Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 hands-on By Engadget

It's hard to imagine that in just a matter of years, foldable devices have gone from the stuff of science fiction to actual usable daily drivers, and here we are today at Samsung's demo event following full COVID-19 safety protocols checking out the third generation of the company's foldable at its unpacked event. Today, the company just unveiled its full slate of products from footballs to wearables and launched the z403 and the z flip 3. Of the bendy pair. The fold 3 is the larger more premium one, and it has been around longer than any foldable device has on the market. Since launching the fold, Samsung has worked to improve the durability and the software of its foldable devices, which continue to be the biggest challenges for foldable in general. The LIFO 3 doesn't just offer more software and hardware improvements, though it's also the first of its kind to offer s-pen support for the interior pliable screen, so you can ride on it without breaking the display.

In addition to style of support, the z-fold 3 brings things like water resistance. A new under display camera on the interior screen, as well as an overall 80, stronger, build according to Samsung best of all, it starts at a cheaper price than before at 17.99. First, given that we had very limited time to cover all four devices that were at the demo event, we focused on what is new and different here. So this is the new s pen, that's designed for the full. You can see fold addition at the top there.

Now the difference here between this and other s. Pens in the past is a slightly rounder nib, so that it's not so sharp as to kind of tear at the screen. It's also got a retractable nib so that, if you push too much pressure on it, you can see it just goes in. You can also get the s-pen pro edition that works with the z43 as well, and it'll have on-board Bluetooth and stuff like that, for the air command gestures that we saw debuted earlier. One thing worth noting quickly by the way the s pen supports only for the inside screen and not for the cover display on the outside.

So trying to draw on this or check off a list won't work. The one thing I am blind about is that there is no onboard slot or holder for the stylus. As you get on note, phones, part of making the zfo3 more durable was not only in improving their hinge, the metal frame and the hinge, but also making sure that the gorilla glasses covering the outside is also a new material. That's 50 stronger than before this way, when you accidentally drop your very expensive phone, hopefully it'll come off without a scratch. The other thing that Samsung did with making the display stronger is that the screen protector now uses a flexible pet material.

That's stronger than CPU in the past Samsung also said it redid. The display stack here, so there are different layers on the display that are just reconfigured to be stronger than before. So when you're, not scribbling or drawing on the screen, you're probably doing something else like taking a video call on duo or something in this setup, you'll be using the under display camera over here. It's a 4 megapixel sensor, so a little less sharp than all the other sensors on this device, and it's supposed to be under display, so you're not supposed to be able to see uh the lens there, but in certain apps like maps, for example, it does feel like a fully immersive display. It's completely blended, but if you pay special attention to where it was before, you'll see that there's a little of pix elation going on making it very clear.

Actually that that's where the camera is one other thing Samsung has done is to optimize the interface to just make it feel a bit better for multitasking. For example, the edge panels that have been around before can now be pinned to the side of the screen sort of like a task bar in a desktop OS like chrome or windows. There's also some software here to just make apps work better in this big screen. One of the biggest complaints about apps on this sort of aspect ratio is that they don't always make use of all the space. So in the Samsung labs settings you can automatically customize app aspect ratios.

If you want, you can pick the app's default or, for example, if you're, using something like Instagram or in this case photos you can choose the default aspect ratio when you're launching those apps in the bigger screen. So this is an example of what flex mode looks like on the z-fold 3, which is basically splitting the screen in half, so that you have a usable space on the left instead of just kind of expanding this to full screen. But then, when you've expanded it and opened it completely, you notice how that quickly takes over and expands to take over the entire screen flex mode, full screen mode, so that swiftness and switching between flex mode and full screen mode that you saw just now is partly also to do with the processor in this. In the US at least, we know that this will be running with a snapdragon 888 processors elsewhere in the world. It might use some other chipsets not clear yet because Samsung's wording seems to be just a five nanometer based CPU for the phone there's a triple 12 megapixel camera system on the rear that allows you to switch between ultra-wide, regular and telephoto front.

There is a 10 megapixel selfie that is triggered by my palm facing up just like other Samsung phones, and it's better and sharper than the 4 megapixel one on the inside of the screen. So what you are looking at here is a 7.6 inch, dynamic, AMOLED display on the inside with a 22.5 by 18 aspect ratio. It's got a 120 hertz adaptive refresh rate, which means scrolling through your Twitter and Instagram feeds will look smoother, hopefully, on the outside, we've got a 6.2-inch, HD plus dynamic AMOLED uh screen. It's also got a 128 hertz adaptive refresh rate, so you can keep scrolling through your twitter on the outside and have the same sort of smooth animation. Samsung also says this is thinner and lighter than previous generations, and it definitely feels easier to maneuver with one hand unfold.

It is 6.4 millimeters thin, and it weighs 271 grams, which is about 0.6 pounds. Of course, there are some things that we couldn't test here at the hands-on event, including battery life, not about to run it for more than three hours straight. Also, water resistance. There weren't any demo set up for us to dunk the phone in water. So these are things we will need to test out in the real world to know for sure at three generations and Samsung has clearly learned a lot and the z-fold 3 at least based on this early preview, certainly feels very refined, but does that mean Samsung has perfected its foldable formula and is the z fold 3 ready for the mainstream, we'll really need to get a review unit on the real world for testing before we can really get a sense for that.

So stay tuned for that, as well as more coverage from engadget. com. You.

Source : Engadget