After years of doubt, I finally found a foldable worth using daily (Spoiler: It’s not a Samsung or a Pixel)

As a tech reviewer, I’ve had access to foldable phones for years, ever since the first Galaxy Z Fold wowed and impressed. But over the years, I’ve seldom played with one, and I purposefully abstained from putting my SIM card inside a foldable and using it as a daily driver. The reason was, well, pretty logical in my mind: none of the foldables I saw in person didn’t feel like a superior device to the conventional flagships I could use.

Something always felt off. Some had unsightly display creases that totally broke the immersion, others were lacking either in the battery life or the camera areas, which are always crucial, some had unusable interfaces, and others were just peculiar in the negative sense of the word.

My point being, no foldable really enticed me to use it as a daily driver, until I stumbled upon this “older” device released back in 2024.

The phone I’m currently talking about and the one I’m obsessed with right now is the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, and it’s easily among the best foldables to this day. It definitely is a more complete phone than any Galaxy Z Fold you can get, that’s for sure.

Here’s my colleague Preslav giving the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro a heatlthy skeptical look. But believe me, my friend, this is the foldable that could finally make even you switch from your precious Samsungs. (Image by PhoneArena)

To explain why I rate this foldable much higher than, say, the Galaxy Z Fold lineup, which is what most people think of when they hear “foldable phone“, I will do what I do best and give you a quick review of the phone in question.

The best foldable I’ve used… so far

The first thing that blew me away with this Vivo was the design.

We start off with a pretty thin body that measures 4.7 mm unfolded and 10.2 mm folded. It’s not the thinnest foldable around, true, but it’s still super-thin and sleek. When you use it folded with a case on, it feels just as large as an iPhone 16 Pro Max with a case on. Moreover, at 236gr, this phone is lighter than some iPhones I’ve used.

Both objectively and subjectively, it’s a beaut’ (Image by PhoneArena)

I particularly loved the aspect ratio of the phone itself. At 21:9, it’s perfectly functional and notably more useful than the Z Fold’s narrower outer screen. The X Fold 3 Pro is perfectly usable even in its folded state, so you’re not forced to unfold it every time you want to use it.

The crease on the inner screen is there, you can sometimes see it when a reflection hits, but you can barely feel it when you move your fingertips on top of it. That’s just the solution I love with foldables, as the necessary drawback of a crease is almost negligible here. In addition, the hinge is super-strong and solid, unlike the flimsy ones on the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

There’s also a simple but very useful hardware mute switch, which is super-convenient.

My favorite Android interface

The there’s the interface. Laugh all you want, but I’m convinced that Vivo’s oddly named Funtouch OS is among the best custom Android skins. It’s functional, feature-rich, and manages a sleek interface style devoid of any fleeting design trends. There are tons of useful features sprinkled throughout the interface, which is usually the case with phones hailing from China, but interestingly, Funtouch OS is probably the least “Chinese-looking” phone skin I’ve laid my eyes upon.

For example, Xiaomi’s HyperOS or Oppo’s ColorOS are instantly recognizable with their near-identical iOS-like styling that oozes with everything but originality. Funtouch OS is more understated as it’s definitely closer to stock Android yet still has its own, rather unique UX design. Classy notifications (with colorful icons, mind you), a unified notification shade that simply revels in efficiency, and all the latest Android features you’ve come to expect are currently here.

There are many personalization and customization features, with Funtouch OS’ Dynamic Effects offering some of the deepest and most intriguing ways to shape the interface to your liking. You can change the home screen entering animation, the fingerprint icon and recognition animations, the charging and USB insertion animations, the ambient light effect when receiving a notification, and so much more. A proper treasure trove for customization freaks like me!

There are some AI features, but they are mostly forgettable. As long as I have access to Gemini and ChatGPT, my AI needs are sorted, and I have hardly needed anything more.

I absolutely adore the foldable-specific features here, like swiping up an app to open it in split-screen or run in a floating window, as well as the neat dock at the bottom. If you quickly close and open the foldable, you can easily open most apps in split-screen, and that’s genius. Position the phone half-open on any surface, and you get a customizable standby clock.

Hardware that puts others to shame

Okay, technically, we don’t get the latest hardware inside the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro: there’s “only” a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip inside instead of the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite. Is that a problem? Absolutely not!

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is still a flagship chip that marries superb raw power with decent enough efficiency, despite clocking it slightly lower scores in the synthetic benchmarks. The performance is top-notch in almost any task you might think of, and I could even emulate some of my favorite PC and PS3 games with respectable frame rates (thank the gods for Android emulation).

The phone is equipped with 16GB of RAM, which is great in itself, but Vivo also lets you use up to 16GB of the 512GB of storage as additional memory, totalling to around 32GB of available memory. This allows the phone to hold so many apps in its memory that I’m sometimes surprised that apps I haven’t used in a day or so were still held in the memory. This is perfect for heavy multitaskers, which I apparently am.

