SAMSUNG GALAXY Z FOLD 7

 SAMSUNG GALAXY Z FOLD 7 Review

In this era of iterative updates, it gets increasingly hard to get impressed by anything. But the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is the one phone in years that looks outstanding. On the side of the phone, you have your standard volume rocker and a combination lock button and fingerprint sensor. The fingerprint sensor is tiny and it's possible that you have to re-scan your fingerprint a second time to unlock the device. What’s more surprising, given the phone’s dimensions, is that on the top of the phone there’s still a physical SIM slot. That’s good if your carrier doesn’t support eSIM for some reason, but that’s becoming rare these days. Down on the bottom you have a USB-C port for charging and data transfer, but because each side of the phone is just over 4mm thick, the edges of the port are almost flush with the device.

Performance     

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the fastest mobile chip on the market right now, and the same SoC which powers the Galaxy S25 line up, including the Edge. And it's the same throttling performance we saw in the S25 Edge, the peak performance of this chip is not much good in the Galaxy Z Flip 6. And to be fair, the Fold 7’s performance profile does seem to benefit AI workloads a lot. It was observed with an actual use for AI that playing around with the nifty ‘Circle to search’ feature is quick and snappy, and even works in games now. Still not sure how useful feature actually is, however looks cool it is to play with once or twice. In Geekbench, which purely tests CPU performance, the Z Flip 7 put up a multicore score of 8,041 points, compared with the Flip 6’s 6,598. That’s a 22% lead, but it comes at the cost of single-core performance. The new phone only gets 1,756 points in the single core test, which is significantly slower than the Flip 6’s 2,112 points in that test. But given that this phone is basically purpose-built for multitasking. Instead, this performance profile is much better attuned to productivity work, which is what Samsung seems to be aiming for. Samsung is willing to absorb some of the costs to “democratize AI experiences”, something the Fold 7 is really trying to do.  

Display    

While a thin phone is cool and all, perhaps the biggest improvement is with the display, and in particular the outer display. Biggest complaint with the Fold 6 and the Fold 5, was the extremely narrow aspect ratio on the outer screen. That 22:9 aspect ratio made games like Hearthstone and Marvel Snap borderline unplayable, but this year’s model updates the screen to a much more standard 21:9 ratio. It sounds like a minor update, but it’s really night and day, and puts it more in line with competitors like the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold and the One Plus Open. The new resolution when closed is 2,520 x 1,080, which unfolds to a 2,184 x 1,968 screen when it's in tablet mode. These are both gorgeous AMOLED panels, with bright colours and deep blacks. 

 Battery      

For a phone with multiple displays and the most powerful mobile chip on the planet, it might be surprising that Samsung stuck with the same 4,400mAh battery which powers the S25 Ultra. That’s not ideal, especially if you plan on doing a lot of heavy work on it, but actually it usually lasts all day. If you observe closely on the battery page in the settings just to get an idea of what battery drain looks like, you would find that the phone typically lasts around 22 hours, and that’s with approximately four hours of gaming. It’s still not a phone that’ll last for multiple days between charges, but it should last all day, and some of the way into the next morning if you forget to place it on the charger overnight.          

Camera

While the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 has probably the most pronounced camera bump ever seen, it does seem to pay off. Samsung has included a similar 200MP main camera to the one found in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, though with only three sensors. This is a huge improvement over the 50MP shooter in last year’s foldable, and is capable of much sharper shots. The front facing camera is also improved, but Samsung replaced the somewhat hidden design found in the Fold 6 with a more apparent cut out. This will be a bit more than expected. It’s not going to break away from DSLR any time soon, but the photos taken are rich and vibrant. The camera also supports a 30x digital zoom, which works much better than you expect it would. 

Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is everything you want out of a foldable: It’s faster, easier to use, and no longer has a weird aspect ratio which makes everything look like it's getting squeezed. However, the high price tag and throttle-friendly performance profile means this continues to be a niche smartphone, even if it’s the foldable that’s the closest to being a normal phone yet. Quite attractive for the folks around the world. Samsung to stay #1 in foldable, but its lead over Huawei might shrink.