Samsung soars for the Flip

BitDepth#1316

SOME DEVICES just resonate with you on sight. Even in a promotional video, they create a sharp urge to own them.

Samsung’s new Galaxy Z series devices, the third iteration of their foldable line, are likely to create that impulse in the audiences they were built to target. But they are also going to be very different people.

The ZFold 3, a device that’s basically two Galaxy phones connected by a hinge, is likely to appeal to someone who really needs a phone that can morph into a tablet.

For the ZFlip 3, the demographic downshifts to a hipper, more fashion-conscious user who is smitten by the notion of taking a Samsung smartphone and folding it in half.

The same basic technology being deployed in both devices, a foldable AMOLED high dynamic range display and the third generation of Samsung’s hinge technology, improved to resist water penetration.

A day after the launch of the new devices last week, Samsung made a review sample of the ZFlip 3 available for evaluation.

Open, the screen flattens out neatly and you have to hold it at a distinctly odd and unusable angle to see anything like a fold in the screen surface. In normal use, the screen flex is invisible.

The ZFlip 3 is almost exactly the same size as an S21 Ultra and has dropped 2mm in thickness from the first ZFlip.

It’s actually a bit lighter than an S21, but the hinge puts a block of engineered metal in the middle of the device, giving it a different, centred weight distribution.

There aren’t many feature surprises for a current Samsung smartphone user. The cameras are Samsung’s standard wide and ultrawide lens array.

The real magic on the ZFlip kicks in when you start to fold it in half. On apps that have been optimised for its folding action, the software splits when you fold to 90 degrees.

An optimised game locates controls on the bottom half and fills the half-screen at the top with the game screen.

The YouTube app recognises the folding action and puts the video in the top half of the screen, which is cute, but not really as effective as turning the unfolded phone sideways to get a true full-screen experience.

Both the ZFlip and and ZFold offer the user two screens. On the ZFold, it’s a full smartphone screen.

The tiny quarter-height screen on the ZFlip has been improved to display more information, including a default time and date, and additional screens you can access with a swipe for summary of recent e-mails, a music controller, timer, voice recorder and alarms.

On price, the ZFlip tracks closely with list pricing on the S21 Ultra, but doesn’t pack the lens hardware of that phone.

The ZFold is a very different proposition for a potential buyer. The list price remains stratospheric at US$1,799.

For that price, you get the functionality of a top-of-the-line Android smartphone that unfolds to become a small tablet for roughly the price you’d pay for both as separate devices.

It all feels a lot like when Samsung dropped the first Note in a smartphone market that had only begun to scale devices up in size. That first Note was a big jump and defined a market niche for the company. The Z series marries something we know, hinged computing hardware, with something completely new, pocketable, minified smartphones that are inviting a market to form around this capability.

Samsung will introduce the ZFlip 3 and ZFold 3 to the TT market in September.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there