Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 review

One can write an entire research paper on how much technology is actually crammed into just making a foldable functional. This time with the Fold4 the hinges have been given a spit polish to feel tighter and also get IPX8 resistance to dust and water. The crease is still there but the brightness helps reduce its presence. And lastly, the in-display camera on the main screen is honestly awful but it’s still a work of technical ingenuity from Samsung. All of that is married with a beautiful and sturdy metal construction which feels premium in the hand.

Following the footsteps of Apple devices, it also gets flatter sides now. Which, in my personal opinion, is not very comfortable to hold — both, the Z Fold and an iPhone. There’s a tiny bit of gap when you shut the hinge which is barely reduced from the previous generation.

The front cover display covers the entire front area so you get smaller bezels and more pixels in the same form factor this time.

Foldable smartphones pack in so much real estate screen that it’s incredible how much work or play can be done on these devices. At least if the OS supports it, right? We’ll get to that in a bit but for now, all you need to know is that when it comes to the display quality, Samsung is pretty much the top dog, foldable or not.

The front cover's 6.2in display is rocking a 2316x904 (HD+) resolution which may not be much compared to any traditional smartphone these days but Samsung’s probably saving the pixel count for the main screen folded inside.

Fold it open and the 7.6in square display greets you with a 2176x1812 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. It’s bright and sharp and the colours, in typical Samsung fashion, are a bit boosted. The contrast and colour balance could do with a bit more natural tone like on the iPhones but since this is a bendable OLED, we’ll give Samsung a solid pass. It’s not going to break your Netflix or YouTube experience honestly. That’s the job of the size actually and the odd aspect ratio. Even as a regular smartphone, the cover screen is a bit too narrow and way too tall for everyday use. The keyboard is squeezed in so typing is anything but pleasant. Meanwhile, scrolling content-heavy apps like Instagram is like reading a book written on a toilet paper roll. It’s way too cramped.

Instagram is also not natively supported on the inside 7.6in cover screen so you have massive empty spaces on the sides because the app opens up like a floating screen in the centre. You can also move it to either side of the screen. Even YouTube and Netflix videos have massive black bars on top and bottom because of the square aspect ratio.

Now, the foldable category is still niche because there’s barely any other foldable in the market right now, especially in India. All the other foldables are either proof of concept products or just have a couple of thousand units to cement the brand's attempt at a foldable. So it goes without saying that you should expect a few nasties when it comes to third-party UI support for big screens. Instagram is the prime culprit.

That said, Samsung’s One UI software is pretty slick and accommodating of the square screen. All UI apps take advantage of the big screen. Samsung has also added an app dock right above the navigation bar which lets you swap apps almost instantly. The Snapdragon 8+ Gen1 makes quick work of any task you throw at it. It’s snappy, and shifting between apps is genuinely a breeze. 

That said, it’s still peppered with a ton of Samsung apps which you won’t ever need. Deleting them is easy so it's fine.

The 12GB RAM and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen1 make short work of every single task. Not to mention the 120Hz refresh rate on the main display that makes everything flow with fluid animations and urgency. It’s a fast and responsive smartphone with a display that can keep up with all your demands.

We had one of the most fun gaming experiences playing Diablo Immortal on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4. The massive screen is simply too good for gaming and reading. Games like Diablo Immortal utilise the full size of this foldable and also give enough room for on-screen controls for a comfortable gaming experience. However, because of the aspect ratio, many of these games, including Diablo Immortal, crop into the game and cut out quite a lot of content from the sides. It’s more noticeable in games like Call of Duty where FOV (field of view) matters. Simple games like 8 Ball Pool have overlapping buttons which can make the game’s UI an eyesore.

That said, games that do let you fiddle around with the on-screen controls are lovely to live with on the Fold4 and the Snapdragon is pretty much always up for the task at hand. Samsung’s also taken care of the heating bit, which is great. It doesn’t bake to a crisp like the older generation Exynos-based Samsung devices did and even if you feel a pinch on your mitts, simply rotate the smartphone and keep the burning back half on top.

