Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 review: water resistant with an improved screen feel and multitasking, but terrible under-screen camera, expensive, and heavy
As good as foldables get, but is that good enough? — The Galaxy Z Fold 3 is the best possible case Samsung can make for a phone that unfolds into a small tablet.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2021 Samsung had already run three generations of folding phones: the original Z Flip whose plastic screen scratched easily, and the Fold2 that made the cover display usable but still shipped a tablet interface needing work. The recurring knocks across both lines were identical — fragile screens, compromised cameras, high prices.
The Fold 3 review lands one week after the Flip 3's, and together they mark the point where Samsung attacks the durability complaint head-on: both are now water resistant and the inner screen feel improves. The trade this year is a new compromise — the under-screen camera — while price and weight remain unsolved.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between the Flip 3 and Fold 3 in the same launch window now get water resistance on both, moving durability from disqualifier to table stakes — but the Fold 3's under-screen camera gives up photo quality no slab phone of its price would accept.
- Samsung has effectively set the foldable spec sheet for the year: multitasking and screen quality lead, camera and bulk lag.
Second-order effects
- Every subsequent Fold generation gets judged against this template — the Fold 4 a year later still earns praise for multitasking and camera gains while repeating the exact complaints of price, weight, and weak tablet app support, showing which fixes stuck and which did not.
- Weak tablet app support on a $1,800 device keeps pressure on developers to build for unfolded form factors, since Samsung alone cannot make the big screen worth owning.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through the Fold 5 and Fold 6 — incremental hinge, battery, and software-support gains layered on persistent heft and cost — foldables settle into a premium niche defined by what they enable rather than compete with slabs on price, with durability confidence (eventually seven years of updates) as the remaining adoption gate.
- The under-screen camera gamble becomes the test case for hiding sensors inside displays: if image quality cannot close the gap, front cameras stay notched or punch-holed even on future foldables.
The trend: Foldables are iterating from fragile novelty toward durable mainstream devices, with Samsung's yearly Fold cadence defining which compromises — cameras, weight, price — the category still carries.