Samsung releases Galaxy Z Flip 3 flip phone with paper-thin folding glass

Will flip phones make a comeback? Samsung is hoping so

Today's expression: Hold up
Explore more: Lesson #400
September 20, 2021:

Flip phones were popular in the early 2000s, but Samsung wants to bring them back. They just released the Galaxy Z Flip 3, a modern flip phone with paper-thin folding glass. The glass is rated for 200,000 folds, but the jury is out on the durability of this phone. Plus, learn what it means for something to “hold up.”

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Samsung hopes you’ll flip for its new folding phones

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff; JR is the producer, and this is lesson 400 of Plain English. We do two lesson sets a week, so that means right around this time every year we hit a nice round number like 400. The full lesson is online at PlainEnglish.com/400. JR has taken care of that, as always.

Coming up today, are flip phones making a comeback? Samsung has two new foldable, glass touchscreen phones. I have seen them, and I am here to give you all the details. Some of you might be listening right now on a new Galaxy Z Flip3 phone; if you are, you’ll have to see if you agree with my assessment. “Hold up” is the expression for today. And the video lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/400 is all about how to describe sizes.

Flip phones are back

They say fashion comes and goes in cycles and the same may be true for mobile phones. The flip phone was a clamshell-style device popular in the early-to-mid-2000s. Previous handsets were rigid and vertical, with a small screen on top and a keyboard on the bottom as well as a rubber antenna sticking up.

But then flip phones changed the cell phone design. The early flip phones were small but thick when closed and flipped open like a clamshell when you wanted to use them. When open, the top half had a screen, the bottom half a keyboard. Most had a small display on the outside, where you could see the time and a few notifications without having to open the phone up. They fit more easily in your pocket and reduced the possibility of an accidental pocket dial. Best of all, it was satisfying to end a call and snap the phone shut.

Does that sound familiar? It might if you’ve seen commercials for Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Flip3 smartphone. For simplicity, I’ll call it the Galaxy Flip. Foldable phones belong to the history books for one simple reason: modern smartphones are made of a single pane of glass and glass doesn’t fold. Or does it?

The scientists behind the new Galaxy Flip explain it this way: anything can bend if you make it thin enough. Imagine a two-by-four wooden beam that holds up a house. You can’t bend that. But if you shave wood thin enough, you can bend it. Anyone who’s folded a piece of paper can attest to that.

The same is true with glass, but the numbers are different. It turns out that glass can be folded; you just have to slice it thin enough. And in this case, thin enough means the width of a human hair. The Galaxy Flip flips open and closed with the glass screen folding in half and it doesn’t break. When open, the Galaxy Flip is a thin vertical phone with a bright OLED screen. When closed, it’s a thicker square shape, with a small preview screen on the outside. That’s where you can see the time and some small notifications.

Now, think back to that piece of paper. When you fold a piece of paper and then unfold it again, what do you see? You see a crease; a little bit of evidence that the paper has been folded. You can try to smooth the paper out all you like, but the crease is always there. The same is true of the Galaxy Flip. There is a small crease right in the middle where the glass folds. When the screen is blank, you can see the crease clearly. When the screen is displaying content, it’s barely noticeable. You can see it if you’re looking, but, to me at least, it didn’t distract from the experience of using the touch screen.

The glass is really thin, so they coated it with a protective layer of plastic. Unfortunately, the plastic picks up scratches much more easily than glass. And for some reason, when the Flip is closed, there’s still about a millimeter of open space between the top and the bottom, so dust and grime can get into the screen.

Samsung says its folding screen is rated for 200,000 folds. That’s over 130 folds a day for four years. If that’s true, the screen would hold up for as long as a typical person would own a phone these days. But I’m more worried about dropping the device. If the very thin glass breaks, the OLED screen will stop working.

One of the advantages to the old flip phones is that you could pull them out of your pocket, open them, dial, have a call, hang up, and snap the phone shut, all with one hand. That may be theoretically possible with the Galaxy Flip, but I found myself using both hands to open and close it. That’s because the hinge is sticky.

What do I mean by that? Well, the old flip phones could be either open or closed. But the Galaxy Flip can stay open at any angle between 0 and 180 degrees. Samsung says this will help you take selfies with the camera or prop it open like a miniature laptop. I’m not sure how useful that will be, but it does mean that it’s not as easy to flip open or close with just one hand.

Samsung has another foldable phone—at least I think it’s a phone—called the Galaxy Z Fold3. This is a much bigger device that opens horizontally like a book. When it’s open, it’s 118 millimeters wide by 170 millimeters tall, so almost a square, and it’s very large for a phone. You absolutely must hold it with two hands: it’s like a tablet. Because it’s so big, it’s difficult to close. The back is slippery, so you can’t fold it closed with one hand—at least I couldn’t. So, to close it, I had to push with my finger in the middle of the crease to get it to fold closed, which was awkward.

The outside of the Galaxy Fold also has its own screen; this one is very tall and narrow. It’s good for dialing, doing some limited web browsing, or viewing notifications. But it’s extremely narrow and there aren’t many things on the web that are made better by a screen that skinny.

The Galaxy Flip—the smaller one—starts at $1,000. The Fold—I hope you’re sitting down—starts at $1,799.

Jeff’s verdict

I went to a Verizon store to try these out. I think the Flip could be useful. I would say, the Flip is great if you have the money, don’t mind the questions about durability, love the design, and want to be an early adopter. But if you’re hard on your phones or you need them to last a long time, I would stay away at this point.

The bigger Fold is a solution in search of a problem. If you’re willing to carry a large, heavy phone, you can get a big Galaxy phone. If you want a tablet, you can get a small Galaxy tablet. This is halfway in between the biggest phones and the smallest tablets, in a form that still doesn’t fit comfortably in your pocket. And it costs a fortune.

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Expression: Hold up