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I've tried a lot of foldable phones over the years, and the tech is super cool. The idea of a display that can bend without shattering into like a million pieces. It's always really neat, but I've never found them particularly useful for how I use a phone until I tried this thing, the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold. This thing hits so different. So, it is like in terms of just aesthetics up front. It's very similar to a Fold 7, but instead of opening up into a two panled phone, it's a three panled phone. and it opens up to this huge screen. It opens up just like a kind of trifold paper brochure, hence the name, and you get a very large viewing experience. It's essentially a
tablet experience. It's a 10-in display, but it folds down into something that fits into your pocket. Now, this device is compact, very compact for something that has a 10-in display, but we now have super small and super thin foldables like the Fold 7 that are just when you compare them side by side, yeah, the Trifold does look thicker and it's obviously heavier, but if you just go back one generation to the Fold 6, uh, this is like a year and a half old, right? And this is it's almost the same size, but you get a third panel when you open this thing up. It's just like a it's huge. Now, I didn't find it too big or heavy when I was using it or when I had it in pocket, but I do think
that if they could drop this weight to like 250, 260 g in the future, that would be awesome. Like future iterations of this, uh, I think the weight is at the cusp of what I think people would find acceptable. If you look at the back of the two side panels, instead of the typical glass back that you'd see on like the Fold 7, let's say, uh this is like the typical material for any of the flagship Samsung phones, this has a it's almost like a plastic material, but it's a ceramic glass fiber reinforced polymer. I think it's basically a version of fiberglass. And I'm thinking they're using it because it has a reduction in weight, but it doesn't look as premium or as elegant as a typical foldable phone from Samsung. So, like
the hinges on the Fold 7, the hinges here on the Trifold feel really wellm made. These feel durable. They feel tanky. They don't have any play when you have it open. And if you'll notice, the different panels have a slight difference in thickness. I don't know how much thinner a trifold device though can get because this panel here has to have that USBC port or else you'd be relying on wireless charging only. So, if you kept the USBC port, this can't get that much thinner. The other two panels could drop in thickness a little bit. And then as you fold it up, like maybe the whole stack gets a little bit thinner. But ultimately, I wouldn't expect this to be that much thinner down the line. The reason why I'm so enamored
with the trifold though is this right here. This is an experience that I've never been able to have on a regular folding phone. Like you open it up and you have a giant screen that actually shows a really large image of a show or a movie that you're watching. And this has bugs me for years because every time I've used a normal folding phone, the one with two panels, the inside screens that open up are barely bigger than a typical slab phone, when it comes to watching shows and movies. And sometimes it's actually smaller unless you rotate it. And so we've been unfolding these big, beautiful displays and just filling them up with black bars. It kills me. And so when I finally see this, like a
like, come on, look at this. This is a folding phone that actually makes use of a large display. And this is just folding for fun because it can. I look at this, I'm like, this is the way that it should be. This is what people want to use. It's an excellent panel. It goes up to 120 Hz in games, and everything just looks really nice on this display. But one thing to keep in mind, the peak brightness outdoors only goes up to 1,600 nits, up to 2600. Now, the outer display uh on this one goes up to the same 2600 nits as the Fold 7's outer display. The chip in here is the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy. So, it's the same chip as we see in the Fold 7. It's not like the newest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but it's still
a very capable processor. It's running 16 gigs of RAM. The camera system is the same as we see on the Fold 7, and the speaker setup is the same as well. Great speakers for something so thin. Uh, and there's one down here and one on the top. And these have uh really good audio quality. Now, the way this thing folds up, I'll just do it one more time, is that the left has to go first. show you real quick. Left panel first, then the right. It has to be done in that order. If you do it with the right panel first, uh it'll give you a little warning message and a little vibration to tell you not to do. And the reason is simply because of the hinge. The left hinge is a normal small hinge that's
designed to fold it cleanly in half like the Fold 7. The right hinge is wider and it's designed to be able to have like a looser or not as tight of a fold because it's holding something on the inside. So, it just has to fold second. You can't fold it first cuz if you crank it down, it'll be pinching it in a way that it shouldn't be. It isn't annoying to fold or unfold this thing like I thought it would be because it's like an extra step and there's a very particular order that you have to do it, but it isn't. But there are some downsides to having the fold mechanism work like this. So, the big one is that you can't have a like midfolded orientation. It's either fully open or fully closed and you're
using that front screen. there is no like midway, so you're just using the two panels or something like that. The other thing is that because these screens all fold up upon themselves, you need to have a fourth screen, like a screen on the back that when you have it open, that fourth screen is just superfluous. It's not doing anything. It's on the back just off and it does take up space and resources and cost when you're producing this thing. The alternative to this kind of folding design or mechanism is to do it the way that Huawei does it on their Mate XT. And that's a device that folds up like a Z. And because of that, one of those three panels will be on the outside when it's folded up. And so you don't have to
have some fourth screen on the back. The downside though is that you have a soft panel that's on the outside that when you put it in and out of your pocket, that front panel is just face tanking all the debris that's in there and can get scratched up if you're not careful. Samsung's iteration does protect the screen because it's all folded up. Like all those soft panels are folded up on the inside, those plastic panels, and then the glass is on the outside. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I think the Huawei version just looks a little bit more elegant. Now, because of the screen being so large, you get really nice multitasking potential, but this also has a kind of custom version of Dex.
It's the only Samsung phone that can run Dex as a standalone device. It doesn't need an external monitor or anything. So, if you connect a wireless mouse and keyboard to it, your phone can function like a computer. So, you have a phone that works as a tablet that works as a computer. It's just a really versatile piece of equipment and it fits in your pocket. The battery is relatively big. It's the biggest battery that Samsung's put in one of their phones, but it's not silicon carbon tech. You can juice it up at 45 watts for wired charging, 15 watts for wireless. And in the box, you get a charger as well as a case. It comes with
a snap-on case. This doesn't use adhesives or anything to stick it on. Uh it just snaps on. And the back of it, it has this like kind of protective mechanism [snorts] for the hinge and it flexes as you open it up. So you open and close it and that hinge keeps it protected. So at this point, it's, you know, the end of 2025. This is now Samsung's like seven and a half generation of product. This is basically the eighth generation of foldable phones for them. And Apple is still not at generation one. It is crazy how long they've been waiting. But the thing that popped into my mind when I opened this device was like if you if Apple comes out with a foldable phone next year and the rumors that they just have like a
typical biffold, like a two panled system. I think if you see something like this on the market, like a triple system, a triple panel, and you see just how much more useful it is for media consumption, it's going to be a really tough sell for an Apple product. like this just has so much more utility and just versatility to it just because of how large this screen is when it's unfolded. Okay. Uh there you have it. These things are super expensive. I didn't even look at the price. This is not mine. This is just a media review unit. I think is an amazing piece of technology that I think is going to be the future of phones. This if once these
things come down in price, a little bit of weight reduction, they'll be awesome.
