Battery anxiety, or the fear of not having a working phone, affects lots of people out there in this day and age where everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. It's a condition that is technically called nomophobia (short for no mobile phobia) – seeing your phone's battery drop down to critical levels while you have no charger around can be a bummer for many.
And on flagship Android phones, battery anxiety is typically more severe than it is on mid-range or budget phones. Flagship devices have a lot of processing power and other fancy features (such as high refresh rate displays or amazing cameras for shooting all your important moments) that take up more power, and with so much hardware packed inside a flagship phone, there's typically not enough space for a battery as big as what we see on non-flagship phones.
Even the Galaxy S Ultra series from Samsung, which has featured 5,000 mAh batteries ever since Samsung started selling the top-end Galaxy S series smartphones with the Ultra moniker, doesn't offer you amazing battery life. It does for some people, but most would agree that the endurance on those devices just isn't as good as it would be on a lower-cost phone with a battery of the same size.
So it's only natural for us to scoff at flagship Android phones that feature anything smaller than a 4,500 mAh battery, and Samsung's Ultra lineup of flagship phones hasn't exactly done much to convince customers otherwise. But, oddly enough, the Galaxy Z Flip 4, with its teensy 3,700 mAh battery, does great on any typical day, and here are three ways the phone doesn't give me any battery anxiety.
It has impressive endurance despite its teeny-tiny battery
Yes, the first primary reason why the Galaxy Z Flip 4 doesn't give me battery anxiety is because it has genuinely good battery life for a phone with such a small battery. Even when you factor in the new Snapdragon chip or the fact that Samsung may have made special optimizations to its new foldables, the excellent battery life on the Z Flip 4 defies all logic, and that's great.
Of course, some of it could be explained by the fact that I don't use its cameras all that much (mostly because there's no zoom camera, or even a 50MP main camera like the Galaxy S22 that can shoot at full resolution and allow you to digitally zoom in for higher detail). Or how the main screen doesn't get as bright as Samsung's candybar phones.
But all things considered, a 3,700 mAh battery on a phone with flagship features just isn't supposed to last as long as it does on the Z Flip 4. It's impressive, and fixes what was one of the biggest issues with Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip line ever since its conception.
If battery is low, you now have 25W fast charging to quickly get back on track
It took some time, but Samsung finally introduced 25W charging on the Z Flip series with the Z Flip 4. It's not the fastest compared to other phones, most of them featuring bigger batteries, but it is still plenty fast enough to get you back on track quickly. Well, at least if you have a 25W charger from Samsung already or buy one, because there's no 25W charger (or any charger) at all included in the box.
The Z Flip 4 doesn't shut down randomly when battery hits 5% or lower
It has been a problem with Samsung phones in general in recent years – once the battery drops down to 5%, there's no way of knowing when it might run out completely. Galaxy phones can burn through that final 5% charge much quicker than when the battery level is above 5%. It basically becomes a luck of the draw and it's best to reach for the charger as quickly as possible once the final low battery warning hits.
On the Z Flip 4, that's not the case. Even once its battery falls to 5%, it continues to drain normally. In fact, you can get plenty of use out of the phone when the battery level comes down into the single digits or leave it unused and still find it running when you pick it up again half an hour later. Something like the Galaxy S22 Ultra, meanwhile, can shut down at any random time once it's down to 5% battery or lower, and that's with a considerably bigger battery powering it!
All in all, the Galaxy Z Flip 4 is a sweet little thing that also lasts long on a single charge, much longer than any previous Galaxy Z Flip smartphone and even some other Galaxy devices with larger batteries. What's the magic trick behind that? I'm not sure, but Samsung's pulled off something almost miraculous with the Z Flip 4 in my opinion, and I can't wait to see where the company takes its flip phone-style foldables in the future.
