The Galaxy Flip 5: An Entry-Point for the Switch from a Slab-Style Smartphone to a Flip Phone (I): Cover Screen Improvement and Apps

If you’re considering jumping from a traditional slab-style phone to a flip phone, the Z Flip 5 is a great entry point. The cover screen was a really useful tool when I used my phone, and it wasn’t just a neat party trick. It is best suited for someone with a sense of adventure and curiosity about technology and willing to try a new method of doing things when they hit a roadblock. That kind of person will love the Z Flip 5.

The cover screen on theFlip5 is larger than before and can be closed if you’re not in use. Older versions used a tiny sliver of a display that showed notifications and a clock, but the new model has a 3.4-inch screen that can offer up a lot more information. To see notifications and respond to them, you have to use the virtual keyboard, or scroll through a bunch of full-size elements on the left side. There are a lot of ways to customize this screen to your tastes too.

Samsung provides a bunch of handy widgets you can enable, disable, and rearrange to your liking. They’re excellent and take great advantage of the available screen real estate; the weather widget shows you current conditions at a glance, and you can scroll down for the next week’s forecast. All the information can be found on a calendar event. It’s all as the good lord intended — and a much better experience than on the Motorola Razr Plus.

Some apps don’t work quite as well on the Flip 5’s cover screen as they do on the Razr Plus’ slightly bigger display. I had trouble using some apps since the cover screen keyboard doesnt give you a persistent text input box, and if you write anything, you can get covered up by otherUI elements. But on either phone, there’s a very experimental vibe to using a full app, so proceed at your own risk.

For reasons mentioned above, Samsung makes it very difficult to run just any old app on the cover screen. You can enable a handful of preselected apps through the Labs menu, but for anything outside of messaging apps, Google Maps, or YouTube, you need to download Good Lock (and an additional module called MultiStar) from the Galaxy App Store. Adding more apps to the cover screen is possible.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 Review: The Flip Phone We’ve Been Waiting For For Almost All These Years, and Is It Worth It?

You don’t want to scroll through your feed on a small screen, but it is perfect for quick-hit tasks like checking transit arrival times or interpreting a Spanish word. It is not easy to arrange a mobile Starbucks order, but it can be done.

The AOD seems to have an effect on battery performance. The Z Flip 5 has a small 3,700mAh battery, so that’s a legitimate concern. With the AOD enabled, I was able to manage a full day of heavy use with 4.5 hours of screen time, but only with a small percentage left in the tank.

On a more typical day with three hours of screen-on time, I had 40 percent left by the end of the night. It is good enough for a lot of people to get through a full day, but heavy users want to work in the afternoons to avoid phone jail.

Source: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 review: the flip phone we’ve been waiting for

New features of the Flip 5 from S23 to G4: water resistance, flex mode panel, and a year of software updates for Flip and Fold

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 For Galaxy chipset is just as snappy here as in the S23 series. It seems to run a little warmer in the Flip 5, maybe because there’s less space for cooling mechanisms, but it never got too toasty in my pocket. The Z flip 5 has more storage than the previous model, the flip 4 which had 128gigabytes of storage. There’s 25W wired charging (BYO charging brick, of course) and 15W wireless charging with 4.5W reverse wireless charging to top off your earbuds. I have to open the phone and set it juuust so on my stand-style Belkin Qi charger, but it works.

The side rails are made from polished aluminum and feel sturdy. The phone has an IPX8 rating and the design of the hinges can protect it better, but the company says that it is not as strong as last year. That means it’s resistant to full immersion in water, which is no small feat on a phone with moving parts, but there’s no guarantee against dust intrusion. Samsung’s apparently working on that, but in the meantime, it’s a bad idea to take the Flip 5 to the beach.

The Flip 5’s new cover screen provides a bigger canvas for lock screen customization, and Samsung provides a lot of personalization options. It’s a lot like customizing a smartwatch face — you pick a basic wallpaper style, select your favorite fonts and colors, and save it. From the cover screen itself, you can long press to view and switch between your customized lock screens. As a lock screen enjoyer, I’ve wasted plenty of time trying to get the background color framing a photo of my kid just right. You’ve got me.

New to the Flip and Fold this year is an updated flex mode panel — that’s the set of controls that you can enable when you use the phone in an L-shaped laptop mode. It isn’t needed in an app that’s already been designed for folding phones, but it is useful in a browser window when you only have a few days left to view a physical therapy video.

It is easily the best flip phone option out there at the moment. You get a better camera, robust water resistance, and an extra year of software updates for the same price, as well as cover screen Widgets, when you buy the same device from the same company. That’s really no contest. The Oppo Find N2 Flip is another option outside of the US, but its cover screen is smaller and less useful, and its durability is uncertain since it lacks any kind of IP rating.

The folding phones don’t come with the latest camera hardware. The flip 5 comes with the same high quality camera and resolution as last year. There’s a 10-megapixel selfie camera on the inside screen, but one of the nice things about the flip form factor is that it’s easy to use the better rear-facing cameras for selfies, so it’s kind of just there for video calls.

The Z Flip 5 has photos that are run-of-the-mill. The main camera does just fine in good lighting and turned in a few shots I really dig — give it ample indirect lighting and some vibrant colors, and you’ll be impressed. Portrait mode is good if you don’t want to be class-leading.

Video clips are fine overall. I think my low-light video clips look alright, even though I think that Samsung is using artificial intelligence to improve video quality. But above all, it’s fun shooting photos and video with a flip phone. It’s possible to put the phone down on a table for a tripod and hands-free video, if you fold it into an L shape. You can hold it up camcorder style or move the image preview to the bottom half of the screen like an old-school twin-lens reflex camera and shoot from the hip.

I can get the most natural reactions in photos and videos of my toddler when my phone isn’t right in front of my face using any of those methods. I think I’m a little bit more engaged in the moment. In any case, I’m hoping Samsung upgrades the cameras on the Z Flip 6 so we can get the best of both worlds: good hardware and all that flip phone fun.

Identifying the Gap Between Screens of New Wi-Fi Devices and Where to Shop for the Best Foldables: What are the Best Contracts?

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It is impossible for us to read and analyze all of the agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

The two new phones from the South Korean giant do not have a visible gap between the halves of the screen. This problem has been fixed by the competition, and it was a problem for the first few years of folding screens. Which company does foldables the best?