samsung's unpacked 2021 event is happening right now we're gonna have it
linked in the video description so you guys can check out all the big announcements there's the new galaxy
watch four series galaxy buds two there's a new flip but for me
the big one is the galaxy z fold 3 5g
this is their third generation flagship foldable and if you're a long time
viewer you will know that i am absolutely jacked to get my hands on
this thing and an absolute first i actually get to look
at it early although i only have a couple of hours to get through it in as
much detail as possible before unpacked is gonna go live so without further ado
we are gonna rip this thing open and take this baby for as hard a test drive
as i possibly can obviously one of the
big highlights is the under screen
camera okay it's not turned on yet but i'll show you in a sec
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conspicuously absent from the unboxing experience is
an included charger that's right my friends just a cable and instructions
for how to use either the single sim or dual sim tray depending on what your
phone has so if we're going to criticize apple for it then we have to hold
samsung to the same standard though to samsung's credit they do have some
launch bundles with some pretty good value ads now i have a bit of a concern
i have not actually fired this up yet Jake prepped the device and i don't see
anything about this externally that would indicate that i actually got
a new fold this looks
oh no oh it's got a wider speaker grille here
okay i had a little i had a little panic
moment there i thought maybe they put a fold two uh default two in the box but
no you can see we've got a clearly different camera array and we ended up
with the black version now the hinge
that was one of the biggest improvements from the first gen to the second gen was
the hinge way more robust this time i'd
say it's got if anything actually even a slightly tighter springier feel to it it
feels even better but the big improvement is that the hinge is now
waterproof actually i lied samsung gave up and decided that it was impossible to
waterproof the hinge because of the moving parts and i can see what they
mean but because they wanted to give the galaxy z fold 3 a waterproof rating of
ipx8 they independently waterproofed the two
separate parts of the phone then they actually treated the internals of the
hinge with both an anti-corrosive and lubricating agent to ensure that even if
water does inevitably leak inside it it
will continue to operate so let's go ahead they rate it for
one and a half hours 30 meters down so theoretically everything should be fine
wow that is extremely dirty water i probably should
have washed out this container before i put it in there but
uh i mean should i go for gold should i fold it
okay
holy schnikeys world's first waterproof
foldable ladies and gentlemen okay with its biggest challenge out of the way
let's dry it off and talk about the under screen camera i want to get the
big questions answered first here andy i mean i didn't have to do the water demo
first but you know i like to live dangerously right
okay you too can get a great phone drying shirt at lttstore.com all right so when
you're watching classic shows you're either stuck with a hole punch in your
4x3 content or you've got a black bar and you're not making use of that giant
screen that you paid so much for i'm hoping that this will completely
eliminate that problem so let's go ahead and fire up some 4x3 content
there it is yup it goes right over top
interesting so samsung has taken a bit
of a different approach than i might have expected with their hole punch
camera like it doesn't have the full resolution
of the display in front of it not even close come take a look at this
so they've actually got a much much less dense matrix of pixels here can you see
that andy so you can actually clearly see through it which actually makes
sense because that's exactly how the transparent xiaomi tv also worked where
the pixel density was much lower it was only 1080p which by modern standards is
pretty small for a 55-inch display but that decrease in density allows it to be
more see-through and it was more transparent one direction than the other
which is probably exactly how this one's arranged
so it's more transparent from the back and then we see the lit pixels now
i can spot it obviously like i can see it from this distance away
but what it isn't is nearly as distracting as a hole in
the content off-axis i can really see it but when i look at it straight on like
if i'm just watching i'm not going to notice it especially
with sdr content like this where the resolution is pretty low
anyway that is a crazy big difference especially when you consider that the
screen's only a little bit bigger at 7.6 inches but that image because we're not
stuck with that stupid black bar it's way bigger whatever i'm jacked i'll
rewatch the whole ducktales series now of course underscreen cameras with good
transparency have existed for some time now the real question is how does that
camera that's hiding in there perform now back when the z-fold 2 came out i
questioned the inclusion of this camera at all because i was like well if you
want to take a selfie you can use this one and just use the screen on the front
and if you don't want to take a selfie then you should use the main camera but
