Beauty or battery life?
Less is more with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 5G ($999.99), a powerful flagship phone that trades battery life for portability and style. Now in its third generation, Samsung’s flexible-screen phone is now mature enough for mainstream buyers. The biggest question is whether you’re willing to pay a steep price for a phone that subtly discourages you from using it. The Editors’ Choice–winning Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra ($1,199.99) remains the best Android flagship if you want a phone you can use intensively all day, but the Fold3 is worth considering if you want to enjoy the world around you and spend less time staring at the screen. Making the Pivot The Galaxy Z Fold3 and the Galaxy Z Flip3 make up the third generation of Samsung’s folding phones. (There was no Flip2; it was called the Flip 5G.) The redesign is more radical with the Flip than the Fold. The major change is a much larger exterior display, taking up the bottom half of the closed phone. At 1.9 inches and 512 by 260 pixels, it’s big enough to deliver notifications, let you control your music playback, and show alarms and timers. Like a smart watch, this display provides just enough functionality and information to discourage you from fully opening your phone unless you really need to. You can style the front-display clock 11 different ways. This is the first Flip that costs what it should cost, at $999.99. That’s the same price as Samsung’s slab-style Galaxy S21+, but where the S21+ is something of an awkward middle child (more expensive and harder to handle than the $799.99 Galaxy S21, but without the Galaxy S21 Ultra’s camera or S Pen support), the Galaxy Z Flip3 occupies its own specific niche. And if the external display saves you the $249.99 cost of a Galaxy Watch4, it becomes a real bargain—though of course a phone in your pocket can’t provide a smart watch’s health and fitness functions. The more I handled the Galaxy Z Flip3, the less I thought of it as a flip phone. There’s too much resistance in the hinge and you need to thumb it open. So much of the visceral concept of «flip phone» is about the one-handed experience of flipping it open and closed. This is really an origami phone, something that folds up small and then blooms larger. Held to your head, it doesn’t feel like an old-style flip phone, but you can still make it cradle your face. Samsung markets the Galaxy Z Flip3, in part, as a sexy fashion phone for influencers. I am not a fashion influencer, but I can appreciate the phone’s sleek, unique look. When it’s closed, the two cream-and-black panes of my model remind me of Naoto Fukasawa’s black-and-white Infobar phone from 2003, a piece of electronics design I still adore. More than any glass slab can, the body here really feels like a meticulously designed object. But I’m more interested in how this phone fits into pockets that others stick out of, especially back pockets, and how it makes you look at your phone less. Open it up and you’ll find a 22:9,2,640-by-1,080 6.7-inch 60Hz screen with plenty of real estate, though a touch less than on a slab-style 6.7-inch phone because it’s so tall and narrow. Closed, the phone measures 2.83 by 3.38 by 0.67 inches (HWD). That’s just barely at the edge of comfortable one-handed width, for me—I’d rather it were 2.7 inches wide—but it still works as a one-handed device and fits easily into any pocket. It opens up to a lanky 6.53 inches long and weighs 6.45 ounces, which isn’t feather-light but isn’t bad at all. The front display is much bigger than on the previous Flip model. You can still see the crease in the screen, but I don’t find it bothersome. It all but disappears if you’re looking at the phone straight on and the display background is anything other than solid white. The front-facing camera peeks through a hole punch at the top. The physical fingerprint sensor shares the power button on the side.
