For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 5G as my primary Android phone. What makes it stand out, of course, is the fold—it normally goes into your pocket as a device with a 6.2-inch screen but can also be opened to unveil a 7.6-inch display, which means you can use the Fold more like a tablet. In short, this tries to be both a phone and a tablet, and even to some extent, a PC. I’ve found it to be a very interesting device.
This year’s Galaxy Z Fold3 isn’t the first foldable phone—as the name implies, it’s Samsung’s third generation. Samsung offers a smaller foldable phone, the Flip3. But this year’s Fold and Flip just seem more polished than previous versions, more “ready for prime time.” They still won’t be mainstream phones, but can now appeal to more people who will judge them for what they do, not just because they are flashy.
Looking at the Fold3, when closed it measures 2.65 by 6.22 by 0.62 inches and weighs just over 9.5 ounces. As such, it’s notably thicker and heavier than a standard phone. Though I still found it fit in my pants pockets, it’s a bit bulky. The 6.2-inch exterior display shows 2,268 by 832 pixels, a bit narrower than your typical flagship phone, and while that gives it a narrow look, I found it quite easy to navigate.
When you open it up, you get a phone that measures 5.04 by 6.22 by 0.25 inches with a display that measures 7.6-inches, with 2,208 by 1,768 pixels. Both front and back displays are AMOLEDs, with 120Hz refresh rates, so they looked great. You can still faintly see—and feel—the crease in the center of the display, but I found I got used to that quickly.
Open, the Fold3 is a bit smaller than an iPad mini, but still a decent size. For applications where I normally prefer a tablet to a phone, including news apps, or for watching videos, it’s simply a much better experience than a traditional phone. Where I would normally take a tablet on a train commute, I took the Fold and was quite happy. It was much easier than carrying another device.
That’s the goal of the Fold3. To make this work, Samsung and Google have worked on software that knows when you’ve moved from the front screen to the full screen and shuffles your open app from one to the other. This seemed to work quite well.
You can also set up the screen to show multiple applications—something I’ve never found all that useful on a phone display, but that makes much more sense on the larger screen.
Samsung’s One UI 3.1.1 lets you have up to three apps on-screen simultaneously, though in practice I usually limited it to two applications, such as email and a web browser. It’s easy to set up and you can resize your windows, sort of like on a traditional PC.
Applications will automatically rotate to match the way you’re holding the device, in either portrait or landscape mode, where portrait is the mode you open with the fold held vertically, and landscape being with the fold rotated 90 degrees.
While any Android app should work on the ZFold 3, and I didn’t notice any issues, officially Samsung says only about half of the top 100 applications are optimized for the tablet. With a “Labs” feature turned on, things like rotation worked for everything I tied it with.
Several applications work better on the larger display. For instance, you can see both the list of messages and the text in Outlook or Gmail. You could also see a spreadsheet when you’re creating a chart, see two Word docs side by side, or take notes while on a video call.
For video, you can set it up in landscape mode so that the bottom of the fold is sitting on a table, and the top is facing you, which I worked well for things like videoconferencing. Because you can change the angle, you can film yourself from the right angle; and Zoom Meetings worked well when using the full screen—you could see four full faces (including your own), even if it was theoretically working under the “Labs” feature.
This takes advantage of one of the other major new features of the Fold3—on the big screen the camera is actually under the display, instead of being in a cutout. That means you don’t get the distracting hole when you aren’t using the camera, but still get the function. I found the under-screen camera to work pretty well. It’s a 4-megapixel camera, and Samsung says that while the screen above the camera only has one-quarter the number of pixels as the surrounding screen (so that the camera can function), it uses AI to touch up the image. While I could make out the difference in some applications, it didn’t bother me, and I appreciated not having a notch or a hole. Viewers on the other side of video calls thought it worked quite well.
When typing on the full screen, you get several options for entering text, including the default split keyboard which separates the left and right sides of the keyboard with a big space in between, making it easier for your thumbs to reach all of the keys. There’s also a more traditional option.
Following in the steps of the Galaxy Note family, the Fold3 supports a pen, although only on the inner screen. Samsung makes two pens that work with the device—a full-size S Pen Pro and a smaller S Pen Fold edition, a $49 option that includes a retractable tip, so you can use it without damaging the screen. I used the smaller S Pen, which worked similarly to the way a pen works with the Note or the Galaxy S21 Ultra or with a Galaxy Tab, though without any dedicated buttons. Because you can’t use the pen on the cover screen, you must open the device first, which I found made it a bit less convenient for quick notes. Once you’re using it, it seemed to work well for things like sketching. You do notice the crease in the screen while using the pen, but it didn’t get in the way most of the time. I didn’t use the Pen much; if I wanted to, I would have wanted a special case that carries the pen as well as the phone.
In short, the promise of using the device as both a phone and a tablet really worked.
As I said, to some extent, you can also use it as a PC, using a dongle to connect it to a larger monitor and optionally a keyboard and mouse with the DeX feature that all recent Samsung phones have had. As before, I found this to work surprisingly well. You can more easily work with multiple windows, and apps such as the Microsoft Office suite are very useful if still not as full-featured as their traditional desktop counterparts. You don’t get Excel macros, for instance, but my guess is that anyone who uses those features probably will want a full-sized machine in any case.
As with all current flagships, the ZFold 3 has 5G support. The version I tried worked on Verizon, and I got download speeds varying from 40 to 67 Mbps and upload speeds between 16 and 45 Mbps on 5G, while on LTE, which is still more common, I saw download speeds varying from 30 to 268 Mbs and upload speeds between 12 and 55 Mbps. As with all 5G devices, you’re not getting much of a speed boost today; here’s to hoping for more coverage and more applications of 5G in the future.
The rear of the device includes three 12-megapixel cameras, including a standard camera, an ultrawide, and one with 2x optical zoom (to which the options on the screen let you bring in up to a 10x zoom). It has the basic camera features I’d expect from a Galaxy this year, such as the useful “Single Take” feature, I found it did a very good job capturing images, including in some low-light situations, though not up to the camera in the Galaxy S21 Ultra, which has a 10X optical zoom. Still, it allows for some nice things such as a “director’s view” in video that lets you preview the pictures from all three rear cameras.
The model I used had a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, with a Kryo 680 CPU cluster (one ARM Cortex-X1, three A78s, and four A55s) and Adreno 660 graphics, and a theoretical speed of 2.84 GHz, with 12MB of memory and 25GGB of storage. I found battery life to be quite good.
With a list price of $1,799 for the 256 GB model I tested, the Galaxy Z Fold3 may be the most expensive relatively mainstream phone on the market, so it’s clearly a niche product. But if you’re looking for something that doubles as a phone and a tablet, that has a distinctive look, and that has some truly impressive productivity advances, the Z Fold3 certainly stands out.