there are lots of applications that do kind of require a camera on the screen
that you're using and one of samsung's big focuses with this device was use
cases like this so whether you're in a video conference and you've got all the
participants down here and then you've got whatever you're presenting up here
or whether you are i mean really a video conference would be one of the main
applications for that you are going to need a front-facing camera so let's go
ahead and flip it around see how it does and it's
not perfect in fact one of the weaknesses is immediately noticeable
hold on i'm going to record video so okay this is for sync so you guys can
see what i'm talking about is you can actually see
distortion so that purple that purple glow is there
that's real but this distortion from this light source is not something that
i would expect to see on a normal selfie camera and in fact we're going to use
the old samsung galaxy z full 2
to compare to it so you can see you can actually see the red green and blue
pixels distorting this bright light source as
it's coming in and you can see the marked difference in sharpness between
these two cameras of course nobody's buying a phone with an under screen
camera for you know the best in picture quality but it is something that you
guys should know okay now let's put it in a situation that's a little bit more
favorable like here where i don't have a
particularly bright light source behind me and i'm kind of sitting at my desk
using my phone as a as yeah okay
interesting
huh now that is cool samsung is clearly
doing some kind of post-processing to increase the sharpness here and you
could tell it couldn't do it when it had that strong backlight but now the
difference in sharpness between these two cameras
not that much when i'm not in motion
when i hold still you can see it kind of sharpens up
that's really cool huh don't you love technology i sure do
how much thinner is it
it is almost exactly the same
i wouldn't describe it as noticeable in day-to-day use but they managed to get
the external screen ever so slightly larger while also slightly reducing
the width of the phone as a whole man it's it's barely noticeable though
can you even tell the one at the back should be a touch
taller yeah it's like slightly taller not much
one of the other things samsung was really proud of was the grade of aluminum that they used on the device it
does feel really nice to the touch
but one of the demos they did was they whacked it against a regular piece of
aluminum and showed that only the regular raw aluminum was marked by that
interaction unfortunately they didn't compare it to any of the other hardened
aluminum alloys that we know of so i don't know you know how it compares to
allies because no one would use raw aluminum in a device like this
now let's talk about one of the other big upgrades both the fold 2 and fold 3
have 120 hertz high refresh rate displays on the inside but only the fold
three has a 120 hertz display on the outside so if like me you find yourself
using it in like well they call it candy bar mode in candy bar mode a fair bit
when you're just sort of quickly replying to a message or something like
that you're going to get that nice responsive experience regardless of
which display you want to use man this is something they've really improved
since the original fold a lot the experience of going from the outside
display to the inside one that's the more common use case where you'd have an
app open like here let's say the play store you just go like this boom
now we are in the the folded experience now normally apps will close when you
close it but you probably noticed on my fold too that plex continued playing
that video earlier that's because you can configure certain apps to stay
running when you fold the device it just assumes that in most cases you're
folding it up because you're ready to put it away and you want the display to turn off
there's lots of things that just look that just transition so much better like
here okay so here we go let's transition
boom look at that and samsung talked a lot about partnerships and how they're
optimizing apps for the full 3 experience so youtube for example has
apparently gotten an optimization where you can do
go like this hey there you go you can watch on here while you scroll comments
because you want to subject yourself to that for whatever reason down on the
bottom screen and let's see can we even reply
look at that we can type our little reply hello
now if i bought a device like this i really don't think that i would end up
watching content like that very often i'd be all about that big screen
experience but your mileage may vary
one thing your mileage may vary about is whether you like samsung's vivid display
profile come on guys look at mine and riley's
lips we look like we're wearing lipstick can you see that ridiculous let me get
that fine-tuned i realize we've gotten this far without really talking speeds
and feeds so in the u.s it's going to have a snapdragon 888 processor 12 gigs
of RAM and 256 or 512 gigs of
non-expandable storage it's gonna have wireless charging fast charging but not
like crazy super fast charging and then outside of the us it's gonna have an
exynos 2100 processor now according to some testing from gsm
arena they found that the exynos and snapdragon this generation are pretty
close in terms of performance but
