Gear

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 3 still isn’t the phone for you

Folding phones are not selling. Despite the arrival of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3, it’s still not the right time to get one

Samsung wants you to want a foldable phone. It has done since 2019 when it announced the original Samsung Galaxy Fold. The new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 are its third generation of foldable phones. If you’re after a phone of this style, these are almost certainly the models you should buy in 2021. 

Samsung has this market sewn up in the West. Huawei was once a contender. Now it is not. The real question, however, is whether Samsung has done enough this time to convert people in sufficient numbers to make foldable appear remotely mainstream. According to IDC, just 1.9 million foldable phones shipped in 2020. Four million are expected in 2021. For some context, Samsung shipped over 266 million phones in 2020. And shipments do not equal sales. So how do these new bendy phones move the foldable hardware conversation on?

Those looking for dramatic changes in the flagship Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 will not find many. The core design is familiar. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 is a sliced open pitta bread of glass and aluminium. A 6.2-inch screen sits on the outside for day-to-day jobs. Open up the hinge and you find the soft filling, a 7.6-inch 120Hz OLED screen with a resolution of 2260 x 1768 pixels. Corseted phone screen on the outside, small tablet on the inside.

Samsung made the Galaxy Z Fold 3 a tougher sounding foldable this time. It has IPX8 water resistance. A folding phone designed to withstand a dunking sounds unlikely, but it's real. The outer glass panels are Gorilla Glass Victus, the strongest used in smartphones at present. 

However, this is a form of window dressing. There’s no revolutionary new inner screen construction in the Galaxy Z Fold 3. It still has a non-removable plastic screen protector that covers a layer of extremely fragile ultra-thin glass. This is the years-long migraine of folding phones. They effectively change what constitutes misuse from dropping a phone to looking at it with too hard a stare. This isn’t Samsung’s fault. Adjectives that apply to resilient stuff, like hard, thick, rigid, are just incompatible with a flexible substrate. 

Also note that while the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 has a water-resistance rating, there’s no dust-proofing. You’ll have to treat this phone well if you want it to survive. Don’t take it anywhere near a beach. It’ll ruin your holiday. 

From a technical standpoint, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 seems like more of the same. There’s still a visible crease at the centre of the screen, likely to become more prominent after months of use. But there are other notable changes. 

This is the first foldable to support one of Samsung’s pressure sensitive S-Pens. There’s a new “Fold Edition” of the stylus. It’s slightly smaller and lighter, and we’d like to think it may have a slightly softer nib to avoid the heart-stopping moment of working a groove into the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3’s screen protector when doodling on the train. 

Still, this makes the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 comfortably the best phone for on-the-go digital artwork. It was one of the most requested missing features of previous Folds. Samsung has added it in, and it’s another important justification for the larger inner screen. 

The Galaxy Z Fold 3 still has the air of a tech toy for rich enthusiasts, though. The Galaxy Z Fold 3 starts at £1,599 for the 256GB version, increasing to £1,699 for 512GB storage. This is the price the Galaxy Z Fold 2 sold at just before the Fold 3’s announcement. No real change. Of course, ultra-high cost remains the big barrier, and that is what the Galaxy Z Flip 3 is here to tackle. 

This phone approaches the foldable problem in a different way. It’s a clamshell, opening up to form a 6.7-inch OLED screen. If a foldable phone has a chance of getting into the hands of “normal” buyers this year, it’s the Galaxy Z Flip 3. Like its predecessor, folded up it has the cuteness factor other flexi phones lack, and it borrows some of the bolder approach to style seen in the Galaxy S21 series. 

It comes in four colours, each with a highly recognisable two-tone charm. The darker top half isn’t there just to look pretty, either. It hides a 1.9-inch OLED screen, only visible when lit. This can show the time and basic notification alerts, but upon pressing the power button twice the camera wakes up. The screen shows the preview image and a tap of one of the volume buttons captures a picture. It seems made for social media. 

There are two rear cameras on the Galaxy Z Flip 3, a 12MP primary and a 12MP ultra-wide, and you can toggle between them by swiping on the 1.9-inch screen. A swipe in the other direction switches between stills and video. 

As long as it doesn’t incessantly go off in your pocket, this seems a well thought-out feature that should appeal to the kind of buyer who might be attracted to a cute little pocket phone like the Galaxy Z Flip 3. 

