Galaxy Z Fold 4 first impression

Hi everybody. Having used my brand new Galaxy Z Fold 4 for a few days I wanted to share my first impressions of this – spoiler – really great device.

I have to admit that I was hesitating as this device is quite expensive and I thought I might also be satisfied with a Fold 3 when it drops in price after some month that the Fold 4 is on the market. But then the possibility of trade in of my old Note 9 along with 200 Euro additional money plus Galaxy Buds plus one year Samsung care persuaded me finally. Disney plus one year for free however which is currently being packed on top of the deal was not really what persuaded me at last but still it is a nice addon. Having tried other Smartphones in between like the Cosmo Communicator or the Unihertz Titan I wanted a physical keyboard phone for occasional writing on the go but getting this along with a decent camera was not really working out and I always came back to my Note 9 as daily driver.

Maybe the Astro Slide successor to the Cosmo Communicator can fill the gap here. But back to the Fold 4. First looking at the lengthy narrow frontscreen was a bit odd but opening the phone was a real woooooow and absolutely stunning. Large screen, vivid colors. A total new experience of playing Subway surfer 🙂 To me it was really overwhelming. Watching films on this device is also a great experience. So if you want a smartphone for media consumption that still fits at least in my pocket the Fold 4 is the way to go if you can spare the money. I must admit that I think that the Iphone 13 pro of my wife still takes the slightly better pictures but I am not a real Pro in that area and for me coming from the Note 9 the pictures are more than sufficient. Talking about the pictures – taking photos by looking through th big main screen is phantastic and I changed the background in a week more often than I did on my Note 9 in over four years. Coming from the Note series – here a few comments on the SPen. I bought the Samsung Cover with integrated SPen and it works really good on the main screen. I still have to find out whether to use the Samsung Notes application, Microsoft Onenote or something completely different. As it is possible to sync Samsung Notes somehow with Onenote this mixed usage might also be an option. Does any reader here has a comment one notetaking apps especially with handwriting and OCR recognition ? I do not know for what reason I should need to buy the Spen Pro. But maybe I find out some day. If you ask me so far what I think what Samsung might have done better I would say integrate the SPen in the body and make the frontscreen also usable with the pen. Apart from that I would love to have seen the possibility of extending the memory by a Micro SD card slot. There was a time when this was an argument for me to buy a device or not especially when the price for a device with a little more memory was not in relation to the price of even a better sd card. Apart from these few drawbacks I come to like the phone more every day. It may really be that this phone can be the device that I am longtime searching for – a one and only portable device that is notebook replacement, tablet and phone all in one. I intend to make use of Samsung Dex to have a notebook replacement but I still have to find a display/keyboard combination. Either a display and an external keyboard or a lapdock like those from Uperfect. The only problem is that I prefer a german keyboard layout on the lapdock which is hard to find on recent models. I currently only know of the HP Lapdock which was sold with their premium windows phone. However when it comes to writing I have to say that the built in keyboard of the Fold 4 works really good to even write longer texts like this. So for me this device works great for writing while on the go. If I need a windows based device I could create a virtual one on my unraid server and connect to it via RDP app. In regards to blogging I now call it my “RBD” which means RealtimeBloggingDevice and the wordpress app really works great. So far for my first impressions what do you think about the Fold 4 – let me know