I have the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3. I absolutely adore this phone. It's thick, but I watch a lot of shows on my phone and having a tablet sized screen to watch them on without having to carry a separate device is amazing. They're not for everyone, I think, but if the flaws in current foldable technology aren't a problem for you and you have the right use cases, they're great.
This is interesting, you're the second person who's mentioned the screen size.
So it's noticeably different than a smartphone? I thought they were all basically the same size as any standard pixel or whatever but just fold it in half.
Also, since you watch movies on your phone, how is the speaker quality?
I have been dying to get another front-facing speaker phone since the HTC 7 and nobody is playing ball.
It's insane that phones don't have front-facing speakers for human ears.
The crease is noticeable in bright ambient lighting conditions like outdoors in very bright sunlight or if glare from lights hits it at certain angles. For example, imagine you have a lamp and you take the shade off of the lamp. If you stand so that the lamp is behind you while you are browsing the phone, it will glare off of any normal phone screen. On folding phones, the glaring will make the crease visible.
In addition to bright lighting conditions, it's most noticeable when not viewing the phone from head on, like you said. Viewing the phone head on seems to minimize the opportunity for light to bounce at an angle and so the crease is often not noticeable.
If you use the phone normally (viewing head on, as in browsing content, writing a text, etc) and in normal indoor lighting conditions, the crease is often totally invisible to the user.
If you work outdoors all day in bright sunlight, tbh you are going to notice it. But then I find most phone screens are hard to use in bright sunlight anyway because they aren't bright enough.
Tl;Dr - There are many cases where you notice it, but there are many more cases where you don't. It just sort of blends into the background after you use it for a few days anyway.
Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this. There are some folding phones that fold vertically. They're for convenience and fold out to the same size as a normal candybar phone. The Z Fold folds out horizontally and doubles the screen size. Speakers are fine -- not audiophile territory, but not bad at all.
That's knocking my socks off, I had no idea the screen's got that big.
I'm trying to pick one out now, it will definitely be a fold with twice the screen size.
Looks so cool, and so much more practical for a lot of my applications, I love comics and lounging around watching less visually demanding TV on my phone.
I'll probably still prefer larger screens for something where I'm supposed to be paying attention to detail, but this is great to know.