It has been about 10 months of primarily using the Z Flip 3. I preordered it on 08/14/21 and it arrived 09/16/21. Before I dive into why I upgraded, I want to focus on my overall review on the phone.
The first weekend/very first impressions of the phone is realizing how bad the battery is. In the first few days, you ignore it because the phone is figuring out which apps are not used as often, and just figuring out who you are. After those first few days, it gets a lot better, but still a very rough battery.
Bixby Routines… This is the solution to the battery, and I really do want to say it was a great experience using these routines, but they fail to activate properly more than I would like to admit. For example, I have a command to turn the battery saver mode on while I am away from home. However, a lot of the time while I’m home, it doesn’t turn off battery saver mode. I typically can make it through the day with my phone, but that’s coming from someone who is on a computer more often than a phone, so take what you want with that.
Second, plenty of people will look at this phone and think the flipping feature is a gimmick. I can tell you precisely why it’s not. The first thing is that hanging up the phone is much easier than on a regular slab phone; especially if you’re driving. The next biggest thing is when you need to take a selfie of yourself or group of friends and don’t have someone to hold the phone. You set it down somewhere flat, aim it and your set. Those are the two biggest things, that I use somewhat frequently, and why I won’t consider this a gimmick.
Another thing I was not in love about this phone is the front screen. For reading your notifications it does fantastic. Doing anything else on the front display is a pain. Eventually during the period of owning this phone, Samsung did release an official update where you could choose which apps could launch just on the front screen, as well as some simple responses for the messaging. There are other solutions like Cover screen OS, I kept trying the free version and I always found it too limiting, and the paid version was just far too expensive. I really wish this phone would have had much more customization.
Concluding the review, my biggest gripe happened in July. My flip decided to start giving me issues. This is the biggest reason I had no intentions of upgrading my phone and would not recommend it to other people. My screen would go black while using it, but remain on. It would also fail to display anything upon hitting the power button unless I tried pressing it multiple times till it eventually fell off. At this point I stopped recommending it, even though it has a decent span in software updates. I decided to switch to my iPhone at this point, I still missed my android os, but didn’t want to buy another phone that will break within less than a year.
So why am I upgrading if my last flip broke? Well Samsung had a killer offer with a trade in. For the record, I am not sending them a broken phone; I tried taking my phone to a ubreakitifixit and it stopped being broken, so they were not allowed to work on my phone. I consider fixed and not broken because of that ;). Again, why did I choose to trade this in then? I paid $151 to upgrade to the Z Flip 4. To get a brand-new flagship for that much Is outstanding. I paid over $1000 for my Flip 3, so this really feels like I am paying to adjust the value back.