There’s somehow a 5,700mAh battery fitted on the foldable phone. Vivo has used a second-gen carbon-silicon battery which boasts 780 Wh/L density. I will be honest with you, I don’t know what that means exactly at the top of my mind, but I can attest to the decent battery life of the phone itself. With a mixed folded/unfolded use through the day and usually moderate usage, it’s easily a day, day-and-a-half phone.

What I like even more is the fast 100W charging. Pop the phone on the charger, go make yourself a brunch and some coffee, and voilà, it’s typically trickling at around 80%, which is more than enough to last you a day.

There are also two ultrasonic fingerprint scanners here, one on the internal screen and another one on the external display. That’s a rarity, with many manufacturers opting for either an ultrasonic/optical or a single capacitive fingerprint in the power button.

Speaking of the displays, both are superb. Colorful OLEDs with just the right amount of customization allowing you to fine-tune the color temperature and tone, very high peak brightness and low enough minimum one, with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate. Absolutely top-notch!

One of the most feature-rich cameras on a foldable

Not the very best, but good enough for me (Image by PhoneArena)

Although it received a fairly middle-of-the-road score in our PhoneArena camera tests, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro camera still amazes me to this day. It reminded me that the best camera is the one you have on you, but also the one you know the strengths and weaknesses of, allowing you to squeeze the best possible results with what you have available.

Hardware-wise, it’s a pretty respectable triple camera setup with a 50MP main camera with a large sensor, a 50MP ultrawide, and a high-res 64MP telephoto with 3X optical zoom that uses sensor cropping to zoom even further without any noticeable image quality loss. I routinely take photos at between 6X and 10X, and the quality is more than acceptable (taking your kid to the park apparently involves a lot of zooming in to capture all the shenanigans).

I absolutely adore the number of features and hidden functionalities available in the camera app. Apart from the standard photo, video, Pro shooting, and portrait modes, this phone also lets you take tilt shift photography, dabble into astrophotography (with AR constellation support), have access to many portrait modes emulating the look of some classic Zeiss lenses like Distagon, Sonnar, Planar, Biotar, and so much more.

There’s a proper macro mode here, which uses the correct camera (it’s the telephoto one, not the ultrawide).

You can also customize the cinematic video mode look by applying custom or some preloaded LUTs, apply a slow-shutter effect, and generally feel like an aspiring cinematographer. All cool beans!

Although it’s not the best camera around in terms of pure quality, it’s just enough for me. More often than not, it’s not the camera hardware, but the creativity that takes a better photo.

he hinge is perfect. Once more for the Galaxy Z Fold users in the back, THE HINGE IS PERFECT (Image by PhoneArena)

Things I don’t like (but tolerate)

The things I don’t like? The phone can capture up to 8K@30fps videos, but the quality is just okay. There’s a big difference when you switch between the different cameras when taking a video, which doesn’t always look great.

Newer Vivo phones also have the very useful Live Photo feature, which works just like on the iPhone and captures a short video before and after you hit the shutter button, but the X Fold 3 Pro only allows this in its dedicated Snapshot mode. In it, none of the standard camera features are available, so it’s mostly a wasted functionality here. Other foldables like the Oppo Find N5 support regular Live Photo capture in all standard still photography modes, so excuse me if I’m a bit envious.

The phone is only IPX8, not IP68. While that’s normal to expect from a foldable, I would have loved some minor dust proofing, at least IP48 matching the Galaxy Z Fold series.

The glass on the outer screen, while having super-strong shatter resistance (at least according to the official specs), the outer glass isn’t very scratch-resistant. While I pamper it, I can notice some micro scratches here and there, which isn’t inspiring a lot of confidence, as I now have to consider getting a 3D glass protector from Chinese online retailers.

The audio quality isn’t too good as well, but that’s usually the case with foldable phones. The dual stereo speakers inside are tiny due to the cramped space inside, which could be some of the reasons why the audio is simply lacking in terms of strength and presence. You eventually get used to it, but if someone plays the same audio track on a Galaxy flagship or an iPhone, it would be a night-and-day difference.

And yes, the pricing isn’t the most affordable. Currently, you can find the phone going for around $1,300 from reputable online retailers that specialize in reselling Chinese phones, but the price was higher last year. Now that I’ve used the phone, I’m fully convinced it’s worth it, though: the value you get out of the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro definitely beats those equally expensive newer foldables out there.

An end of a journey or not?

Currently, I have no plans to stop using this device. It has everything I could possibly want from a phone, be it a foldable or a regular one.

Given the increasing pace of rumors regarding the upcoming Vivo X Fold 5 (the company conveniently skips the “4” iteration of the phone as is the Chinese tradition), I am fully expecting to be shock-and-awed by Vivo’s next-gen foldable phone and would absolutely rattle up the chain of command so that I can review it as soon as it enters the PhoneArena premises.

As a conclusion, I’ve you’ve been hesitant to try out a foldable phone, make sure to look past the usual suspects coming from Samsung and Google. Chinese manufacturers are playing in another league altogether, and I’d never swap the X Fold 3 Pro for a Galaxy Z Fold.