It’s time for a new round of foldable Samsung devices. Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 are official. Both devices will go on sale on August 26, and prices are unchanged from last year: $1,799 for the Fold 4 and $999 for the Flip 4.
The Z Fold 4 — the one that opens like a tablet — gets a few millimeters wider this year and has an external 6.2-inch, 120Hz, 2316×904 OLED display. The Z Fold 3’s external display has a slim 25:9 aspect ratio, but the Fold 4’s aspect ratio is 23.1:9, approaching the normal 19:9 aspect ratio. The internal display is also wider – it is a 7.6-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2176×1812 and a frequency of 120Hz. The thickness of the device has not changed much – when opened, the phone has a thickness of 6.3 mm, and when folded – 15.8 mm thanks to the hinge gap.
Other specs include Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, 12GB RAM, 256GB storage, and a 4400mAh battery with 25W charging. Samsung gives the dust and water resistance rating “IPX8”, which means no dust protection, but the device can be submerged in fresh water for 30 minutes. There’s a side-mounted fingerprint scanner on the power button, and the phone supports Wi-Fi 6E.
Samsung’s foldable display technology has yet to prove it’s ready for prime time. You will regularly find reports that phones won’t even last a year due to cracked displays or delaminated layers. The internal display is still plastic and the inner layer is flexible glass, but Samsung says the “optimized layer structure”will make it more durable.
The internal display has a quirky internal camera that places the selfie camera behind the display pixels. These cameras will always be a compromise; Shooting images with more pixels is not the best for image quality, but fewer pixels make the display camera more visible. Samsung says it has gone for a denser pixel arrangement on top of the 4MP camera this year. There are three rear cameras: a 50MP main sensor from the Galaxy S22, a 12MP ultra-wide-angle lens, and a 10MP telephoto lens with 3x zoom.
This is one of the first Android 12L tablet devices to have a new taskbar at the bottom. Samsung offers the industry’s best Android update package with four years of major Android updates and five years of security patches.
Z Flip 4 now with extended battery life
Samsung also announced the Flip 4, a foldable phone in the usual smartphone format, but it folds in half like flip phones. The phone is similar to last year’s model with a 6.7-inch, 120Hz, 2640×1080 internal screen; external display 1.9 inches, 60 Hz, 260 × 512 pixels; and a thickness of 6.9 mm when open and 17.1 mm when closed.
The battery of the Z Flip 4 is significantly increased to 3700 mAh, compared to the 3300 mAh that the Flip 3 had. The main problem with these foldable phones is battery life. In a design world where manufacturers don’t even want to make room for a tiny headphone jack, the hinge mechanism is a large mechanical structure that needs to run down the center of a phone. Normally you would have one large battery taking up most of the space in the device, but in a foldable device you have to split the battery in half to get around the hinge and that reduces capacity significantly. If you fold the phone, it will become twice as thick in your pocket, so manufacturers are trying to reduce the thickness of the device. The result is a tiny battery. 3700 mAh is still not up to standard,
Paying $1,000 for a Flip 4 doesn’t really get you top-notch specs, since most of that money goes into a fancy screen. You get a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ SoC, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. There are two rear cameras, main and wide-angle, both with 12 MP sensors. The front camera has a resolution of 10 megapixels. Like the Z Fold, the phone still supports 25W charging, an IPX8 rating, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, and Wi-Fi 6E compatibility.