How the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip failed me without breaking

When the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 arrives, probably in July, it could be a fairly decent upgrade on the Z Flip 5 that I have. He would have a slightly larger battery that the flip 6, which had a slightly larger than the flip 5, plus a Much larger outdoor screen.

Unfortunately, I I can’t wait a few more months. After a year and a half with a flip, I reached my break point.

To be clear, my phone has never cracked. My folding flip never even pushed A line of green misfortune along his fold. The factory screen protector began to peel, but $ 30 and a trip to Ubreakifix made this problem disappear.

No, the end came for my flip when she stopped lasting the day and started to wake me up at night. The battery is constantly died faster than it should, and since the last major software update, sleeping and no and not changing no longer blocks the notification sounds. I cannot understand one or the other, and the unique benefits of the flip no longer feel good enough for me to treat them more.

On battery: I saw this phone reach the bar of 80% by 9 The morningAnd threaten to die at 9 p.m. I hardly even use the phone when I am at work, and yet now I have the impression that it must always be connected.

I always knew that I would make sacrifices to get a phone that folds into a pocket square. Flip 5 twin batteries have a total nominal capacity of 13.92 wattheures, less than the smallest Galaxy S23 phone (14.68 WH) which sent the same year. But using it has not always been so bad.

At first, my flip has always arrived at my bedside charger every night. Later, I could easily get there by simply using it a little less during the day, deactivating Ar Pokémon Goor activate the battery saving mode in the evening.

But after a year, even delete Pokémon Go It was not enough. When I gave myself up for these in January, I realized that I could not afford to transport this phone to a living room. I had to move all my accounts to a phone borrowed just to do my job. I cannot swear it, but I certainly have the impression of being able to retrace the life of the battery reduced to the update of the Samsung One UI 6.1 software which arrived last April, and I wouldn’t be the only one.

It could be the aging battery prematurely, I suppose, but I did some superficial checks: the internal diagnoses of Samsung say that the battery is “good”.

I have already had phones with a weak battery. It has been a while since I was transporting around the spare batteries for my Motorola Droid 2, exchanging midday, every day, until I continue. But phones with battery doors have made this easy; These batteries were also inexpensive. And even if I could probably manage to permanently replace the batteries of my z flip 5 with a little workI would risk a fragile phone that also feels deficient in other respects.

I am not talking about the fold, to which I got used to fairly quickly, or the fingerprint sensor rising lateral which I almost lack as often as it strikes. I am not talking about the camera either, although yes, you sacrifice in the camera department with the folding phones of Samsung. I knew it outside the door.

Above all, I am talking about how Samsung has not yet adopted the potential of the flip, and how useless its external screen can be felt after the wearing of novelty.

When people ask me what I really prefer to the z flip, I ended up saying that it is really the way it fits into my pocket and how great it is to fold. It is a square when closed, so it remains put in my pocket and does not advance.

But it is Not really a little phoneAnd it is not a particularly good phone in one hand because there is no hand to open it. I especially stopped trying after the tenth time I groped it on the ground.

And I find myself opening it almost every time I use it, because it is almost never worth worrying about the Flip cover screen. Although it is actually larger than screens on the first Android combined, Samsung is simply will not leave yourself Use the outdoor screen as an appropriate Android phone.

Before asking: Yes, I downloaded the Good Lock app from Samsung and used its Multi-Application Sub-Application to carefully load each of my Android applications the most used on this screen, one at a time, but it is almost always more efficient to simply open the phone, because they are more difficult to use and more difficult to launch. Most applications do not lie properly, and it takes an additional blow to start them; More than one if I slip the wrong direction first.

With the blanket screen, Samsung makes you slide inexplicably on the left rather than for applications, and on the right instead of Down for notifications. Even if the bar below looks like my handle of application drawer, it is actually a Samsung Pay shortcut instead, and it triggers me again to this day.

For many months, I forced myself to use the cover screen to sign my children out of school, to remove my 2FA authentication codes, to monitor my Uber driver, to open my garage door remotely. But the only thing I can really do better, there are selfies, which allows you to point the right goal to yourself while you supervise your photo with the cover screen. Even so, I think I got more use This gaming gaming gaming tour that all the coverage applications that I used combined.

So after these in January, I started hunting my next one. I may have hoped to find a little phone, But no luck. On Reddit, however, I saw a trend: many owners of Galaxy Z Flip discussed the abandonment of folding phones, now that Samsung suddenly offered $ 500 in transaction credits to a Galaxy S25 instead.

After confirming that The Galaxy Vanilla S25 is indeed the smallest high -end Android phone that you can buy today, I was intrigued. After hearing good things about the battery life with this year’s model and its 15.16Wh pack, I decided to jump into the agreement.

The S25 does not look like a little phone in my pocket, I’m afraid. It seems a little boring compared to my flip, and maybe I will complain about the last software update of Samsung per year from today! But I needed a new phone.

So far, the camera is much better and the battery life seems great. As I write these words, it is 5:40 p.m. and my phone slightly used is 80%. There is a lot left in the tank.

Photograph by Sean Hollister / The Verge