Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 Review: The One You’ve Waited For
Is a week enough time to test one of the hottest phones of the year? Probably not, so I took a week and a half, and now I think I have a good grasp on the newest foldable on the market, inside and out. Here’s my official review of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 — the good, the bad, and whether or not I plan to send it back.
A thought kept turning over in my head as I pulled the Galaxy Z Fold 7 out of its box for the first time: this thing feels impossible. Impossibly thin. Impossibly light. Impossibly premium. The usual descriptors like “stunning” and “gorgeous” didn’t even come close. The phone, even as I held it in my hands, just didn’t feel real, and yet it was right there. Tangible. Foldable. A piece of art.
Then the reality of that impossible thinness started to kick in.
First-Time Fears
I had some very real fears straight out of the box. Granted, I haven’t worried about the durability of a smartphone for well over a decade. On top of that, the only time I’ve ever broken a phone was thanks to a freak accident in college. It slipped out of my pocket while jogging across a busy street, after which it was promptly crushed by a bus. That wasn’t a good day.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is different. It has more moving parts than most phones, and the inner display, though improved over past Fold phones, is made of a material that’s far more delicate than the reinforced glass found on a typical slab. Even after all these years of development, the interior screen will scratch at a measly level 2 on the Mohs Hardness Scale (compliments to JerryRigEverything for destroying his Z Fold 7 so I didn’t have to).
I started to wonder if I could accidentally scratch the inner display with my fingernail, or get a piece of pocket lint stuck in the hinge, or something else that I haven’t thought of yet — you know, the kind of things you just don’t have to worry about with a tried and true slab smartphone.
Thankfully, Dan Seifert of The Verge fame and now a product critic at Google, was quick to quash my fears, and he wasn’t the only one. Several existing Fold owners on Threads also came to assure me that I had nothing to worry about, so I started to relax. Maybe everything was going to be alright.
I’m Your Fool
Before we get too deep into this review, I’ve got another confession to make (cue the Foo Fighters soundtrack). I’m a fan of Samsung hardware. I’ve owned several Samsung phones over the years, and I liked most of them. But the cold, hard truth: only one of them ran Android.
The last Samsung phone I bought with my own money was a Galaxy S3. A year later, I got a job with Samsung as part of their Samsung Experience Store launch at Best Buys from coast to coast, where I sold S4s, Note 3s, and the very first version of the Galaxy Gear that landed before the days of Android Wear. That means my most recent memory of a Samsung phone came with a TouchWiz wrapper layered on top of Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
Fast forward a decade later. Aside from mindlessly scrolling through a test unit at a local store or glancing at the S25 Ultra in my brother-in-law’s hand, I’ve never experienced One UI on the daily.
Why? Because I’m a Google Pixel guy. And before that, I was in the Nexus camp. Although I’ve tried many Android devices over the years, Google’s version of Android is the one I fell in love with back in the Jelly Bean era, and I’ve been hooked ever since. It just feels like home.
That all changed when my Galaxy Z Fold 7 arrived. With my new foldable in hand, this past week+ is the longest I’ve used a non-purist Android phone. Will I love it? Hate it? Return it? It’s finally time to find out.
Hardware Part 1: Unbendable Like Beckham
I’ve said it a dozen times, and it deserves to be said again: the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is impossibly thin. In fact, it may even be too thin.
When folded, the phone feels great in the hand. Most people wouldn’t even know it can fold out at all. I had my mother-in-law hold it, and she didn’t realize its true identity until my wife, bursting with anticipation, spilled the beans before she could figure it out herself. With most of the proportions of a typical slab, the Z Fold 7 is the perfect foldable in disguise, both for knowing users and unsuspecting newcomers.
But unfolded into tablet mode, the device is razor-thin. On one hand, it’s a manufacturing marvel that the Z Fold 7 is as sleek as it is. Whoever packed it all into this chassis deserves a raise. On the other hand, it’s so svelte that there really isn’t a lot to hold onto when using it. It feels delicate, vulnerable, and fragile, like one wrong move could snap it in two. I haven’t tried that myself, of course, because I’m generally in the business of preserving my devices, but again, JerryRigEverything brings my greatest fears to life. I mean, look at how easily it bends! Just watch it-...wait a second. Is it actually bendgate-proof!?
I’ll admit, I was surprised when I saw the results of JerryRigEverything’s torture test. Given the dimensions of the phone, I expected we’d crown a new bendgate champion, and that clearly didn’t happen. However, despite watching Zack Nelson do his best to turn a Galaxy Z Fold 7 into two Z Fold 3.5s, I still had two close calls with my own phone that made me a little nervous.
On day two, I forgot which way the phone was oriented in my hands, and I tried to fold it along the line opposite to the crease instead of with the crease. I stopped applying pressure the moment I felt the phone resist with a reluctant creak, and I pulled back, no harm, no foul. A couple days later, I went to fold the phone properly, this time putting my finger a little too close to one of the inner hinge mechanisms, and it let out an unsettling popping sound as I closed the phone. Panicked, I opened and closed the phone a few more times, and nothing was damaged or out of place. The sound also never came back. Thank goodness.
Still, it’s little things like these that remind me how quickly a $2K masterpiece could become an otherwise beautiful paperweight. Just one misplaced finger or a lapse of attention, and I can see how someone could break a Z Fold 7 before they realize they did it. Then again, we all just watched a man actively try (and fail) to tear one in half, so maybe my concerns are invalid.
