times (aside from accessibility-based problems, which Xbox addressed with a better device later). And also, the UI in Minority Report was just a fancy CG effect that was made to look cool rather than be an efficient, usable interface.

In real life, the Kinect was tedious to use at its best and buggy bordering on unusable at its worst. Kinect was innovation for the sake of innovation (sound familiar?); a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Even with a handful of good games like Dance Central, Kinect has mostly gone down in tech history as a fart in the wind. Just a decade later, and you can’t even plug one into a new Xbox.

We’re so bored with the annual smartphone upgrade cycle that we need to latch onto something that looks “futuristic” just because it’s different.

Maybe foldable phones won’t go the way of Kinect. It’s totally possible some company will figure out a practical, commercial use for this technology that makes regular flat panels in portable devices a thing of the past. The overly expensive and imperfect Microsoft Surface Duo, for example, at least joined two large enough screens together that you could see how multitasking might work on a better version of that device. Even the Z Fold 3 lets you use multiple apps at once thanks to its larger display. The Z Flip 3, however, isn’t even really capable of that because of the way its screen is constructed. The fact is that it’s just not big enough for effective multitasking when its screen is folded. Besides, most apps aren’t even built with that flexible functionality in mind right now anyway.

There’s certainly a sort of nostalgic novelty to the specific form factor of the Z Flip 3. In particular, its size and shape when closed remind me a great deal of the Game Boy Advance SP, one of the greatest pieces of consumer technology ever conceived. And there’s even validity to the idea of a smartphone you can close — back in the heady days of flip phones, you weren’t always staring at your phone waiting for notifications to pop up like we do now.

But those phones kept their displays and their keyboards separate. The Z Flip 3 is built around the notion that the entire display can fold in on itself, and that’s supposed to be special. Instead of binary open and closed states, the phone purports to offer both a traditional flat smartphone experience and this weird, folded state where apps work differently, alongside the closed, cover display-only position. As it turns out, neither of the ways to use the Z Flip 3 while unfolded are ideal.

The hinge hurts more than it helps

When you aren’t taking photos, folding the Z Flip 3 into that roughly 90-degree angle typically crunches whatever app you’re looking at to fit in the upper half of the display. The bottom half then becomes an empty void with some generic device controls like a volume slider and a screenshot button. It looks ugly and just isn’t useful whatsoever. I tried reading our entertainment team’s What If episode recaps this way and the most it could fit on screen was the headline and maybe a whole paragraph, depending on length. The upper half also isn’t big enough to make this a good way to watch videos, either.

I don’t think this is a great way to read anything.
Credit: screenshot: Alex perry / mashable

But let’s stop beating around the bush and talk about that hinge. God, I hate it.

Using the Z Flip 3 like a regular phone, fully unfolded, means that you’ll constantly thumb over a very noticeable groove running horizontally across the exact center of the display. Oh, you want to check Twitter? Every few seconds you’ll slide your finger over something that feels roughly like an air bubble in a screen protector you put on the wrong way. If that were the problem, at least you could fix it. Here, it’s built into the device and can never go away. Even more unnerving is that, while the screen can apparently withstand 200,000 folds, this technology is still new enough that I don’t fully trust any foldable to last that long.

You can’t even smoothly and quickly open and shut the phone with one hand.

Also, you can’t even smoothly and quickly open and shut the phone with one hand. That most satisfying basic aspect of old flip phones isn’t present here. Hard pass.

I’ll hold onto flat smartphones until the day I die if this is going to be the case with foldables going forward. There just isn’t anything practically useful enough about the Z Flip 3’s bending screen to justify having a permanent dent in the middle of the display.

I’ve felt the same way about the limited experiences I’ve had with other foldable devices, too, such as the original Z Fold. It’s like we’re so bored with the annual smartphone upgrade cycle that we need to latch onto something that looks and feels vaguely “futuristic” just because it’s different, even if the concept hasn’t yet fully justified itself after two years in commercial smartphones.

So go ahead and buy the Z Flip 3 if you want, as it’s a perfectly competent machine that does what it tries to do. Who knows — maybe you’ll enjoy reading half-sized articles and fiddling with an intentionally dented screen more than I did.

I just want to go on the record now and state that I’ve never thought foldable displays were the future of smartphones and the Z Flip 3 didn’t do anything to change my mind. Sure, I might reconsider if someday some future foldable comes along without any noticeable crease but it would still have to prove more practically useful than traditional smartphones for me to fully buy in.

If that gets me on a tech version of Freezing Cold Takes somewhere down the line, then so be it. I’d welcome that.