The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip ($1,380) is the first folding-screen smartphone that incontrovertibly works. It's still a bit clunky, a big square that says "niche luxury item" rather than "everyone's next smartphone." But that's OK. After all, expensive, uniquely designed clothing exists, and people pay for and enjoy it. Here at PCMag, we review flashy desktop PCs where you're definitely paying extra for the clear case and blue coolant fluid, but they rate highly.
So given that the Galaxy Z Flip works, and it does, I'm happy to give it a salute while at the same time not recommending it for most people. We've now seen three generations of folding phones, and they're improving fast. The Galaxy Fold had some serious initial build issues. The Motorola Razr doesn't actually work very well as a smartphone. Yes, the Z Flip has a scratchable screen and costs $1,380, but at least it does everything you want it to. So if you love the design and can foot the bill, take it to Fashion Week. Everyone else can look forward to the Galaxy S20.
Flipping for a Form Factor
The Galaxy Z Flip is a solid, almost exactly square glass-over-plastic sandwich when closed. It measures 3.44 by 2.90 by 0.68 inches and weighs 6.46 ounces; solid, but not the neutron star density of the Motorola Razr (7.2 ounces). Also unlike the Razr, which is sharp and pointy at various angles, the Z Flip is smooth all over; even if you try to pinch your finger in the hinge as you open the phone, it simply slides your finger softly away. The exterior material attracts fingerprints easily; I say wipe it down and then immediately put on the included two-piece plastic case (or a third-party case of your choice).
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On the side, there are volume controls and a combination power button/fingerprint sensor that's exactly like the one on the Galaxy S10e. There's no headphone jack.
Flip the Z open, and the first thing you notice is that you can flip it exactly as much as you want to. The Z can become an L, or a V, or a chaise lounge—it finally falls flat after about a 145-degree angle. There's a trade-off with the hinge not being spring-loaded like the Razr's—you can't just whip it out and flip it open—but the profit is in a new L-shaped mode that's great for sitting the phone on top of things and taking photos.
The 6.7-inch, 2,636-by-1,080 OLED screen definitely has a crease in the middle—and yes, the crease became more noticeable during the long weekend I was using it. With the screen lit up, you can only see the crease at an angle; you certainly feel it when your thumb rolls over it. That said, I don't see it as a horror. I only worried about it when people on Twitter asked me. It doesn't impact picture quality or my enjoyment of videos.
Motorola Razr vs. Samsung Galaxy Z Flip: Which Is the Finest Foldable Phone?
On the outside, there's a tiny 1-inch, 300-by-112 color display. By default, it shows the time, date, battery level, and a colored dot if there are notifications. Swipe left, and you see notification icons, but not their content, so they're kind of useless. When someone calls you, their name scrolls by. The front display also works as a small camera viewfinder: Double-tap the power button and you can take a selfie with the main 12-megapixel camera as opposed to the 10-megapixel front-facer.
The symmetrical body, with its stiff hinge, means the Z Flip is much harder to whip out of your pocket and snap open than the Motorola Razr is, or old flip phones were. For one thing, when pulling it out of my pocket, I often found I had it upside down; it's very square, and the tactile difference between the front and back edges is pretty subtle. I use my phone just to check the time a lot by just pulling it out my pocket and checking the screen, and fumbling with the Z Flip upside down isn't ideal.
The hinge means it doesn't want to flip open with a flick of your wrist. Oh, you can do it, but it's likely to just open half or a third of the way. Rather, the Z Flip wants you to hold it in one hand and open it with your other hand, like a makeup compact.
Top to bottom: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, Motorola Razr (2020)
Foldable=Breakable?
The Galaxy Z Flip's screen is covered in "ultra-thin glass" with a thin plastic film over it. You can't add another screen protector. As XDA's Max Winebach points out, the screen is not particularly durable or scratch-resistant. If you poke it, it will bleed.
That's where the Z Flip being a flip phone comes in. When the phone is knocking around your pocket, the screen isn't exposed. Instead, what's knocking around is its Gorilla Glass-over-aluminum exterior, hopefully also protected by the free clear plastic case that comes in the box. Samsung also sells a leather case for $79.99, and other cases are coming from big brands like Otterbox.
Over the weekend, that plastic case got subtle scratches from keys and coins, the way cases do. Nothing got into the phone. Five four-foot drops to carpet caused no damage. (Hilariously, the phone actually bounces pretty high.) I don't do drop tests to concrete on phones that aren't rated for it, because they almost always scuff or crack the glass, and I think the outside of this phone would crack with a drop to concrete as well.
