I’m an avid user of foldable smartphones. I’ve been using them for years as my personal devices, and have a lot of experience in that regard. Having said that, I’ve used predominantly book-style foldables, and their form factor has been the same for a long time now. Well, until wide-format foldables started arriving. Huawei and Samsung are the only companies that have launched such devices thus far, and I’ve been using Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 for a couple of weeks at this point.
Having said that, I’ve had a truly great experience with the phone. I’m fully convinced this is the right form factor for a (book-style) foldable, and that has been the case for 5-6 years at this point. It simply makes sense for both one-handed use (cover display and size) and vertical and horizontal content consumption (main display). That 4:3 aspect ratio is a much better choice than a (near) 1:1 aspect ratio. All in all, I do believe the Galaxy Z Fold 8 has been a home run for Samsung; I really do.
However, the phone is not perfect. There are some things that the company could improve. That’s something I wrote about recently. In this article, I’d like to focus on two major gripes I have with this smartphone. Both of these were kind of obvious from the get-go, but the annoyances they provide only grew the more I was using the phone. I’m talking about the phone’s camera performance and the wobble its protruding cameras provide. So both major annoyances are camera-related, kind of. Let’s talk about each of them separately.
Camera performance
I did not really have high expectations from the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8’s camera setup. Why? Well, because the camera hardware is not all that impressive. I immediately knew that I’d miss a (periscope) telephoto camera, as these days I’m basically using it as much as the main camera, if not more. Including a periscope telephoto camera is a much better idea than putting an ultrawide camera on phones, in my opinion. That is a major mistake by Samsung here. If they aimed to use only two cameras, the periscope telephoto camera should have been included in addition to the main camera.
The missing periscope telephoto camera is not the only problem here, though. The camera performance in general is not really all that good. I’m coming from the OPPO Find N6 to this phone, and the camera performance difference is night and day. That’s not something you’ll notice as much in daytime. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 does a solid job when good lighting is around; even indoors, it can lack a bit of detail. The main problem is the performance in low light, and that goes for both of its cameras.
I basically avoided using the ultrawide camera in low light, as it’s noticeably worse than the main snapper. The main camera did alright if you had plenty of time to capture your subject. The phone takes its sweet time to capture an image in low light, as I usually had to wait for 4-5 seconds for it to get the job done. If there is even the slightest movement in the process, the pictures turned out… well, not good at all. All in all, the camera performance was not at the level it should be for a phone at this price range.
Wobble
In recent years, as it turns out, I mostly used phones that have centered camera modules on the back. Tabletop wobble was not something I had to deal with. It has been a non-issue for me for years now. Yes, I reviewed phones that do wobble, but considering those were not my personal devices, it never annoyed me as much as it does now. Besides, none of those devices wobbled this much. The Galaxy Z Fold 8’s wobble when it’s sitting on a table is considerable. It’s enough for you to bump or rock the table a bit, and there it goes. The same happens if you try to interact with the phone.
All this can be solved by moving the camera layout and changing its design/orientation. Samsung is rumored to start doing something along those lines in the near future, and I hope that happens. OPPO’s foldables never had this problem, and neither did HONOR’s, just to name a few. Huawei also found a way to avoid the wobble with the Pura X Max, the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s direct competitor. I do hope that, with the Galaxy Z Fold 9, Samsung will fix this problem. You don’t really realize how annoying it is before you actually use the phone for longer periods of time.
The post My Two Biggest Galaxy Z Fold 8 Annoyances After Weeks of Daily Use appeared first on Android Headlines.
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