Horizon
The best new tech heading your way
1 SAMSUNG GALAXY Z FLIP3
● From £999, samsung.com
Though the camera and battery package stays pretty much the same as that of its predecessors,
Samsung’s bendable range grabs the headlines like no other, and the recent Galaxy Unpacked event proved that the Korean giant still has flexibility placed at the head of the line. So T3 should be putting the star of the show, the newly toughened Z Fold3 (with its pressureretracting S Pen and mostly-invisible underscreen selfie cam) in the Horizon top spot, right? Ordinarily, yes. That appears to be one seriously awesome phone, and we’ll be taking a good look at it very soon. But realistically there’s something about the Z Flip3 which excites us even more.
It’s the price. £300 less than the Z Flip 5G, introduced at the start of this year, the Z Flip3 sneaks in just under the £1,000 mark. That is an absolutely killer price point, some £600 cheaper than the Z Fold3, and a good chunk less than, well, just about the entirety of the high-end phone market. It’s genuinely the sort of price point that could start to make foldables mainstream, and one which is surely going to encourage more pockets to hold compact phones in the years to come.
The Z Flip3 will, admittedly, need more than just a shiny price tag to succeed though. Here there’s a big hardware upgrade along for the ride, Samsung’s software appears to have been edge-honed to better suit the Flip’s half-open Flex mode, and it’s tougher, too – as long as the screen (newly upgraded to 120Hz) can hack the pressure of folding and re-folding, this may just have what it takes.
and the chassis trims down just slightly, the Z Flip3 is bigger where it counts: there’s now 8GB RAM on board.