the exynos variant does tend to thermal throttle faster and harder so that's
something that unfortunately i don't have enough hands-on time with it in
order to test right now but could be something to watch out for if you're
outside of the us other key specs it's got a 4400 milliamp
hour battery nano sim slot fingerprint sensor over here on the right just like
the full two and of course a whole whack
ton of cameras so on the back we have three 12 megapixel shooters a wide an
ultra wide and a telephoto then on the cover we have a 10 megapixel and on the
inside that is just a 4 megapixel built
into the display so it's really intended for video conferencing where it's going
to end up destroyed by compression anyway and not for you know taking the
most you know beautiful duck face selfies you
know what i should try i should try all the different cameras here oh you can
choose apps that will continue on your cover screen when you close your phone look at that it even prompts you to do
that thing i was telling you about well camera for one
uh definitely netflix and plaques choose
a color tone for your selfies natural yeah
and they have a little motion photo feature now kind of like the iphone that's cool i'm expecting this to be
much better
did i get it oh yeah i got it i look ridiculous oh yeah you can really tell
on that under display one check this out andy so there's under display
and there's not under display that's a lot sharper and that's the main
shooter now something they didn't talk about much in the briefing actually
really at all now that i think about it but that was a big difference from the
fold one to the full two with screen brightness it was really dim on the fold
one to the point that it was kind of difficult to use outside and that's something that i'd like to see if they
improved here oh wow that looks a lot better i'm
surprised they aren't talking about this
trey's interesting let me make sure that both displays are actually set the same
because right this one's probably still in vivid mode oh this is cool right
here's yet another large screen optimization that they've made even
something as simple as the settings menu now has the sub menu over on one side
see that so if you've got your oh i don't know let's say display settings if
i can find the bloody thing there we go here it would just show it to you on the
whole screen and then you'd have to go back here you can just click through all
these different menus and sub menus and then you can go ahead and play around
with them in here so let's go ahead and change screen mode to natural
there we go now they're actually looking very very similar
it looks a little brighter to my eye not a ton though i wouldn't think
yeah i can see why they wouldn't talk about it if it's that close another big
feature compatibility with the s pen now there
are two versions of the s pen there's the fold edition and then there's the s
pen pro and it looks like they've sent me the s pen pro although i didn't have
pictures of them in my pre-briefing material so i'm doing my best with it
but given that the s pen pro has an integrated battery and this has a type c
port on the back for charging i'm assuming that it's this one by the way
as soon as i change it over to natural the color grading on this video looks
fine just fine so thank you very much samsung for at least just making it one
click to go back to a proper screen mode okay only s pens designed oh
interesting only s pen is designed for your galaxy fold other s pens will
damage the screen set it to z fold mode before using it on
your fold okay so there's a little switch here boop
okay okay and so that immediately starts just
passively working this is another perfect example of i can definitely see
the camera if i look for it but if i'm not looking for it i don't notice it
hello wow responsiveness is extremely
high so extremely light strokes it does
struggle with a little bit but wow
wow my uh you can see why i never write anything
my penmanship not the best but
that is really responsive
now obviously people are going to want to
know will an old s pen work so i guess we're
going to find out oh it yells at you
it says no no you may not
okay what if i have this one close and then i touch it with this one
no i'm not liking uh i think there's a
writing to text thing here let me try this actually
testing okay yeah it works um writing to text is a feature that they talked about
a lot in the pre-briefing i don't see it as useful for myself personally i type
extremely quickly using the on-screen keyboard especially the excellent one that
samsung includes with a really well thought out split
but for people who you know let's say right in chinese or korean where it can
be a little bit more challenging to input text with a keyboard
it looks like a great feature it's just one that's not that applicable to me so
here's their split keyboard you can use swiftkey with a split keyboard there are
other third party keyboards but this was a case of a first party keyboard
actually not being abhorrent to me so i ended up keeping it with the z fold too
let's see i mean this is kind of an interesting use case
so you can kind of okay i'm trying to write
upside down it's going to be really confused type i may have managed to
but that's kind of neat does the faux three come with a string protector this
