If you want to buy a folding phone in North America,
your options are limited, but luckily, Samsung keeps putting out new foldables.
And today we are looking at the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5.
Just say Flip 5, it's really fine. Otherwise, all you get in the box is a phone, no cable.
No cable? Oh, oh, maybe?
Silly me. There is a cable. No brick, we have a three foot long cable
that's not super high quality. I guess it feels fine, but not my favorite.
We have our sim popper and our start guide,
but we don't want any of this. We really just want the phone because that's where things get interesting.
Some people don't get the Flip phone lifestyle. If you've watched one of Riley's videos covering
the Oppo Find-in-2 Flip or the other Flip phone that he did, both times,
he didn't get why people would want a smaller phone because it makes the phone twice as thick.
But I am a passionate believer in the form factor
because I just think this looks and feels so good in the hand and the pocket.
Sure, it's a little bit more bricky, but it also leaves so much more space for other things.
Or if you carry a purse or have small pockets,
it actually fits, which is great. But with that, I haven't actually been very impressed
with Samsung's offerings before. I'd use the Samsung Galaxy Flip 4
and I find the battery life wasn't great and that tiny outer screen really didn't do it for me.
But maybe this is the phone to make me go back to Team Samsung.
I actually used the Oppo Find-in-2 Flip for quite a while because I had the taller screen
and this one here, it'll be hard to tell until we turn it on, has a massive cover screen.
But first, let's take a look around the outside of the phone. So on the right side, we have our power button
fingerprint scanner combo and volume rocker. On the top, we have nothing but a mic hole.
On the left, we have our SIM tray here,
which is just a single nano SIM. And on the bottom, we have our mic holes,
USB-C charging and speaker grill.
Looking at design, it's very similar to the Flip 4 other than the cover display,
which as you can see on the Flip 4 is pretty darn small. You can see small notifications,
change your song, whatever. But on the Flip 5, we now have a massive 3.4-inch display.
It's not quite the entire cover, like the Motorola Razr that just came out
that actually goes around the cameras themselves, but you're not really getting any use of that screen there.
So I can understand why Samsung kind of just made a notch as we see when we turn it on.
Other than that, it's pretty hard to tell, but the glass looks a little bit more frosty on the 4
compared to the shiny glass of the Flip 5.
And the hinge looks a little different because this one now folds completely flat
versus a tiny opening on the Flip 5 here.
And I have to say, I didn't notice the gap on the Flip 4 that much, but having it completely sealed off
means that there's less chance of dust getting in there and scratching the inner screen.
So it is great to see. And I gotta say, aesthetically, I mean, it just looks really, really sharp.
Going back to the inside of the phone, it is a 6.7-inch AMOLED display,
and it is up to 120 Hertz, and it's an adaptive sync as well. So it'll vary depending on what you're doing,
which is great, and it is IPX8 water-resistant.
So no dust resistance at all. Things might get in the hinge, but hey, at least if this dunks in the pool,
you don't have to worry about it. Now, we usually start on the inside of the phone, but the Flip 4's big difference is this cover screen.
I have to say, it looks great. Like with it being an AMOLED screen,
you can't really tell where the screen ends and begins.
The screen in the front is 748 by 720, and it's only 60 Hertz, which is a little bit slower
than, again, something like the Razer, and it's something we're gonna be calling out quite a bit,
because that's the only other Flip you can really buy in North America. But on the cover screen,
I guess you don't really need anything too crazy. As for what you can do, it has a bunch of widgets.
So you see we have a calendar, our weather, alarms, and steps, which is great.
And if we go all the way over to the left, we get our notifications. One thing I would have liked to see is a bit more.
Like, widgets are great, but I wanna be able to use any app that I want
without having to worry about whether Samsung's made this custom thing on the cover screen,
but I guess it is what it is. And on the inside of the phone, we have our full HD plus display,
so it's gonna be, you know, 1080p, just expanded for this aspect ratio.
And honestly, I think it's fine. Again, a lot of people look for those high-end ones,
or even like the Sony phones that are 4K, and those are a bit overkill.
For a phone of this size, you'd really like to be pixel peeping to, you know, notice that difference,
but for me, I don't really care, and I'd rather have the battery life. As for bloatware and everything like that,
it is a Samsung phone. For better and worse,
the downside is that you're gonna have doubles of a lot of apps. You're gonna have everything that comes standard
with Google, as well as all the things that come standard with Samsung.
As for specs, all models come with eight gigs of RAM, and they can either get 256 or 512 gigabytes of storage.
This is not expandable, so be aware, you might wanna go for the larger one if you're ever worried about it,
but to me, I think 256 is gonna be plenty for most people.
And it's running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.4, mobile platforms for Galaxy or something like that.
It's a special OC version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that reportedly gets up to 5% better performance.
I mean, why not take it? Other than that, it's got Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3,
5G, sub-millimeter wave, all that kind of stuff, and it's running Android 13.
I don't know how many years of updates they're promising. I couldn't actually find anything online,
but somebody be aware of, I know sometimes Android updates can take a while to get to Samsung,
so if again, you're somebody who really, really cares about that, maybe wait till they make a statement on it
or do some more research online. Now let's get right into Labs testing results.
Usually when a new generation phone comes out, it blows the old one out of the water.
You know, it's the best phone we've made yet, but we did find some interesting results
when it comes to performance, gaming, and Apple launches. In the 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme benchmark,
the Flip 5 does outperform the Flip 4 by a decent margin,
but when we get to Apple launch testing, the results are mixed. For Chrome, the 5 outperforms the 4,
but for Instagram, Discord, and Slack,
the 4 outperforms the 5, and I'm not sure what would cause that.
It could be optimization, but the form factor is very, very similar
and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 obviously outperforms the Gen 1, so any guess I make would be purely speculatory.
Oddly enough, again, when we get to gaming, the Flip 4 outperforms the Flip 5
in both Dolphin Emulator and Call of Duty Mobile, though the Flip 5 does perform better at unhappy raccoon.
And when we get to battery testing, the results are equally as confusing.
The Flip 5 hands down, slams the Flip 4
with 18 and a half hours of battery life compared to 8.75 hours,
but then when we get to the stress test, the Flip 5 gets 3.7 hours compared to the 4.75 hours of the Flip 4.
Though the results are so mixed and the 4 outperforms the 5, you know, in a lot of these circumstances,
I wouldn't say it was a huge blow-in on most of the results, and the phone we have is obviously pre-release,
so there could be updates or anything that changes that, but at the moment, the 4 seems to outperform the 5
and everything, but battery life. Now, let's listen to some Crab Rave.
["Crab Rave"]
Like all Samsung displays, this looks great. The colors are very punchy
and the OLED blacks look amazing, and you don't notice the 1080p resolution at all.
As for sound and quality, it's pretty good. It doesn't have that punchy bass,
as it just doesn't really have the space to create that, but the balance is very good
between the left earpiece speaker and the right main speaker, or vice versa,
depending on how you're holding it, and I think it sounds really good. Let's compare it to the 4
just to make sure it doesn't sound majorly different, but I'm assuming it can sound pretty similar.
["Crab Rave"]
Ah, yeah, they sound like the same. So if you're upgrading from a 4, don't expect any difference there.
On the back, we have our 12 megapixel main shooter with OIS and our 12 megapixel ultra-wide.
Unfortunately, no OIS on that one, so you're gonna have to be a little bit more steady with that.
And on the front, we have our 10 megapixel selfie shooter.
No under-display camera like the Fold has. It is just a regular camera in the whole punch fashion.
We're gonna throw some photos I took up earlier on the screen here so you can take a look.
And what do you think? I think it looks pretty good. Obviously, it's not the flagship for Samsung,
but, I mean, nowadays it's hard to get a bad camera unless you're going for a very budget phone.
This is a 4K 60 video on the Flip 5.
What do you think? From the preview, it looks A-OK,
maybe a little bit overexposed, but we'll see.
Can you hear the train? Can you hear the little bit of wind?
How about jiggle? I'm jiggling the phone quite a bit, and look at that, it is buttery smooth.
You can't tell, I'm walking like a little Goobus. And this is the selfie video.
What do you think? Does it sound good? You can see my friends back there.
Look at that little guy. Wow. Oh, good boy. It's exposing well.
I think this is gonna be a winner. Oh, I'm knocking stuff over, might be.
I'll take a picture for that as well. Overall, I actually think this is a pretty darn decent
upgrade over the four. Performance issues aside,
I'm assuming, again, that gets resolved. You're getting a much bigger cover screen
that's way more usable, and assuming they're adding more widgets over time
could, again, become very useful. Though, of course, I do wish they went the way
of the Motorola Razer Ultra and let you use any app you want.
I do think this has the possibility of becoming a very well-used display.
Starting at $1,000 for the 256 gig model, it's pretty much the price that you would pay
for any flagship. I think that this could use a bit of a bump
for killer features on a folding phone if you're somebody who doesn't just like the form factor.
Of course, you can do multi-window between the two halves in flex mode
or taking pictures with the cover displays to get the main camera.
And, of course, it's obviously the best Game Boy Advance SP emulator that there is.
I still don't think there's a killer reason to get this if you don't want to just have this smaller
little square in your pocket. For me, that is a killer feature,
but I understand for a lot of people where maybe they want the fold or are gonna stick to their candy bar phone for now.
When the price of these start to drop, I think we'll start to see them out everywhere, but for now, I can see people waiting
for more competition this space from Google, Apple,
or even OnePlus with the leaks coming out for their big folding phone. If they can enter that flip space,
I think it will really push the whole space forward. But while we wait for that,
why don't you go check out another video and let us know down below if this is the phone to make you want a foldable.
Were you waiting for that bigger screen? Has Samsung finally done it?