SINGAPORE - Samsung’s latest foldable phones Galaxy Z Flip5 and Fold5 hit shelves on Friday, offering meaningful upgrades that extend the brand’s lead in the foldables race.

You’ll have to stomach the high price for each device – the Fold5 is going for as much as $2,938 - and questions remain about a folding screen’s long-term durability. But the pair of new phones refine the formula that Samsung has pioneered in the past five years – there is really no reason to look past them if you’re in the market for a foldable phone.

The Straits Times tested both devices for several days – this is what it is like to use the Flip5 and the Fold5. 

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 (Starts at $1,498) 

Samsung hasn’t rested on its laurels with the immensely popular Flip devices. Continuing to innovate, it has expanded on features that have made its Flip phones so fashionable, with a gorgeous design and, now, an enlarged cover screen that offers even more customisability and functionality.

Starting with the Flip5’s design, it is sleek and slimmer than before as Samsung has finally managed to close the gap created by the hinge. The phone is completely shut when closed, preventing debris from entering and scratching the screen.

The phone also comes in fun colours: mint, cream and lavender. Some colours like yellow, grey and green are available exclusively online. It also has plenty of customisable wallpaper designs for its larger, 3.4-inch cover screen, dubbed the Flex Window, which is a true game changer.

The Flex Window is nearly four times larger than the Flip4’s cover screen, providing users quick access to notifications and widgets like voice recording, calendar and Spotify. 

You can summon a keyboard to respond to messages in apps like Telegram, or conveniently select from pre-written replies, like “okay”, “on my way”, or from your own list of quick responses. 

It is also easier to take selfies with the phone closed, using its 12 mega-pixel wide- and ultra-wide cameras. These are far from the best that Samsung has to offer, but they do the job for photos with adequate lighting.

The Flip5 offers even more personalisation than before, with cover screen designs that range from a handy display of notifications and quick settings, to expressive and colourful wallpapers. Samsung will also release NFC-activated Flipsuit cases with funky illustrations that dynamically alter the wallpaper on the front screen with similar designs.

And at last, we have a cover screen that can run apps like YouTube, WhatsApp and Google Maps, which come as part of the Flip5’s experimental Labs suite, available in the Settings menu. 

The apps don’t all work perfectly on the cover screen, as Samsung makes clear in a disclaimer. I often hit the wrong keys on the crammed Qwerty keyboard and struggled to navigate the miniaturised apps. Yet, I found myself using the front screen regularly for simple tasks, like short replies on WhatsApp or to quickly jump to another video on YouTube.

And when you flip open the phone, it remembers where you left off on the app when you used it on the front screen, making the transition seamlessly. 

Samsung might have figured out how to shut the phone completely, but it hasn’t worked out how to get rid of the crease on the flexible screen. It’s still impossible to ignore when the screen is dim or turned off, and I chuckled more than once when some friends’ faces were awkwardly distorted as I swiped through Instagram stories.

But the crease is more than compensated for by the Flip5’s 6.7-inch Amoled screen, which refreshes at up to 120hz and produces brilliant, crisp colours and detail. 

The phone’s is slimmer and lengthier than usual candy-bar smartphones, for better or worse. It’s a joy to scroll through long walls of text, but awkward for videos and films as content is rarely sized to the Flip5’s 22:9 aspect ratio, leaving a bar of jarring black, empty pixels on each side.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 (Starts at $2,398)

Not much has changed with the book-like Fold5 since last year’s model, unlike with the Flip5.

But the Fold5 remains the king of productivity, thanks to its 7.6-inch Dynamic Amoled 2X screen that can open at least two apps comfortably and a thoughtful user interface that is primed for multitasking.

Anyone familiar with an iPad will be right at home with multitasking on the Fold5. A task bar at the bottom allows you to summon commonly used apps, and you can drag app icons to the sides of the screen to open it in that half, then launch another app to multitask. 

The sheer size and sharpness of its screen make it a joy for reading, using spreadsheets and watching videos, although the issue of black bars remains for most video content due to the phone’s aspect ratio.

I’ve always felt the Fold was a little too squarish when unfolded – it’s too tall for most videos to fit – and slightly too narrow when folded, making for an awkward typing experience on the front 6.2-inch cover screen. In that regard, the rectangular Google Pixel Fold seems to strike a better balance, but sadly, that device is not coming to Singapore.

The S Pen Fold Edition also makes a welcome return – it is almost necessary if you’re going to be multitasking a lot. But you will have to fork another $88 for it, and even more for a phone case to slot the pen into – though I wish the pen could be housed within the phone, as with the Samsung Note series.

The Fold5 starts at $1,498 for a 256GB model, and $2,938 for a 1TB model.

Both the Fold5 and Flip5 are backed with the latest top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, which worked flawlessly for me even as I opened multiple apps on both devices, and booted up graphically intensive games like Asphalt 9. 

These chips should give both devices the stamina to last years of software updates and app improvements, making their high price tags easier to stomach. It also bodes well that Samsung offers five years of security updates and four generations of operating system updates, which is longer than that offered by most other Android phone manufacturers.

Whether the phones will physically last as many years is another question. The hinges on both phones are sturdier than before, but there is still a slight sponginess to the folding screens that give me no confidence to handle it as roughly as I might a candy-bar phone.

I shudder to think of the damage a drop would do to the Fold5, which weighs 253g – which is the weight of two standard phones, essentially. Given that you could spend anywhere up to $3,000 on these phones, I’d seriously consider the additional year of Samsung Care+ Screen Care for a one-time screen replacement.

If you’re looking for a foldable phone, there aren’t better options around than these two.

The Flip5 builds on the fun personality of its previous iterations and the Flex Window brings added convenience and functionality to the cover screen.

The Fold5 doesn’t move the needle, but thanks to polished software and long-term support, it remains the one to buy since it is priced similar to the Fold4.

Both devices are available at major electronic stores, telcos and e-commerce sites from Friday.