SAMSUNG Galaxy Z Flip5 Review – Perfecting Where It Should Be

Previously we have just unboxed the Z Flip5, which you can CLICK HERE to find out. Now lets just further dive in further in this review on the aspects of performance and offerings, as well as our find outs of what it has in this flip phone.

Design

In general, one of the major concerns of a flip or folding phone is the mechanism. Samsung calls it the Flex Hinge, which is now can be flipped closed tight, incorporating its in house dual rail design, and this does not ends there, the improved Armor Aluminum is here surrounding the frame protecting the device, and thus this allows users to unfold and folding the phone easier, smoother and tougher, while maintaining the compactness of the overall design. This can be obviously seen when compared to the Galaxy Z Flip4 side by side, where the folded symmetry can be noticed between the two.

Measured at 15.1 mm when folded and 6.9mm when unfolded, the Galaxy Z Flip5 is considered quite tall and highly compact within most of the flip phones found out there, while the weight is just 187 grams, Samsung is still be able to squeeze in improvements inside it, if compare to the last year’s Z Flip5.

My stand is still the same, even though is Armor Aluminum is a further improvement, you still can unfold the phone one hand with ease, as usual using two hands is safer for me, however the hinge is refined as such much smoother when opening and closing it, Samsung claims that you can fold and unfold it up to 200000 times without problem. If you are feeling of needing additional protection over your phone, Samsung does offer a variety of accessories such as casings that you can check it out, and soon enough, third party casings and accessories will be made available.

All of the button placements and positions of the phone remains the same as a carry on from the Galaxy Z Flip4 with an exception of the cover display glass protection is upgraded to Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and IPX8 rated for water protection.

Display & Audio

Since it’s a flip phone, it has two screens. I’ll start with the Flex Window, currently measured on a large, comfortable 3.4-inch Super AMOLED display at 720 x 748 pixels. Now with this flexible window you can interact more with it, previously most you could do was minimal interaction like swiping and limited controls but now you can tap, move, edit, reply messages (SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat) and view information, alarms, music player controls, time, calendar, calls, SmartThings, watch streaming videos and events. This also adds support for customizing your own emojis and backgrounds on your cover screen with clock styles. Of course, you can also use the cover screen as a screen to take pictures through the rear camera, which has a higher resolution than your selfie snapper. 

When unfolded, you get a large foldable 6.7-inch 2X 120Hz Dynamic AMOLED display and this time the screen brightness can peak up to 1750 nits, making it one of the contenders. top class in display quality and scale down to flip. phone, this excels in AMOLED quality, color accuracy, and still has really good overall contrast, so it’s a phone you can interact with day and night. The Dynamic AMOLED display can now drop to 10Hz when not interacting with it, giving it a great advantage in terms of power saving and energy conservation for longer use. The crease in the middle of the screen is still there however not too visible sighting improvement that Samsung has done with the lines that some may complain, but with the Z Flip5, to me with the least, thats not hindering my reading and tapping on the screen.

Lets talk about the audio, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 produces a better experience compared to it’s predecessor on its dual speaker setup, and this can be tuned further if you wished to via Dolby Atmos which you can adjust equalizer, or just select from the presets available, while the adapt sound portion can be used to adjust your hearing based on the age, I find that useful especially those who wanted to get the best of audio hearing out from your phone.

Camera

Samsung uses a very similar spec rear and front camera on this, the usual 12MP wide lens with OIS, a 12MP ultrawide for the rear and a 10MP wide shooter for the selfie. By default photo mode, you can zoom pictures up to 10X with several features such as portrait, panorama, wide mode, hyperlapse, night mode just to name a few

Photos : Day Time

Photos : Night/Evening

Photo : Rear/Front Cam comparison

If not looking at the numbers, the set of the combo camera is still on par with most flagships, and that’s where we take in the factor that Samsung invested alot of time in software and AI computations within the camera app as part of the OneUI 5.1 features embedded in it. A clear advantage is tied to the processor being used, and also the Flex Window doubles as a preview window for capturing images, and this clearly put into good use, whether you wanna take your own selfie or taking another person image, whether the counterpart and the user can now preview first then capture it. In the end you get a useful camera with improvement over image processing, which during day time and indoors, looks good as usual, while night time you will need some time to get used to the focusing before capture, however if there is some sort of light source, the pictures can be produced out decently. My experience is more towards liking to take pictures and selfie with the rear camera, since it’s purpose is there anyway.

