Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 review

Going back to the drawing board, the engineering team seem to have outdone themselves this time around by shaving off more than 3mm off the thickness of the folded device in a single generation! That’s almost like three years of work in one, and the moment you hold the Fold 7 in your hand for the first time, you notice it immediately. 4.2mm when unfolded and 8.9mm when clammed shut is no mean feat and ties with the slimmest in the world. Next is the weight saving of 24g that makes its presence felt and along with the svelteness, it just transforms the hand feel of the Fold 7 compared to its predecessors dramatically. Samsung has worked on the ArmorFlex hinge so that it opens even flatter and besides aiding in the newfound slimness, it also manages to make the screen crease less perceptible to the touch than ever before. Typically, with more fold/unfold actions, the crease tends to become a bit more pronounced, but during our early days of testing the Fold 7, the crease is almost negligible and you can forget about its existence during regular use.

Hardware-wise, Samsung has taken this opportunity to upgrade one of the weaker points of the Fold 6, which was the under-screen camera for the main screen and the primary sensor for the rear camera. The paltry 4MP under-screen camera has been replaced with a more traditional but also more capable 10MP punch-hole camera on the main screen now and the 50MP primary rear sensor has been swapped out for the 200MP one from their other flagship, the S25 Ultra.

The other big changes come to the screens themselves and if you’ve been a user of any Fold device up until now, you’d agree that the cover screen was too narrow to serve through an entire day of digital carnage. The Fold 7 increases the width by 5mm and overall dimensions now measure 6.5in for the cover screen and a massive 8in for the main screen. Slimmer bezels, the flatter profile and the negligible crease now make it more of a joy to use than ever before and feels like a different model and brand altogether. Until you start using it…

One UI gets a big update and working in tandem with Android 16, multitasking gets smoother too. Floating and split screens can be dragged and pinned to various ratios, animations are more fluid, audio eraser is built into several native apps, generative edits can now be compared side by side on the main screen and much more. Google’s Gemini Live gets multi-modal support, bringing it one step closer to becoming the ultimate AI assistant. It gains real-time screen awareness via circle-to-search or simply pointing your camera at something and asking Gemini for info. Support for in-game circle-to-search could be a big deal for gamers looking for a quick fix or a cheat code, without leaving the game! One UI 8’s Now Brief proved to be a WIP, though and throughout the time of this test, failed to deliver anything meaningful from its understanding of calendar events. It did throw up relevant suggested YouTube videos and weather updates, but that’s about it and doesn’t warrant the need for a separate widget IMHO. 

As always, Samsung has cajoled Qualcomm into extracting maximum performance from their flagship SoC and the Fold 7 gets the Snapdragon Elite “for Galaxy” edition processor, overclocking the CPU and extracting even more performance from the GPU and NPU. 

While some apps still suffer from under-optimisation for the new screen size, using the Fold 7 is a premium experience whether you’re using the cover screen or the main one. The 5mm additional width on the cover screen has made the keyboard indubitably more convenient to type out an entire email on, without having to open the device. Video edit render times are significantly faster than on previous Fold devices we have seen and the gaming experience is top notch too, as long as you don’t go crazy with multiple games on multiple screens. Even then, the frame rates never drop below 60Hz, but it does heat up a fair bit. As is expected from Samsung, the visual quality of the display remains ahead of the pack with brilliant colours that are now a lot more accurate even when using the ‘Vivid’ option, which wasn’t the case with earlier Samsung devices. 

There are stereo speakers mounted on the cover screen to serve the expansive visuals, but the quality of the audio is fairly average and won’t encourage viewing long-form content from the built-in transducers. Plug in some punchy earbuds and the Flex mode makes it handy to watch videos on the top half of the 8in screen while the bottom half can be further split into two halves, allowing you to multitask while watching drivers getting fined for cursing on team radio during the Hungarian GP. Samsung’s One UI8 has gone all out to ensure S-pen loyalists don’t miss prodding the screen to get stuff done. With up to five windows opened simultaneously, the processor and the OS are now ready for all you can throw at it. Gemini Live’s multi-modal support lets you open the camera at something and copy that information straightaway on an adjacent window in notes or mail. The flexibility is truly staggering and the fact that Samsung is the first one out of the door with Android 16 out of the box is quite a feat.

Battery life, although unchanged from the previous gen’s 4400mAh is still pretty strong, thanks to better power efficiency now and you could still get through the entire season of Adolescence and still have some juice left to call the therapist. Charging speeds won’t set any new records at 25W wired and 15W wireless.

For photography enthusiasts, the 200MP primary sensor offers more detail and resolution, but mostly during still life. Try to capture a fast-moving subject at this resolution and more often than not, it fails to lock on to the focus on time, resulting in more blurs than pixels. Portrait mode did a great job of identifying and locking on the subject while blurring out both the foreground and the background, something most phones struggle with doing well. The 3x optical does a reasonable job of getting you closer to the action with excellent segmentation and highlights, but the same cannot be said for the other focal lengths that exhibit an unusual amount of noise in less than bright outdoor lighting. On the phone screen itself, the results look perfectly fine but transfer them to a larger, more pixel-dense display and the noise is easy to see. For social media and general everyday use, though, this is a fine camera for the fold form factor.

Macros are possible now with autofocus added to the ultrawide camera and they were pretty impressive in their sharpness. Samsung has also toned down their post processing to be a lot more natural this time around and after the second or two it takes from shooting to viewing, it does a fine job of taming exposure values and preserving dynamic range. Dolby Vision, though, like on all Samsung products, is unsurprisingly omitted. Selfies are better from the inner camera due to the 10MP unit now but overall, the camera performance still feels like it's good for a foldable. Not good, period. Vivo has an upper hand in the photography department with the X Fold 5. (review here)

Samsung’s seventh-gen Fold feels like the first one they truly nailed. The Flex hinge opens flatter, the crease is barely there, and the under-display camera is gone, replaced with a proper punch-hole cam that does the job better. Paired with the Snapdragon Elite chip, performance is snappy, multitasking is fluid and One UI 8 with Android 16 and Gemini Live turns the main display into a productivity playground. The 200MP camera sounds impressive on paper and shines in controlled lighting, but still lags behind the best in dynamic, real-world photography. But as a whole, this is Samsung’s most refined foldable yet. Not just a tech flex, but an actual tool that everyone would love to use daily, not just the “power users”. If you’ve been eyeing foldables but hesitated because of bulk or bloat, this is the one that might finally win you over.