A viral Tweet shows a Galaxy Z Flip with a crack in the screen caused by cold weather; I could not duplicate that problem. I froze the Flip for half an hour at zero degrees Fahrenheit before flipping it open, vigorously, 10 times. Later, I flipped the phone open and closed 1,000 times without issue. It also spent most of a weekend in jacket pockets.
The phone didn't develop any cracks, no gunk got under the screen, and it didn't start making any weird noises (unlike the Razr, which easily developed an unsettling creak). While the screen has a slight gap at the hinge when the phone is in the middle of folding, that gap is less noticeable than on the Razr.
Samsung claims to have special brushes in the hinge to keep dust out. I'd take that with a grain of...well, dust. iFixit did its usual torture tests and found that if you shake the Flip in a bag of fine dust, the dust will get into the hinge. Once more, I didn't find that in normal use in coat and pants pockets, but if the Z Flip lands buried in a sandbox, that might damage the screen. A screen replacement costs $119, according to Samsung via SamMobile.
In other words, the phone appears to be decently durable if you aren't trying to break it. And keep in mind it isn't a rugged or ruggedized phone. It's a fashion item, and should be treated as such.
Performance on Par
Performance-wise, the Galaxy Z Flip feels and acts like a Samsung Galaxy S10. That's fine—the Galaxy S10 is a good phone. The Z Flip actually has a slightly faster processor than the S10 does. It's a Snapdragon 855+, with one of its cores hitting 2.96GHz as opposed to 2.8GHz on the older phones. That pushes PCMark Work scores a little north of 10,000, but short of the 12,000 or so we expect from Snapdragon 865-based devices like the Galaxy S20. The phone has 8GB of RAM and 227GB of available storage (out of 256GB). There is no memory card slot, unlike on the S10/S20 series.
The Galaxy Z Flip is a 4G phone that's currently being sold by AT&T and Sprint, as well as an unlocked model that works on all four US carriers. I tested the Sprint model, which is a good buy right now. With the Sprint/T-Mobile merger inevitable at this point, Sprint users will probably soon get access to T-Mobile's network as well as their own, and the Z Flip supports both.
Top to bottom: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, Motorola E815 (2005) (Yes, I reviewed that)
While the Z Flip's spec sheet suggests dual-SIM capability, the Sprint model I used had a single nano-SIM and no eSIM option in settings.
I was happy to see that 4G signal strength holds up to the S10's high standard. I tested the Flip on Sprint's network against a OnePlus 7 Pro 5G locked to 4G mode. The Z Flip got 3-4dB better signal in many situations than the OnePlus, with the two phones' speeds in the Ookla Speedtest app coming out about on par. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company.) On a Manhattan street corner, the Z Flip reported connecting to three 20MHz channels of band 41 LTE spectrum and getting impressive speeds around 100Mbps.
Audio quality is passable, if secondary. The bottom-ported speaker isn't awesome; it distorts a little at top volume. Closing the flip cuts off a speakerphone call, which isn't ideal. The lack of a headphone jack means relying on Bluetooth or the included AKG-branded USB-C earbuds, which sounded as good as bundled earphones usually do.
Battery life on the 3,300mAh battery is also satisfactory. I had about 30 percent left after a full day's use, and the phone delivered about 10 hours in our Wi-Fi video streaming rundown test before entering an ultra-low-power mode for another hour. The phone's flip nature means it doesn't have to light up the whole screen when you check to see if you have any messages, which helps with the battery. It also supports wireless charging and comes with a 15-watt USB charger, on which I got 77 percent of a charge in an hour.
Simple Software
The Z Flip has less customized software than the Galaxy Fold or Razr, and that's mostly good news. The phone runs Samsung's OneUI 2.1 on Android 10. Previous folding or dual-screen phones have tried to lean too much into a customized software experience. That's generally made for an inconsistent UI (across apps that have the special juice, and apps that don't) and delayed updates (the Moto Razr runs Android 9). So keeping things low-key makes for a compatibility advantage here.
At the phone's launch, Samsung showed off a special UI mode for L-shaped use. The idea is that when you half-fold the phone, some elements should slide up above the hinge and give you a sort of dual-screen, Nintendo DS-type approach. Right now that's primarily in the camera, where the controls drop below the hinge and the viewfinder pops above when the phone is half-folded. In Samsung's messaging app and the dialer, the keypad fits just into the bottom half of the phone, but that doesn't change depending on how much you fold the phone. Samsung says it's putting an SDK out there, but the history of single-device SDKs for any manufacturer other than Apple isn't promising.