time okay that's a complicated question to answer so the full two came with a
screen protector that made the screen feel really plasticky and unpleasant and
i actually removed it and did not end up
being able to scratch it at all in my in my daily use of it
so i was but it is does still have a protective layer on it so it doesn't
feel quite like glass because it's more of a plastic it has to
fold you know the three
does appear to have a bit of a ridge right at the edges
but what i will say about it is that it feels
just as good to my finger as the raw fold too so
i wouldn't recommend removing it here's why i need it this
was another big partnership message for samsung so how they optimized the
spotify app for either their normal
interface so you go your search is over here your library is over here or
fold interface so now if you're looking at your library or search or whatever
else that's over here and then you've got now playing you've got your media
controls right accessible to your left thumb now
of course my biggest issue and the reason that i have not been able to
daily drive exclusively a full device up until now
is that the youtube app has not been fully featured on previous fold devices
so now is the moment of truth where i find out if i can switch to this thing
by opening up youtube of course consumption the consumption experience
is excellent but what about the creators there's literally thousands
of us okay create okay allow access come on can i
come back record and go live is that it
okay that is not a good sign
even on the older fold too when i click create
i am allowed to post a community post but when we contrast that with what
happens on my trusty note 9
i can upload a video create a short go live add to my story or create a post
i don't know i don't know how to communicate this more clearly samsung
google both of you you have to fix this especially with the rumored upcoming
foldable pixel device i can't have such a dramatically different experience from
one Android device to the next when i click the same bloody button in an app
three different behaviors for the same
app no no no no no no no no
bad and before 100 of you start bleeding at me that i need to you know do it in
candy bar mode or something like that let's try that all right
no work i mean the truth is that i record most
of my video clips on the iphone that i keep in my back pocket anyway
but like not being able to access basic
functionality like posting a community post from a device i don't understand
how google considers this acceptable i don't understand why they don't just hurry up and validate this device i
don't know why samsung considers it acceptable especially because they have to know
that a lot of the most influential reviewers out there guys like mkbhd or
mr who's the boss like if they have any hope whatsoever of convincing
influencers like that to use this device i mean me too right
it has to work for creators right
but there's other good stuff let's fire up some games shall we
now that is big screen mobile gaming
wow that is a whopping 2268
by 832. like what
oh my god that is that is something else
now i've never actually played cod mobile before so you'll have to forgive
me i don't even know how to run this is pathetic they've really nailed down the actual
fold in the display like obviously if i'm looking for it it's like the under
screen camera right like i can find it but when you are just immersed in
content like this you're not gonna notice that oh that's how you run okay cool
it's so big like it's like clicking on giant
blown up enemies man this thing makes even someone like me functional at this
game nice
okay are these bots or something because i'm pretty sure i'm not that good at
this oh man
that that is a different experience right
there yeah it's pretty good
one thing i was surprised to see was samsung encouraging users to dig into
the Labs features under advanced features here so this allows you to have
multi-window for all apps like say for example you wanted to
uh shop on one side and then read reviews on another side let me just open
up another another app here interesting okay i didn't get the
shopping thing working immediately but i found another thing where you can enable
apps that don't natively support it for this viewing experience
and check this out plex so you've got your controls down
here and your media playback there
and it just like worked uh so it was this flex mode flex mode panel thing so
you can just uh you know the phone app obviously
supports it by default but not everything does
this multi window for all apps thing i want to figure out how you
how you multi-window things well i was figuring out the side-by-side
view thing i found the feature to just run any app in a little window like this
on top of whatever else you're doing so i've got the youtube app running like that you just go into your multitasking
okay i guess it turns it into a bubble when you go into that that is super cool
so here's how we get rid of it and then we go oh yeah okay it's dead well that's fine
let's do it with this one so we just drag it here for pop-up view and then we
can resize it a little something like that and we can just have our like
browser right over here or wherever the heck else it is that we want it
that's pretty neat i will figure out this side-by-side thing
bloody hell it's the same as the old one so you swipe in from the side and then
