When the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 arrives, likely this July, it could be a pretty decent upgrade over the Z Flip 5 I own. It’ll reportedly have a slightly bigger battery than the Flip 6, which had a slightly bigger one than the Flip 5, plus a much bigger outer screen.
Unfortunately, I can’t wait a few more months. After a year and a half with a Flip, I’ve reached my breaking point.
To be clear, my phone never cracked. My folding Flip never even sprouted a green line of doom along its crease. The factory screen protector did begin to peel, but $30 and a trip to uBreakiFix made that problem go away.
No, the end came for my Flip when it stopped lasting the day and started waking me up at night. The battery is constantly dying faster than it should, and ever since the last big software update, the sleep and do-not-disturb modes no longer block notification sounds. I can’t figure out either one, and the Flip’s unique benefits no longer feel good enough for me to deal with them anymore.
On battery: I’ve seen this phone reach the 80 percent mark by 9 in the morning, and threaten to die by 9PM. I practically don’t even use the phone when I’m at work, and yet now I feel like it always needs to be plugged in.
I always knew I’d be making sacrifices to get a phone that folds into a pocket square. The Flip 5’s twin batteries have a total rated capacity of 13.92 watt-hours, less than even the smallest Galaxy S23 phone (14.68Wh) that shipped that same year. But using it wasn’t always this bad.
At first, my Flip always made it to my bedside charger each night. Later, I could easily get it there by simply using it a little less in the day, turning off AR in Pokémon Go, or turning on battery saver mode in the evenings.
But after a year, even deleting Pokémon Go entirely wasn’t enough. When I flew to CES this January, I realized I couldn’t afford to carry this phone at a tradeshow. I had to move all my accounts to a borrowed phone just to do my job. I can’t swear to it, but I certainly feel like I can trace reduced battery life to Samsung’s One UI 6.1 software update that arrived last April, and I wouldn’t be the only one.
It could just be the battery prematurely aging, I suppose, but I did a few cursory checks: Samsung’s internal diagnostics say the battery is “Good.”
I’ve had phones with weak battery before. There was a time I carried around spare battery packs for my Motorola Droid 2, swapping mid-day, every day, until I moved on. But phones with battery doors made that easy; those batteries were also cheap. And while I could probably manage to permanently replace my Z Flip 5’s batteries with a bit of work, I’d be risking a fragile phone that feels deficient in other ways, too.
I’m not talking about the crease, which I got used to quite quickly, or the side-mounted fingerprint sensor that misses for me almost as often as it hits. Nor am I talking about the camera, though yes, you do sacrifice in the camera department with Samsung’s folding phones. I knew that out of the gate.
Mostly, I’m talking about how Samsung really has yet to embrace the potential of the Flip, and how pointless its outside screen can feel after the novelty wears.
When people ask me what I actually prefer about the Z Flip, I’ve wound up saying it’s really about how it fits in my pocket, and how awesome it feels to fold. It’s a square when closed, so it stays put in my pocket and doesn’t jut out.
But it’s not actually a small phone, and it’s not a particularly good one-handed phone because there’s no one-handed way to open it. I mostly stopped trying after the tenth time I fumbled it to the ground.
And I do find myself opening it almost every time I use it, because it’s almost never worth bothering with the Flip’s cover screen. While it’s actually larger than the screens on early Android handsets, Samsung simply won’t let you use the outer screen like a proper Android phone.
Before you ask: yes, I downloaded Samsung’s Good Lock app and used its MultiStar sub-app to painstakingly load each of my most used Android apps onto that screen, one at a time, but it’s almost always more efficient to simply open up the phone because they’re harder to use and harder to launch. Most apps don’t scale properly, and it takes an extra swipe to start them; more than one if I swipe the wrong direction first.
With the cover screen, Samsung inexplicably makes you swipe left instead of up for apps, and right instead of down for notifications. Even though the bar at the bottom looks like my app drawer handle, it’s actually a Samsung Pay shortcut instead, and it still trips me up to this day.
For many months, I forced myself to use the cover screen to sign my kids out of school, to pull up my 2FA authenticator codes, to watch for my Uber driver, to remotely open my garage door. But the only thing I can actually do better there is selfies, which let you point the good lens towards yourself while you frame your shot with the cover screen. Even so, I think I’ve gotten more use out of this Game Boy Advance party trick than all the cover apps I’ve used combined.
So, after CES in January, I started hunting for my next. I hoped maybe I could find a small phone again, but no luck. On Reddit, however, I saw a trend: many Galaxy Z Flip owners were discussing whether they should abandon folding phones, now that Samsung was suddenly offering $500 in trade-in credits towards a Galaxy S25 instead.
After confirming that the vanilla Galaxy S25 is indeed the smallest high-end Android phone 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 on the deal.
The S25 doesn’t feel like a small phone in my pocket, I’m afraid. It feels a little boring compared to my Flip, and maybe I’ll be complaining about Samsung’s latest software update a year from today! But I needed a new phone.
So far, the camera’s much better, and the battery life seems great. As I write these words, it’s 5:40PM, and my lightly used phone is at 80 percent. There’s plenty left in the tank.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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