Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3

Reading this on a Fold 3, which I'm considering replacing with a OnePlus Open, if the reviews are good. The crease is not noticeable in use for me. Having more screen real estate in a device that still comfortably fits in my hip pocket is great. The only downside I've noticed in a year of use is the Samsung bloatware. There are a couple of small scratches on the screen but no more than I had on my previous smartphones after a year. That's after taking it to the beach multiple times and not taking any particular care to avoid getting stuff on the screen.

I spent some time last week trying to set this up. You can use Andronix to install Linux and a window manager onto you phone. You then use a VNC app to connect to that (local) Linux container and you'll have a fully working Linux phone. Works pretty well, though I had to jump to a few hoops as not all distro's worked on my Fold 3. DEX starts automatically when you plug HDMI into your (Samsung) phone. You then start the Andronix Linux container thing from DEX and you have a fully working Linux distro, right from your pocket. Pretty magical. What I do, is use remote VSCode to connect to my dev server, so I don't need to run anything locally, because speed wasn't great for me. But if you set it up as I did, you can work from anywhere and you don't need a laptop.

I used Samsung DEX (Galaxy Fold 3) as my desktop for work for a few months. It had some minor issues, but otherwise works surprisingly well and I was able to develop Python applications, run web servers, etc. Plus, it's only using a couple of watts instead if hundreds of watts compared to a 5 year old desktop for the same performance.

1. Nice to watch youtube videos on, which I do a lot. Both in portrait and landscape. I watch a lot of linus tech tips, photography videos, breadtube, and mandarin learning videos on it. I wouldn't buy it for this alone. 2. Really excellent emulation device. Powerful enough hardware and phenomenal screen. I use it as-is in portrait mode for the best possible DS emulation on-the-go. I can at least 4x the resolution in almost all games. I can also slap a gamesir controller thing on either side to turn it into a sort of switch-style emulation device. I play ps2, ds, 3ds, gba, gamecube, n64, snes, and nes games on it. 3. Good game streaming device. Mount the controllers on it and use moonlight or steam link to stream from my desktop PC, even if I'm not on local network. Or, use nvidia geforce now or whatever it's called. There's a separate link to servers here in Taiwan through taiwan dageda, so I get ridiculously good connection. 4. Pretty good note taking device with the stylus. This is the use case that drove me to purchase. I'm always experimenting with various ways of (handwritten) note taking, especially on books I read, and having all my notes right there on my phone is really, really nice. I never "forget my notebook" now. Well, unless I forget the stylus lol, or it falls out of my pocket, which has happened 3 times now, and the styluses are an absurd like 50$ or something, so, this device is not nearly ready for mainstream consumption. Similarly, it's great for banging o…

It's "good" for everything on the go if you can handle the bulk of it folded. I've got an iPhone 14 pro and a Galaxy fold 3. It's roughly the size of an iPad mini when unfolded and is my favorite form factor. Small enough to carry around and enough real estate to RDP or SSH to get some actual work done if you need to. I don't like carrying a bag with my MacBook if I can avoid it