There are five cameras on this smartphone. Three at the back, one on the cover display and one behind the main display. There’s no shortage of cameras on this but the quality is debatable. The Z Fold4’s colour balance across the lenses is always boosted and bright which makes me wonder how the colour accuracy is so wildly different from what Samsung was doing with the Galaxy S series smartphones. The colour accuracy is not acceptable for a smartphone that costs a whopping ₹1,54,999.

A simple point and shoot from the rear camera and you can clearly see the colours on the Samsung are almost boosted to a neon sort of shade. Compared to the Google Pixel 6a, the tonal accuracy of the Samsung is nowhere near. Sure, dramatic shots with various hues during the sunset will absolutely look gorgeous with Samsung’s colour science but if you want that sort of unnatural boosted appeal, then a filter from Instagram on the Pixel shot should do the trick, right?

In night mode, Samsung has a bit of an advantage over the Pixel in terms of details. The 50MP snapper on the Samsung captures wee-bit more details in low light compared to the Pixel 6a and Samsung’s low light colour processing is a bit more accurate than Pixel’s. The Google Pixel camera tries to restore colours back to their original shade even if the lighting is affecting it, the Samsung doesn’t do that and we prefer that.

Portrait mode for tricky situations is pretty much the same on both smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 smudges the details here a bit. The Pixel definitely has more details and again, better colour accuracy. It also has better focus capture and subject detection. Samsung, however, is good enough with people as a subject rather than plants and flowers. Even though you won’t be taking portrait shots of plants like us, the reason why we did so is to put the computational smarts of both brands through tricky situations. Think of it as a UPSC exam but for smartphone photography…

The 10MP telephoto lens has 3x optical zoom which is average as well. It’s blotchy and has way too much noise in the darker areas and more sharpening than we expected. In 2022, where Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo and even Google smartphones do a similar if not a better job for less than half the price, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 should’ve been better with its camera quality. It’s still a good camera system but a camera system that belongs on a smartphone that is under ₹80,000. Although, some might argue that you can overlook this ‘under ₹80K camera quality’ for the folding technology. The choice is yours.

Lastly, selfies. Now, this is the only smartphone where every single camera can be used to take selfies which begs the question, what do you even compare it with? The 10MP cover selfie camera is good. Actually one of the most impressive selfie cameras around. Compared to the Pixel 6a, it does a good job of highlighting all parts of your face even when you’re facing opposite a light source. The whitewashing of skin tone is severely gone down on this smartphone which is great for us brown skin folks. Samsung does a better job than any of the other Android smartphone brands when it comes to skin tones. Barring Google course.

The most fun way to use the Fold 4 is to open the main display and make the cover screen a selfie preview and face the rear cameras. You can use all of the three rear cameras to take a selfie but only The Great Khali can hold the 7.6in screen with one hand.

The in-display camera is a slight improvement from the Fold 3 but it’s still not good. It may get the job done for meetings and Zoom calls but other than that, it’s best ignored. In fact, the in-display is great at getting ignored during everyday use. You’ll barely notice it under the display and for that, job well done Samsung.

The Fold4 doesn’t bring much to the table for existing Fold users. It’s more of a spit polish over the Fold3 than a radical change to the foldable smartphone category but that’s not a bad thing. We feel that Samsung has reached its foldable sweet spot and now it’s down to polishing this for a few years. The price still needs to be a bit more accessible to get curious folks on board.

Although, having used the Fold4 for two weeks, I personally would not want to use it as a daily smartphone. The narrow front screen is just too squished for any typing work and the weight doesn’t help its case. The aspect ratio doesn't make the content feel bigger and better because it's got massive black bars on top and bottom. 

Reading and checking emails on the main display is an absolute joy but for everything else, you’re still better off with a traditional smartphone or… Samsung’s Flip smartphone that is better priced, and is a more sensible and easy to live with daily smartphone.