SAMSUNG Galaxy Z Flip 3 5G (Refurbished) (Open Box)

I've had the phone for a few days now. First off, as a refurbished phone this phone was in perfect condition. It looked brand new out of the box. The phone also came with a charger which I was not expecting as I was reading the phone did not come with one new in box. My biggest gripe with the phone thus far is the battery life is atrocious. I understand that's the trade off here: you're getting a phone that folds in half, so the battery is half the size give or take. But after only a few hours of use it's ready for charging again. I have reduced my brightness much of the time, and I've also made it so the screen turns itself off after 2 minutes instead of 10 to help reduce battery drain. The outside screen is nice to use for a viewfinder for taking selfies, especially if you want to use the wide angle lens for taking pictures. It's nice to be able to respond to texts and the like as well using voice to text, but being able to use an on screen keyboard would be nice. The screen is probably just a bit too small for that though. I do wish there were slightly more functionality to the outside screen than what we get. Having an app launcher on the outside screen would be good, or being able to use some apps in a contained form on the smaller screen would be good so you don't have to open the phone up fully if you just wanted to do something quick like scroll some a website or a social feed. Having access to more widgets would be nice, or having the widgets be more customizable or dynamic would be good. For example, the events widget would be good if it could display a week's events at a glance instead of just today's events. Otherwise you have a blank widget to scroll through. The folding action is smooth and works a lot better than what I expected. Although when this is the whole gimmick of the phone, you'd hope that the company would get this right. However looking at the 4 models of this phone, you can see the hinge has changed with each iteration so it does seem they're still tweaking things. This on does open and close smoothly. It is a bit "stiffer" than what I'd have thought thinking back to flip phones of yesteryear, but it's not jerky or anything. It is a smooth action. The phone will stay in any position along the fold that you place it in, which is nice for video chatting so you can angle the phone in a way that is easiest for visibility based on the surface it is placed on. I've seen people in videos on YouTube put a thumb under the screen and flip the phone open like a pocket knife. This works, and it appears they open the phone like this regularly, but something just feels wrong to me about it. Maybe that will change over time for me, but knowing the screen is only protected by plastic makes me feel like I might damage the screen panel underneath if I'm too aggressive in opening the phone that way. The closing action is satisfying, especially having the phone set to hang calls up with flipping it closed. I've used it to hang up on a robo call already and it's :chefskiss:. Yes, there is a crease in the middle of the phone. Yes you can feel it. Yes you can see it. Yes it's expected, it's a folding phone. No I don't mind it or care. I'm, personally, not a fan of Samsung's One UI, or any of their UI systems through the years going back to TouchWiz. I'm coming from a Motorola device and would have gone with another Motorola device, except the Razr was exceptionally inferior to this phone every step of the way with the exception of the external screen and the camera was listed as being slightly better in low light. Vanilla Android is my jam. I've disabled Bixby and made my power button a power button again. There are plenty of things that I'm not used to in a Samsung device at this point yet, and things that Android can do that Samsung's One UI does not allow for. Some examples are the dashboard on the power menu for gpay/Google wallet payment methods and Google home devices, being able to bubble specific conversations from all messaging applications (Facebook messenger included) and being able to set custom notification sounds for each conversation, and having call screening from the Google phone app as just a few examples. It will take some adjusting to get used to Samsung's way of handling things, but so far it's a small price to pay for the better specs that come with this phone versus the Razr 5g. Overall I am very satisfied with my purchase, and the fact that I went refurbished. You can't beat the price for something that was pretty much like a brand new phone out of the box. The fact I got a phone that retails for around $800 brand new for less than half the price is a no brainer. I used to exclusively buy refurbished phones and started buying them brand new for a few years. I'm not working right now and broke my phone that I just bought in July to replace the same exact phone I dropped in a sewer (I'm not this irresponsible with phones and have never done anything like this before) and decided to look around. This phone cost me $30 more than what it would have cost me to buy the same phone again brand new from Amazon. Tl;Dr: Good quality phone overall, good specs, battery leaves much to be desired. Don't be scared of refurbished, as long as it's manufacturer refurbished, or in this case, Amazon refurbished so long as you have a warranty. This phone came out of the box looking brand new and works perfectly. Couldn't be happier with my purchase unless there were a way to flash vanilla Android on it.