Foldable smartphones have made significant progress in terms of design, jumping leaps and bounds from its nascent stage full of creases and gaps. The X Fold3 Pro perfectly embodies the cutting edge innovation with this form factor. Thanks to our friends from vivo, we got a chance to try out the new phone in Shenzhen, China.
In case you’re not familiar with it, the brand introduced its new lineup of foldables earlier this year, with the Pro being the top-tier offering of the series. It sports an 8.03-inch LTPO AMOLED inner display and a 6.53-inch AMOLED outer display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a much higher peak brightness of 4,500 nits.
Most people are familiar with the huge crease that’s in the middle of all foldable phones but it’s barely noticeable with the X Fold3 Pro. It’s still there if you look at it from a certain angle and you can sort of feel it when your finger’s moving across the screen, but it’s so nearly invisible that once you start using the phone, you’ll likely forget it’s even there.
Of course, with this form factor, you’re getting a lot of screen real estate when you unfold it, but what about the one on the outside? To get the almost-tablet unfolded shape, the cover screen is usually a bit taller than standard smartphone displays and that’s the case with this as well. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still more than usable for daily driving, but I personally prefer a wider aspect ratio, despite the trade-offs.
Under the hood, the phone runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset paired with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Powering it is a 5,700mAh battery, which is an especially large capacity for a foldable. Charging-wise, it supports 100W wired and 50W wireless speeds.
For the design, I was fairly impressed at just how thin it was. The company managed to get it even slimmer and lighter than its predecessor with a width of just 5.2mm when unfolded and weighting at 236g. Even when folded, it’s barely any thicker than your average phone, not accounting for the massive camera bump.
Speaking of which, the X Fold3 Pro is packed with a ZEISS-branded camera setup, comprised of a 50MP main sensor with OIS, a 64MP periscope telephoto lens with OIS and 3x optical zoom, and a 50MP ultra-wide lens. The highlight of the bundle is definitely the telephoto camera, which can capture some decently sharp images even at 10x zoom.
The foldable offers three ways to take selfies; the 32MP camera on the cover screen, the 32MP shooter found in the inner display, or you can straight up use the main camera by unfolding the phone. You can also fold it halfway and put it on the table.
Overall, the X Fold3 Pro shows that this specific form factor, while not getting a lot of changes, is still getting more and more refined each year, with all the initial kinks being gradually ironed out to the point where we might just forget about those earlier issues in a couple of generations from now. Hopefully, vivo will eventually bring over its foldables to the Malaysian market.
