A new generation of Samsung foldable phones is available now and the Galaxy Z Flip4 is as nice as it can be.
After years of evolution, the current crop brings changes that are small at first but serve to consolidate this class of devices in everyone’s consciousness.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 measures 165 mm x 71 mm and it’s only 6.9 mm thick when open. It folds to 84.9 mm by 71 mm and it will then be 17.1 mm thick. It fits nicely in your hands both when open or closed and it’s not that heavy, at 187 grams.
The build and materials used (glass and metal) feel extremely luxurious and it is nice to be able to see notifications or control some features when using the small external touchscreen display, without having to open the phone.
The external display is 1.9-inch touch screen with 512 by 260 pixels resolution. As I said, great secondary display that helps you open the phone less than before.
The main OLED-based screen measures 6.7 inches and has a 2640 by 1080-pixel resolution. It supports an adaptive refresh rate that can go up to 120 Hz so you have smooth scrolling when needed but will scale back and save power when not in use. And you have enough power to play up to 8K videos (7680 x 4320 pixels) at 60 frames per second (FPS).
Opening the phone is not a one hand exercise but it its easy and quite satisfying, thanks to its hinge design. Yes, there’s a makes a crease smack across the middle of the screen but you actually won’t notice it when reading or watching content.
The fold design leads to some good use cases too – open it halfway (L shaped) and you can easily prop the phone on a table for a video call or selfie. And it’s more, some apps will automatically detect when open like this and use the top half of the screen for content and the bottom half will house controls to interact with that content.
In terms of speed the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 is fast enough – meaning it is probably not a great phone for your gaming needs but it’s responsive and thanks to judicious use of speed, also quite good at managing longer battery life. This is thanks to a new octa-core processor with support for multiple speeds on different cores and its 8 GB RAM – which you can expand by another 8 GB (taken from the main storage area) if you use the RAM Plus feature to keep more programs open in the background.
The phone is small for today's standards so it has only one SIM card slot, but it also supports the eSIM standard, in effect giving you the means to juggle between two accounts if needed, which is great if you are thinking of having a single phone for work and private use, or for use while roaming overseas.
With support for Voice over LTE and WiFi Calling you can pretty much say goodbye to bad-quality voice calls. And with WiFi 6 on board, you know you can get very fast wireless data when connected to a compatible router. If you only have an older router/access point you still get to use all previous flavours of WiFi in both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.
In terms of security, you have it covered with a fingerprint reader built into the power button so it can easily turn on and unlock your phone in a single motion – or use face recognition for security.
The camera is where you will feel the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 is a mid-tier phone, with a its main camera having two 12 megapixel with F1.8 and F2.2 stops. This gives you a digital zoom of up to 10 times. It can record 4K videos (3840 x 2160) at 60 FPS but it is not a super camera phone.
The phone charges via the USB-C standard as most these days, but you won’t find a headphone jack here.
You can use Microsoft’s Phone Link app on a Windows-based computer to control some features (notifications, photos, messages and interaction with mobile apps on your computer) using the built-in Link to Windows feature, but there’s no support for Samsung Dex on this handset.