Samsung's OneUI is not stock Google Android, and it has a lot of guff. There's bloatware in the dialer, albeit shunted to a weird Places tab you probably won't notice. My Sprint model also came laden with mostly deletable bloatware, including Candy Crush Saga and an annoying paid VPN app.
You can activate Samsung's Bixby assistant with a long press of the power button. You like AR Emoji or AR Doodle? They're now joined by an AR Ray-Ban try-on app and AR Wayfair home decor. Microsoft apps are here, too, including the "link to Windows" option to see notifications on your Windows 10 PC (Samsung's DeX, on the other hand, is not supported). You can clear out a lot of this and use Google's apps, or any others you want, of course.
Sit Down and Take a Photo
The most innovative thing about using the Z Flip as a camera is stability. You can sit the phone in L-shaped or V-shaped mode, vertically or horizontally on a table, to shoot photos and videos without actually having to hold it. That improves night photos somewhat, but it's most useful with video. You can set up the camera, use the tiny front-facing screen to position yourself, and take a nice, stable video with the main camera, or sit the phone in L shape on a table and use the front-facing camera for long video chats.
Left to right: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, Google Pixel 4
The Z Flip has dual 12-megapixel cameras on the outside and a 10-megapixel front-facing camera inside. These are pretty much on par with the Galaxy S10's cameras. The Z Flip's rear cameras are f/1.8 and f/2.2, while the Galaxy S10 has an f/1.5 aperture, but it doesn't make a noticeable difference. The Galaxy S10's camera is good, but not quite as good as the Google Pixel 4's. The same holds here; outdoor shots were a little noisier than shots taken with a Pixel 4.
I was a little annoyed at how often the Z Flip dropped below 1/60-second on indoor shots, even with some natural light, making for photos less than perfectly sharp, but it's no worse than the Galaxy S10.
The Z Flip's form is ideal for video chatting. You can sit the phone on a table half-open and angle the front-facing camera toward you. There's a funny little bit of foreshortening in the image, but it's more natural than propping up any other phone I've used.
Single Take mode is Samsung's new hybrid photo-video mode. The idea here is that you take ten seconds of video around a scene you like, and the phone automatically crops out a bunch of photos, short videos, and a GIF-friendly "boomerang" video for you. If you use Google Photos, the stills appear in your library grouped together as a burst, and the short videos appear separately.
Single Take mode did the best it could to make my failed juggling entertaining
The Single Take photos crop tight to people when they can, show zoomed-in and zoomed-out options using the phone's two lenses, and apply filters. The mode is unafraid to apply digital zoom—remember, there's no optical zoom here—and as a result you get some shots that look a little fuzzy at pixel-by-pixel levels. The video effect, in general, is pretty manic—swooping and swerving around a scene at accelerated speed with some instrumental music over it.
Comparisons and Conclusions
Folding phones are a trend now, and they're improving fast. The Galaxy Fold cost $1,980 when it came out. The Galaxy Z Flip costs $1,380—a 30 percent drop in less than a year. The Fold had all sorts of manufacturing problems; the Flip seems to have mostly worked them out. The Z Flip is a brick in the road, not a dead end.
Unlike with the 3D phone fad of 2011 to 2012, folding phones fulfill a role consumers actually want: more screen in less space. Nobody's lost a bet by making screens bigger, as long as they don't make phones unwieldy or insanely expensive (and those considerations haven't really stopped phone makers, either). Folding phones square the circle: bigger screens, smaller devices. People want that.
The Galaxy Z Flip has about the same performance as the $749 Galaxy S10, and unless you're utterly taken by the ability to prop it on a table to shoot video, I don't feel like the Z Flip's form factor innovation doubles its value. I'd also caution anyone against buying a 4G, $1,380 phone on a 30- or 36-month payment plan right now. 5G isn't all that at the moment, but it will be in two years, and you don't want to still be paying your 4G phone off then.
If you're a fancy fashionista who wants folks to flip out when you fondle your phone, by all means get a Z Flip and try to find a jeweled case it—it's a cool gadget for people with money to burn. But it's not a phone for the rest of us.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip is the first folding phone to really work, but it's still a costly and potentially fragile fashion object rather than a mainstream hit.
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