Above is a sample video from the rear camera shot at 1080P, 60FPS with audio capture that can be heard clearly in the recording environment, at the image level, if moving too fast jitter still exists but is stable with the support of OIS and EIS. As usual, these can be further improved with patches and updates. Zooming still sees a decent amount of detail, especially on the alphabetic characters, including signage. All in all, it’s a good vlog candidate in terms of front and rear camera setup. If you wanted to push it further, you can go up to 4K at 60FPS though you will miss the Super Steady Option.

Performance, Software, Benchmarks

Now comes the internals, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 is powered by the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor for Galaxy (a customized SOC variant with tweaked processing clockspeed) with the choice of 256GB or 512GB internal storage, and 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM is there for all your multitasking needs, should you need more you can expand your virtual memory up to an additional 8GB, giving it a total of 16GB. Judging from the performance, a minor performance bump can be seen and felt where with the combination of the 3700mAH battery which last you approximately 1 day over mixed usage of calls, social media, e-mail, and a few games and to me I see it as an improvement, since the Flex Window is larger and needs some of the processing power to run it as well. Recharging back will just take about 30 minutes from empty to 50% of the charge by using a 25w PD charger or greater.

Specifically for graphics intensive games like Genshin Impact, this phone can now handle without breaking a sweat, with a steady pace of frame rate at least for the first half an hour, which marks the major improvements in heat management and better cooling that can now be achieved on a single foldable phone along with the new SOC improvements. During gaming sessions, or heavy multitasking the device will go warm, but nothing too serious.

OneUI 5.1 with Android 13 brings a number of features and improvements. Among the notable highlights, About Phone shows a model of the device along with its status. Some may not see any major overhauls, but global changes in the Labs menu give users more flexibility, such as allowing all apps to open in pop-up views and the Mode panel. Flex Panel allows 2 apps to work at the same time although some apps have not been tested by Samsung. but supported. In addition, Android 13 has matured to be a friendly device with large screens and can be folded to run as optimally as possible. Flex Window can now do more with better support for adding clock emoji animations, customizing backgrounds, replying to messages, adding calendar events, third party app support such as WhatsApp, Netflix and organizing and expand more Samsung apps added with drop-down menus to turn on and off some features such as Bluetooth, Sound Profiles or WiFi.  

Above are the benchmark results against a few models that we tested, which marks a flagship level performance points that is in your hands, folded and ready to go, just a touch behind from some of the models, but this is expected in order to keep the device balanced and optimal on all times. However do take note again that the warm touch is still there after long session of intensive task, but again, it cools down fast and lesser on the speed throttles.

Technical Specifications

Verdict & Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 again, marks a tremendous improvement on almost every portion that we experienced so far, a bigger flex window is indeed a win, but Samsung spend a tremendous amount of time in improving and adding interactive features to it, Good Lock is one example on customization that gives a further expansion of what a secondary screen can do, while the camera gets some software enhancement to it, in part thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that further accelerate processes intelligently while keeping the efficiency and performance checked. The launch price remains similar to the last year’s Z Flip4 too, and we do recommend this phone should all you need is a fashion statement, performance and reliability for a flip phone that you can get today.

Pricing

It is now selling at RM4499 for the 256GB storage and RM4999 for the 512GB storage, and you can order yours today via SAMSUNG ONLINE STORE. Pre order before 19th August and get double the storage as a bonus you will get additional RM400 e-Voucher.