you can actually have pre-configured side-by-sides like say for example you
wanted to watch a youtube video while you're browsing the web you could do that or you could just grab youtube and
go um hello what did i click oh shoot i
accidentally clicked that first one okay let's try that again so i've got my web
browser open
i don't know maybe here uh yeah you know what let's go up top
there we go so we can go ahead and watch an LTT video up there while we're
browsing ltteststore.com down here we've got mousepads in stock right now
guys we've got these cool new retro GPU shirts Linus plushies underwear and
stock look at all that good stuff we've got there
freaking fantastic you can easily resize things if you're more into that sort of
thing and i believe you just click here yep that's right you can switch them around
if you want to focus on your video for a little bit and
there we go and we can actually add
additional items as well so let's go ahead and chuck i don't know let's do
some messaging maybe on this side
now obviously our keyboard is going to kind of complicate the experience a bit
but hey at least the functionality is there even if 7.6 inches might be a little small
for three apps another shopping or comparison related
feature is the chrome browser natively supports opening in a side-by-side
window now which is pretty cool so let's just
there you go open a new window so you can you know read reviews of the product
or whatever while you're still looking at the entire catalog pretty pretty sick
that's a good question probably it will just keep doing what it's doing yeah
just like that yeah it's
pretty thoughtful man how gen z am i right now i can't
even stop watching my youtube video here for long enough to take some pictures
i don't even know what to take a picture of to be perfectly honest with you
i can tell immediately that it's over saturating the blues a little bit but
that kind of is what it is samsung wouldn't be the only mobile camera maker
to commit that particular sin i mean this isn't the kind of phone that
you buy for the best photography performance you'd go for something like
an s-series or a note or something like that if you really wanted that but it's
not like it won't be perfectly functional
now we're gonna turn things around and i'm gonna record the cameraman instead
of the cameraman recording me it's like a mexican standoff
overall it's doing a really good job of dynamically compensating for
me pointing at something brighter versus something not so bright
i mean it'll be perfectly perfectly acceptable in spite of the fact that you
got to remember in order to make this thing not ridiculously thick
right each half of the phone has to be thinner than a conventional phone even a
good phone like this is an iphone 12 pro
oh yeah it like ai detected i was taking a picture of a vehicle that's cute
and that puts us pretty much at conclusion time except i actually just noticed something else really cool you
can actually see it it does struggle a little bit two chrome
Windows you can see the frame rate drops a little bit when it does that animation
but that is such a minor issue and this thing is going to be in my pocket the
second samsung and google get together and make the creation experience as good
as everything else about this phone is and if you want one
it's going to be a little bit trickier because these puppies are going for
17.99 us dollars starting at and in canada around 22.50
so boy is it expensive but it's a phone experience that's unlike
anything else on the market quite frankly this
yeah it's just man it's awesome
so snappy so snappy and this video is
brought to you by a classic sponsor dbrand
um this is a little awkward though did dbrand send a skin nope they just ask
you to make one oh that's what this is for
okay um i will make my own dbrand skin i mean
they can do it it couldn't be that hard okay what do you think in terms of
color palette andy this is very LTT themed was that intentional did you put
this together for me i know i can count on you precision fit here they have the
precision fit like robots and some or some
i love how my show notes here say Linus shows an f'd up result at the end but
what dbrand didn't see coming is that i'm gonna make it awesome dbrand wishes
they could have this design i call it orange grey bumblebee
rainbow
they wish they could name things as well as me i mean what swarm
lame and all that talk on their website blah
blah blah we measured so many times four-year-old could do it now get out of
here and get a real job kid sticker salesman like who who sits there
in kindergarten and fills out the thing you know i wanted to be a hockey player
who goes yeah i want to i want to sell stickers on the internet if you want
this but maybe it fits a little bit better and your phone still folds go to
dbrand.com safety dash scissors at the link down
below they make skins for all kinds of stuff not just the z z-fold three once
they can get their hands on it and get it all precision measured and make a
skin for it you tape the screen that's fine i like the big screen anyway
who needs the thinner little one you know this is why i wear pants with big
pockets yeah
what's up andy now son
thanks for watching guys if you've enjoyed this video maybe check
out my full review of the fold two which was having spent weeks with it instead
of just a couple of hours