Unlike the Galaxy Z Fold 3, this model may not seem as outrageously expensive to phone buyers. It starts at £949. This is still high. But it makes it the one foldable phone you can buy at a cost similar to normal high-end phones. 

The hinge feels good, it’s just as powerful as any current top-end Android thanks to its Snapdragon 888 processor. It is not too hard to imagine someone browsing for an upgrade at the end of their contract and casually choosing the Galaxy Z Flip 3, which just isn’t true of the other ultra-expensive foldable phones. 

But what does this prove? There’s an appeal to neat, interesting-looking phones? That’s not so interesting. If foldables have a long-term future in anything like their current form there needs to be a more meaningful, functional purpose for the bendy display than just “halving” a normal phone screen so the case can look like a makeup compact. 

The real test for Samsung’s foldable strategy requires a phone that does not yet exist. Let’s call it the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 FE, borrowing the naming convention Samsung uses for its slightly more affordable high-end flat phones. 

It’s a foldable device much like the Galaxy Z Fold 3. There’s a screen on the outside. There’s a display on the inside that opens up to a canvas-like tablet. But it costs around £1,000 for the entry-level model, not £1,599. At that point we can discover whether phone buyers would choose a foldable phone over a flat one, trading the greater resilience of Gorilla Glass and a thin frame for a tablet-on-the-go form. 

We may have all signed up to the collective insanity of spending £1,000 on a phone, but £1,600 is still a step too far for most. If this is the inflection point, why hasn’t Samsung managed to bring down the cost of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, or a phone like it, when it has achieved a hefty drop in the Galaxy Z Flip 3? This may come down to yield. 

Then there’s the yield problem. Yield tells you the number of usable display panels manufactured compared to the number that have to be rejected at some point in the production process. According to a DSCC report in mid-2020 Samsung Display’s flexible OLED yields were at just 38 per cent.

“Until now, yield rate of foldable displays and corresponding components has been an issue,” says Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research. "Though the yield rates for a foldable panel, cover glass, and putting together the complex hinge mechanism have been improving as Samsung enters the third generation of its foldable phones.” Improving they may be, but still they'll need to get a lot better than 38 per cent. The prices of these new phones suggest Samsung Display may have been able to significantly improve the yield figures of the Galaxy Z Flip 3’s 6.7-inch screen. But the Galaxy Z Fold 3’s 7.6-inch panel? Not so much. 

There is one reason for Samsung to continue to make phones that, to the outside at least, it seems few people buy. There’s a race going on here, to dominate the flexible OLED display market. It is a race Samsung does not want to lose, because Samsung Display is already market leader by a huge margin as manufacturer of OLED panels in general. LG Display’s ubiquity in OLED TV displays led to OLED panel revenues of $6.87 billion in 2020 according to a report by UBI Research. The same report put Samsung Display’s OLED panel revenues at $22.3 billion, despite a big year-on-year drop thanks to 2020’s smartphone downturn. 

It is perhaps not LG Display that Samsung is most concerned about, though, but Chinese BOE. The company has already reportedly secured a contract for Apple’s iPhone 13 series. And it almost produced them for the iPhone 12 phone, but lost the contract after its own yield figures reached just a dismal 20 per cent — and that’s for “flat” OLED panels. 

For some context, Samsung Display currently makes the OLED panels found in the iPhone 12 Pro lines and the iPhone 12 mini, while LG Display supplies the screens for the base iPhone 12. The Galaxy Z Flip and Z Fold lines aren’t just tech flexes for Samsung to show off how ambitious its mobile tech is. They are vehicles for the refinement of Samsung Display’s manufacturing processes, so the corporation can continue to “own” OLED in the mobile tech space. 

Google is reportedly going to release a flexible phone. Rumours of an Apple foldable in a couple of years pop up every now and then. There are doubtless uses for flexible OLED displays outside of phones. Samsung doesn’t want a part of that action, it wants all of it. 

“Yield rate and capacity won't reach the Galaxy S21 series level any time soon, but starting the second half of next year it should improve even further with more investments and scale. This along with competition from other suppliers should further reduce display panel costs,” says Shah. 

This is why Samsung wants you to want a Galaxy Z Fold 3 or Galaxy Z Flip 3 in 2021, but doesn’t need you to. The long game is more important. That said, if you’re desperate for a folding phone, it should probably be one of these two. They’re expensive and a little thick, but are likely the best around right now. And, hey, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 is kinda cute, too. 

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK