Review: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 folding smartphone

Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Flip4 and Fold4 are aimed at the social media market with loads of camera tricks for perfect selfies and videos. But are they worth the hefty price tag?

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip4 and Fold4 are the company’s latest folding screen phones and offer a range of new photo options.

The Fold4 opens like a book to morph from a phone to a tablet and the Flip4 is reminiscent of the flip phones of the 1990s whose screen and number keyboard folded to take up half the space in your pocket.

Now though Samsung has produced a phone with a 6.7-inch AMOLED display which itself folds in two — clearly aimed at the GenZ social media market.

You can open the Flip4 to 90 degrees and perch it in front of you with the camera app image appearing on the top screen and a set of controls on the horizontal section. You can swap the order around if you want.

It’s your perfect buddy for video calls and for making instant selfies that you can post almost instantly to social media.

Using the Flip4 screen as a keyboard.

Video choices include 1:1 square video for Instagram and 9:16 video for TikTok.

Overall the Samsung Galaxy Flip4 does succeed in being geared to social media image and video creation. Some users may be put off by it lacking Samsung’s top notch lenses, especially on a phone that starts at $1499 with 128GB of storage.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 folding smartphones.

You pay $1649 for 256GB of storage and $1849 for 512GB, at recommended pricing. A bespoke edition with 256GB of storage costs $1729.

You can also buy the Flip4 on plans from Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. Keep an eye out for discounts and specials.

Meta has gone to the trouble of modifying the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp apps so you get a set of special controls on the bottom half of the screen when creating videos for those applications. I could instantly take and upload stills to Instagram but I had to shoot video first before loading it into the app.

I had a great time using the Flip4 while on holidays in Parma, Italy whose big attractions include an 11th century cathedral, some of the earliest Gothic architecture in the form of the Parma Cathedral Bapistery, being the birthplace of famous Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini and near that of the legendary composer Giuseppe Verdi, and for Parma ham and Parmesan cheese.

It looks like a normal mobile phone.

But the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 folds up.

I used the Flip4 L-shaped to create some selfie commentary about Parma. I could take stills and video of the view ahead either with the camera stretch or L-shaped with the forward image appearing on the top half of the fold.

This delivered the best quality video which isn’t surprising given the Flip4 has two 12MP back facing wide and ultrawide lenses. The single selfie lens is 10MP.

There is a trick for getting better quality selfies using the Flip4’s back facing cameras. You close the phone and take selfie images and video while viewing yourself though the phone’s 1.9-inch cover display.

The control of this is ingenious. You switch to this mode by quickly pressing the power switch twice and swipe horizontally across the small screen to swap between stills, video, and portrait modes. Swiping up and down lets you swap between the wide and ultrawide lenses.

You then press the screen to initiate a photo or video. It’s really clever that you do all of this with the phone shut. The drawback is that the camera snaps square images and video in this mode.

In the end I thought this phone would be lots of fun for taking holiday snaps and movies.

The Galaxy Z Flip4 folding smartphone and accessories.

My biggest criticism is that for a four-digit price, you’re not getting the camera quality of the S22 range which Samsung did incorporate in the Fold4. But it didn’t include it with the Flip4.

So there’s no 108MP or 50MP wide lens, and no telephoto lens – just 12MP and 10MP lenses.

That may not impress serious, professional influencers who seek to create high quality images and video, even though they post to lesser resolution social media.

Higher quality media can help preserve quality when you’re conducting multiple editing tasks and professionals may use third party solutions to edit video before posting.

I thought the Flip4 would be better with a second, ultrawide selfie lens so you can include additional scenery when videoing selfies with the clam shell open.

I also thought Samsung should upgrade its Galaxy video editing app to offer more sophisticated editing options, to turn the Flip4 into a media workhorse.

Flip4 does bring several improvements to the table. Battery life has improved thanks to a larger battery, however the big step forward is fast charging which took well under 2 hours for a full charge.

The wide camera has a larger sensor for better low light photography, and there is improved optical image stabilisation and video digital image stabilisation. You get Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor and Android 12.

Originally published as Review: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 folding smartphone