While it’s very capable, the Z Flip8 is only average when it comes to battery life, another drawback of its size. Samsung put in a 4,300-mAh silicon-carbon battery that’s good enough for casual use. If you’re on your phone a lot, you’ll want a power bank handy. Charging speeds are disappointing at 25 watts wired and 15 watts wireless, and I’m annoyed by Samsung’s refusal to implement the magnetic feature of Qi2.
Snap Shot
If you’re a keen photographer, you can get many better camera systems in a range of Android phones for the same money or less. That said, the main 50-megapixel shooter is perfectly good in many situations, and most folks will be happy with the photos it captures. Some noise creeps in when it’s dark. The 12-megapixel ultrawide is useful when you want to cram a lot in or take a group selfie, but it’s a definite step down in quality. Sadly, there’s no telephoto lens, but you can emulate 2X zoom without losing detail by cropping, and it offers passable results in good lighting up to 10X.
I don’t see much reason to use the 10-megapixel punch-hole selfie camera outside of video calls, since you can flip it to get a cover-screen preview and use the main camera for selfies (a big benefit of this design). I also love Samsung’s Horizon Lock, which lets you shoot video with a steady horizontal plane no matter how you turn or move the phone.
Another new AI feature from Samsung is My FanCam, which lets you pick a subject to focus on in group videos and reframes them as though your chosen subject is the star. Handy for school plays or soccer games, if you remember to use it. (You can also apply it to old videos.) Speaking of AI, Samsung offers Now Brief to float up calendar events, reminders, and useful info like local weather, and Now Nudge to suggest adding dates to your calendar from messages, sharing locations or photos, and auto-filling forms.
Compact Competition
The cover screen, or FlexWindow, has been a weakness for Samsung’s Flip line, and it’s still limited in the Flip8. On the plus side, you can use more apps with the cover screen, including most of Samsung’s apps (Health, Calendar, Browser), YouTube, Netflix, Google Maps, and Messages. But if you want other third-party apps, you still have to install Good Lock, then the MultiStar plug-in, and select the apps you want to use. It’s stupidly convoluted, and I don’t understand why it isn’t preinstalled, especially since Samsung has virtually all its other apps on there, along with a few third-party apps I never asked for (Facebook, Spotify, and Instagram). This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but it’s disgraceful that Samsung is including bloatware on a phone this expensive.
Photograph: Simon Hill