There’s a new folding phone in town. Another folding phone. The thing we’re not entirely sure people want yet. No matter! Samsung has just released its second smartphone with a flexible display. This one is called the Galaxy Z Flip, and it will have a base price of $1,380 when preorders start February 14.
On Tuesday, after waiting in a designated press room for an hour or so at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco, I got my hands on the thing.
A folding phone is, of course, a phone with a flexible display. The display itself bends and creases, so that the device can morph into something smaller. But when it’s open, it’s one long display. This may seem obvious, but for people of a certain age, a folding phone or flip phone was one that had a small screen up top and a keypad on its bottom half, connected by a hinge. You snapped it shut. I was there too. I share your memories.
Samsung’s first folding phone, last year’s Galaxy Fold, had a disastrous start, with devices that broke after a few days. Even Galaxy Folds that worked fine—like the loaner unit I used for about a month—forced a change in behavior that just didn’t feel natural. Text messaging on a 7.3-inch touchscreen display was awkward. So was using the Fold’s 4.6-inch “cover” display.
Also: Why? Why folding phones?
Samsung is asking for a do-over with the Galaxy Z Flip. The phone is smaller, and it folds from the top down, rather than sideways. When it’s unfurled, the phone has a vertically long display that measures 6.7 inches on the diagonal. (Bizarrely, this also gives it a 21.9 by 9 aspect ratio.)
When it’s closed, the Galaxy Z Flip is infinitely more pocketable than a standard phone. It fit in my back pocket better than my iPhone 11. A friend who was monitoring the Samsung event sent me a photo of a makeup compact, and after that I couldn’t unsee the similarities. The closed Galaxy Z Flip looks like a big, shiny, glass-coated, worth-a-month’s-rent makeup compact.
Rather than jam some kind of half-useful cover display on the closed Flip like it did with the Fold, Samsung opted for a tiny display on the closed Flip. This mostly shows the time, but when you press the physical buttons on the side of the phone, it doubles as the world’s smallest viewscreen. This is so you can see yourself as you capture selfies, obviously.
The phone’s case is aluminum, and the outside is coated in glass. It screams premium. But here’s the interesting part: The Z Flip’s flexible display is also made of glass, Samsung says. Every version of a folding device we’ve seen before this has had a flexible polymer display. Royole’s FlexPai, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold, Motorola’s resurrected Razr (which, based on my brief experience with a loaner unit, had a hard-to-ignore crater where it creases)—all of them use flexible plastic. Some glass makers like Corning and Japan’s ACG are believed to be working on ultrathin folding glass displays, but Samsung has brought one to market first.
It’s not clear what the properties are of this “Ultrathin Glass” that Samsung is touting, or what partners Samsung might have worked with to create it. It doesn’t feel vastly different from the polymer display on last year’s Fold, and tapping on it with your fingernails produces a vaguely thud-ish sound rather than the sharp tik-tik you’d hear on glass. But the upside of glass is that it’s supposed to be more scratch-resistant than plastic, and hopefully, less prone to deep creases over time.
The Z Flip’s flexibility is, in a lot of ways, the newest and most interesting thing about the phone. The phone is running on last year’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+. It has a front-facing 10-megapixel camera sensor, two different 12-megapixel cameras on the back (wide-angle and ultra-wide, but no telephoto), and it captures 4K ultra-HD video at up to 60 frames per second. These are last year’s camera specs, the same kind of cameras found on the Galaxy S10 smartphones from 2019. These are still, by all measures, excellent smartphone cameras. They’re just not the newest.
The Galaxy Z Flip is running Google’s Android 10 operating system, but that’s one aspect of the phone I didn’t get much of a chance to test in the brief time I used it. As with all folding or dual-screen gadgets, the software experience is one of the most critical elements of it. Will people actually want to split that 6.7-inch display in half, showing a photo on the top half and swiping through another element of the photos app on the bottom half? Maybe. Is that worth $1,380? We’ll see.
You might wince at that price tag, and I wouldn’t blame you. It’s expected now that premium smartphones will now cost more than $1,000, and to shell out even more than that for a still-unproven form factor seems unwise. But, to counter that: Samsung’s last folding phone cost $1,980; the Flip is notably less expensive. Also, since we’ve already acknowledged that we’re living in the era of the $1,000 smartphone: There are non-folding phones that creep up into the $1,400 range. So if you happen to want a pricey phone that has a new kind of flexible glass and, for whatever reason, you happen to love an ultra-tall aspect ratio, Samsung has delivered on that.
That’s all assuming the Galaxy Z Flip holds up to wear and tear—which I wasn’t able to determine in the 30 minutes I spent with the new phone. And after using it for a bit, I still can’t explain the whys of folding phones. But it feels like we’re getting a little bit closer to an answer.