Korean Tech company Samsung has been one of the leading smartphone brands and one of the top android phones year after year.
Samsung’s first foldable design debuted in 2019 with the Galaxy Fold and further developed this design and technology with the Galaxy Z Fold, and Galaxy Z Flip 3.
This technology shook up the mobile world, breaking free of the standard design of a solid glass slab like most smartphones and felt like a modern take on the classic flip phones of the early 2000s.
The latest model the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 offers a plethora of improvements and upgrades on the folding design but is it worth flipping open your wallet?
It comes in five matte colours, Purple, Graphite, Pink, Gold, and Blue but there is also the option to choose custom colours with the Bespoke edition, allowing you to pick the colours for an additional cost.
When fully unfolded the Flip 4 looks like a pretty standard phone measuring 71.9 x 165.2 x 6.9mm with a small dual camera set up on the back. When folded up the Flip 4 becomes a compact 71.9 x 84.9 x 17.1mm which easily fits in most pockets and feels great to hold.
Weighing 187g it feels solid especially when folder but it never felt heavy or cumbersome like the S22 Ultra or iPhone Pro.
The Flip 4 features greatly enhanced durability, it’s equipped with a shiny, yet tough Armor Aluminium on the frame and hinge.
The hinge also feels a lot tougher and reinforced this time around but it also feels a lot tighter and harder to open and close quickly, this allows you to use it in a half-folded mode which is great for taking photos and especially selfies.
As for the rest of the phone, it uses Corning Gorilla Glass Victus + on the front and back of the device, one of the toughest glass materials available making it damage and scratch-resistant, it also comes with a pre-applied screen protector too.
Along with the folding design of the phone protecting the screen, the Flip 4 feels like one of the tougher phones on the market.
Water resistance is rated at IPX8 which means it can withstand around 3-meter submersion in water for 30 mins, making it safe from accidental drops, being caught in a monsoon or just good old sweat at the gym.
There was something undeniably cool that appealed to the geek in me, taking out this compact little brick and unfolding it "Star Trek" Tricorder style which made me smile every time.
Foldable screens have come a long way since their initial appearance with their quality and visible folds in the centre becoming less noticeable.
The Galaxy Z Flip 4 features the best screen I’ve seen in a foldable display, creating a nearly seamless experience. The screen is a 6.7-Inch Super AMOLED display with HDR10+ support, offering incredibly bright and vibrant colours as well as strong contrast making films and games look spectacular.
The Flip's screen possesses a resolution of 1080 x 2640 pixels and 426 PPI, which is more than enough to make your pictures, films and gaming look sharp and crisp.
It has an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz which means when you are gaming the faster framerate will kick in offering a much smoother experience, but when you do not need them or your screen is static they can drop down to as little as 1Hz to save battery life.
The 1.9-inch screen on the front is a handy little addition as is practically the same as last year's Flip 3, it's pretty sharp given its size and I had no trouble checking my calendar, seeing notifications, checking the time, you can also use it to play music, see upcoming alarms and you can even add other widgets too.
The best use for the screen I found was using it to take selfies with the camera shut, which was fun but not essential.
This was another feature I thought would be superfluous, but I found it was a great way to keep on track of my notifications without opening up the phone and getting sucked in or distracted.
While the crease in the centre is less noticeable, it does become more noticeable when the screen is dark or off. It's your personal preference whether it will bother you, I thought it would annoy me but it didn't.
It does feel odd when you run your finger along it, especially for something like gaming which was a little off-putting and made me want to use a controller.
Specifications
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 - 4nm
1 x 3.19 GHz Cortex-X2
3 x 2.75 GHz Cortex-A710
4x1.80 GHz Cortex-A510
Screen: 6.7 inches FHD+ 1080 x 2640 pixels (426 PPI density)
Cover Screen 1.9 inches (512 x 260)
RAM: 8GB RAM
Storage: 128/256/512GB UFS 3.1 storage
The Processor on the Flip 4 is one of the most powerful and impressive available using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. It is a beast of a processor that can tear through apps, and gaming and always offers an incredibly swift experience.
With the 8+ Gen 1 and it's built-in Adreno 730 GPU gaming was fantastic. COD Mobile was fast and responsive while on the highest setting, Minecraft ran like an utter dream and even the most graphically demanding mobile game Genshin Impact, ran in its highest settings with very few stutters or frame drops at all.
If that's not enough Samsung phones include a dedicated gaming mode that offers a slight boost to performance, disables annoying notifications as well as Bixby and turns off auto brightness to maximise performance and minimise distractions.
There are three storage options with the Flip 4 128GB, 256GB or 512BG with no internal expandible memory.
RAM on the Flip 4 is fixed to only 8GB, which is fine for day-to-day use and able to keep multiple apps running and your most frequent ones loading up quickly. However, the most demanding tasks like rendering 4k video or editing multiple photos.
The battery is fairly unremarkable, its 3700mAh cell gave me around 6 hours of use sometimes a little more but it would generally struggle to give me a full day's use.
It does support 25W fast charging which isn't the fastest out there by a long shot but is faster than the flips 3's 15W and got me to a 50% charge in 30 mins.
The camera isn't up to the quality of that on the Galaxy series but it does a decent job with a 12-Megapixel, as well as a really nice 12-Megapixel Wide-angle for your landscapes, and group shots, it also features a surprisingly decent 10-Megapixel selfie.
Although it does benefit from some image stabilisation I found the results in low light weren't great. Pictures were pretty detailed and sharp but not too good for cropping due to that lower pixel count, and colours with just a little brighter and poppier than normal.
For video, the Flip 4 can record 4K and HD resolutions at 60 and 30fps with more advanced modes like Pro Video that allows you to take better control of filming.
The Flip 4 uses Samsungs OneUI 4.1 which I’ve always preferred compared to some more simplistic UIs. It comes with lots of handy and some not-so-handy Samsung apps included. It's built on Android 12 as 13 hasn’t yet rolled out to it yet, but it's apparently due before the end of the year.
I found apps like Device Care, Smart Switch and Health useful but in general I avoided the app store.
I was pretty disappointed to discover it didn’t include my favourite Samsung app, DeX, this allows you to connect your phone to a screen and it’ll run very much like a standard PC desktop, which is great for organising files, or even doing a few helpful tasks while at work.
Being a state-of-the-art Samsung means it’s by no means cheap, starting at £999, £1059 for the 256gGB version and £1199 for the 512GB version.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 Verdict: 4/5
II large part of whether you should the Flip 4 hinges on if you like its folding design. At first glance, I wasn’t sure I’d like the design and thought It might be a gimmick, but after using it as a flip phone user back in the early 2000s and a Game Boy Advance SP and Nintendo DS fan I always loved the clamshell design.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 does a lot very well but is let down by a weak battery performance and an average camera. I wouldn't say it's a necessary upgrade from the Flip 3 but it is the strongest and most refined Flip Samsung has put out and can go toe-to-toe with all but their highest-end phones.
The Flip is an interesting almost retro feeling that you'll just love or hate but I can't deny was actually very practical and easy to carry, it made me completely rethink my stance on foldable phones.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 is available from the Samsung website and is included in various offers from Vodafone one of the largest mobile networks in the UK.
