Review: I think the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is Samsung’s best foldable yet

There are plenty of times in life when thinner isn’t necessarily better, but in the case of tablet-style foldable phones, slimming down is definitely for the best.

That’s my big takeaway after several days playing with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, the latest flagship foldable from the Korean tech giant. It combines what I always liked best about this style of foldable (namely the incredible versatility of its display modes) with an almost unbelievably sleek form factor that makes it the best Samsung foldable yet.

Yes, it starts at $1,999, making it the textbook definition of a premium or luxury product. And beyond that, its battery life didn’t wow me during my testing, and what counts for new software features here mostly just bring the Fold line up to speed with previous Galaxy phones’ AI features. But there’s so much else to like about the Fold 7 that if you have $2,000 lying around and any part of it sounds appealing to you, it’s well worth your consideration. Plus, if you pre-order from Amazon, you can get a $300 gift card to soften the financial blow.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7: Price and specs

Just looks like a normal phone from this angle.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

As I already covered, this phone is going to cost you two grand to start. Perhaps the specs sheet will do a good job of explaining why:

• 8-inch AMOLED inner display with 2184×1968 resolution and 120Hz adaptive refresh rate

• 6.5-inch AMOLED cover display with 2520x1080p resolution and 120Hz adaptive refresh rate

• Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset

• 12/16GB RAM

• 256/512GB/1TB memory

• 4,400mAh battery

In plain English, that means you’ve got two very large, high-quality displays to go along with one of the higher-end mobile chipsets on the market right now. Even with a relatively small battery size (more on this later), this is a powerful device and the price reflects that.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7: Design and displays

Even when folded, it’s tiny.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is pretty incremental in a lot of ways, but its physical design is probably the biggest area where Samsung made real changes this year. I’ll get to why in a second, but first, let me say the color choices this year are dull: Blue Shadow, Silver Shadow, and Jet-black. Blegh. My pink iPhone 16 may not be as powerful a device, but it’s got way more pizzazz, I’ll tell you that much.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that Samsung made the Galaxy Z Fold 7 significantly thinner and lighter than any foldable I’ve ever used. It’s in keeping with the recent Galaxy S25 Edge, a phone that offered thinness and little else as a primary selling point. (Ultra-thin phones are also a major theme in the mobile world this year.) Its 215g weight is perfectly agreeable in the hands for a device with two big displays; it’s actually lighter than the S25 Ultra, which notably only has one display on it.

With a thickness of just 8.9mm when folded and 4.2mm when unfolded, the Z Fold 7 really needs to be seen and held to be believed. I’ve reviewed a handful of these tablet-style foldables over the years, and none of them have ever felt as good in the hands as this one does. I’m still a bit skeptical overall of the long-term viability of high-end foldables compared to regular smartphones (they really need to start costing less than $2,000), but from a pure usability standpoint, the Z Fold 7 is just tremendous.

Look at that little guy.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

Both displays are also perfectly solid, as you’d expect from the spec sheet. The 8-inch inner display is still wonderful for watching videos on the go, while the 6.5-inch outer display works very well as a regular phone when you don’t feel like unfolding the unit. I also didn’t really notice the crease at all while using the phone in its unfolded state. It’s hard to believe, but foldable makers have more or less figured out that part.

If I have one complaint in this department, it’s that there’s a noticeably thick bezel around the outer display. It doesn’t really affect usability, but it immediately stood out to me the first time I used the Z Fold 7. It just looks a little awkward, that’s all. Not a deal-breaker, by any means, but worth pointing out.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7: Performance

Nothing to worry about, performance-wise.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

Let’s get the hard data out of the way first: Using the GeekBench 6 benchmarking software, the Z Fold 7 recorded a multi-core score of 9,600. That’s actually a little less than the 10,049 I registered on S25 Ultra earlier this year, but still a very high score overall. I’m not convinced the difference of 449 points actually matters in any meaningful way here.

Put simply, this phone works very well when you try to do pretty much anything on it. Apps load quickly, having a bunch of them open at once doesn’t noticeably slow it down, and I didn’t notice any egregious examples of the phone being uncomfortably warm to the touch after periods of use. Performance is not an issue here.

I will say, though, that this isn’t a banner year for new software ideas from Samsung’s foldable team. As far as I can tell, the Z Fold 7 just takes the AI features that were present in the S25 phones earlier this year and lightly adapts them to the bigger display. That does mean you have a much better way to edit photos than you would on a normal smartphone (complete with split-screen side-by-side editing), but the actual editing features don’t feel particularly new or novel here.

The other main advantage of the foldable form factor with regards to AI stuff is that you can drag and drop your creations from one app to another using split-screen view, which is nice. Other than that, there just isn’t a lot to play with here that wasn’t already around in one form or another before. 

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7: Cameras

Your three rear lenses.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

To its credit, Samsung delivered a fairly beefy camera upgrade this year. The main selling point is the new 200MP main shooter on the back, which is a big jump from 50MP a year ago. Here are the full camera specs:

• 200MP wide rear lens

• 12MP ultra-wide rear lens

• 10MP telephoto rear lens with 3x optical zoom

• 10MP selfie cameras on both the exterior and interior displays

To keep it simple, the Z Fold 7 takes nice photos. The new 200MP main lens produces very pretty, clear, and vibrant shots.

Brooklyn looks good through the Z Fold 7’s lenses.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

You can also get down with some nice macro photography. I recommend taking advantage of this while flowers are still in bloom.

Pretty.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

Nighttime photography is fine, too. One could argue that it makes images look a little artificial, but our backyard is nearly impossible to photograph at night, but the Z Fold 7 did a pretty good job of capturing it.

Left:
No nighttime mode.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

Right:
Nighttime mode.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

The Z Fold 7 is capable of up to 30x digital zoom. The results aren’t great, to be honest, but they rarely are in my experience on phones like this. You can get zoomed-in images that are technically clear and visible, but you can tell that the software is filling in some blanks to get there if you look closely enough.

Left:
No zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

Right:
30x zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

Still, it’s not a disappointing camera system by any means. Portrait mode is always there for your social media shots, too. In all, I dig it.

Looking good, my man.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7: Battery life

The only thing I found truly disappointing about the Z Fold 7? The battery life.

At first glance, the 4,400mAh cell size didn’t stand out to me because that’s pretty normal for smartphones, and there are other factors at play, like power efficiency, that make the size of the cell not a great indicator of total battery life. Still, maybe I should’ve been more wary. In performing Mashable’s standard battery testing (which involved playing a video in HD on the inner display at 50 percent brightness until the phone died), I got about 20 hours of life out of the Z Fold 7. Obviously, normal use that doesn’t involve a full day of video playback will probably squeeze some more juice out of it. It’s not a uselessly small battery by any means, but for a $2,000 phone, you’d like to have some more life on a single charge.

Is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 worth it?

Battery quibbles aside, this is a really good foldable phone. I think if you can make the price work for you (via trade-in or otherwise) and you think the form factor would benefit you in any way, you might have found your next phone.

Galaxy Z Fold 7 is my favorite Samsung foldable yet almost entirely on the back of its extreme thinness and solid performance. Its software features aren’t really anything to write home about, but we live in the age of diminishing returns, so that’s to be expected at this point. It wins in enough other areas that this could be a nice everyday device for years to come, assuming there aren’t any long-term technical problems that wouldn’t show up in a launch window review.

Where to buy the new Galaxy Z Fold 7

Both Amazon and Samsung have pre-order offers available, as of this writing. The phone will officially ship on July 25.