Tell me why I’m being silly in the comments below.
Hardware Part 2: The Fold Awakens
Irrational fears aside, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the hardware highlights that make the Z Fold 7 a manufacturing marvel.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy is a fantastic chip with snappy performance, powerful graphics, and decent heat management. It’s even better when you can cram all that performance into such an easily pocketable phone that’s also a tablet. Again, it doesn’t feel possible to have it all, yet this phone exists.
Thermals are a clear high point. The only time the Z Fold 7 got warm was during extended gaming sessions, but even then, the heat was never unbearable, and performance never took a hit. I even sacrificed an entire weekend to play games on the inner screen, but it never skipped a beat. I’m very impressed.
The dual speakers are also surprisingly robust for a device this thin. They pump out plenty of feedback while watching videos or playing games. Granted, it doesn’t have the bass to shake itself off its hinges, but the output is more than serviceable. My only complaint is that, depending on which orientation you hold the Z Fold 7, sometimes your hands will cover the speakers and muffle the experience.
Lastly, the overall build quality of this thing is simply stunning. The Z Fold 7 feels like it was expertly crafted, each complex piece fitting together to form one sleek, beautifully refined gem. It’s immaculate. Even if you never buy a Z Fold 7, you should run out to your nearest store and hold one in your hands. Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Software Sundry
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone already in the Samsung ecosystem, but my brothers and sisters on the Pixel side need to know that if Pixel is all about simplifying Android, One UI is a Swiss Army Knife. I was delightfully surprised to find all the added customization options and capabilities. You can tweak everything. Sort the app drawer, stack your widgets, run more than three apps at a time, change your default AI assistant, take advantage of extra features built into Samsung’s suite of first-party apps, slide out the Edge Panel for better access to your favorite people, apps, etc. If there’s something you’d like to do or change in One UI, Samsung will probably let you.
The snappiness of One UI overall deserves its own award. It’s fast, fluid, and I didn’t run into a single stutter. Not once. While the Pixel Launcher is seen as the gold standard for how a skin should perform on Android, One UI is a close second, if not pulling ahead. Some of this may be driven by more powerful hardware, like the Z Fold 7’s wicked-fast Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy vs. the Pixel 9 Pro XL’s slower Tensor G4. But Samsung has also spent years optimizing One UI, and it shows. They’ve come a loooooong way since the days of TouchWiz.
If I had to distill it down into a sentence, One UI is the culmination of a bunch of little quality-of-life changes that make it feel more powerful, productive, and interesting than the Pixel Launcher.
Closing Arguments
When I bought the Galaxy Z Fold 7 for review, I gave myself an ultimatum: if it wasn’t an indispensable piece of my digital life by the time this article hit the web, I would send it back. Now that my test window is finished, I can say that my decision wasn’t an easy one.
There are a lot of things I like about the Z Fold 7:
The convenience of a phone when I need it and a tablet when I want it is the main appeal for a foldable like this one, and it’s great to have that option on the fly without grabbing another device. It makes browsing the web, watching videos, reading books, playing games, and scrolling through social media feeds more enjoyable and engaging.
The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite on all accounts – daily tasks, heavy gaming, AI features – makes Google’s move to Tensor look like a mistake (though that may change soon, with TSMC as Google’s new chip foundry of choice).
One UI 8 has been a delight to test out for the first time ever, and I love the customization options sprawled throughout the operating system and Samsung’s core apps. One UI 8 takes the best of Android 16 and makes it even more capable, if that’s even possible.
The entire Z Fold 7 experience feels very thoughtful and meticulously crafted to convey elegance, capability, and quality. It’s a delight to hold and an even bigger joy to use.
There are also plenty of things I don’t like about it:
As it turns out, the battery life hasn’t been all that great, and fast charging is much slower than expected. I went from 15% to 80% in 51 minutes and it took 87 minutes to hit 100%. I’m not sure I would trust the Z Fold 7 on a long day away from a charger without a battery pack.
The durability of the inner display is still a red flag. Despite reassurances from people far smarter than me, I’m still nervous I’m going to scratch it or even break it. On top of that, I can’t imagine having a phone long-term that I have to cautiously use for the next year or two. That just sounds unnecessarily stressful.
Then there’s the matter of the price. Just a couple weeks ago, I argued that the 3-in-1 nature of a phone + tablet + Dex made the Z Fold 7 worth the MSRP, but I couldn’t get Dex to work with my display setup, so my rationale is slowly crumbling. Plus, it’s hard to swallow that kind of cash for a phone that is still notably more fragile than most devices.
Finally, for some reason, my Z Fold 7 doesn’t fold out completely flat after it’s been folded for a while. If I leave it unfolded long enough, it does eventually level out, but it’s back to being a few degrees off when I unfold it again a couple hours later. This is a small gripe for sure, but it’s annoying for a phone this expensive, and I’m not alone.
My biggest Z Fold 7 deterrent, though, is that at the end of the day, it’s still not a Pixel. I’m drawn to Google’s version of hardware and software because of the benefits you can’t get anywhere else. I want to be among the first to have the newest versions of Android. Pixel-first features and regular Pixel Feature Drops have become a bright spot to look forward to. I prefer the Google ecosystem with Pixel phone and Pixel Watch working beautifully in tandem, plus added perks like native Fitbit and Gemini integration are more appealing to me than Bixby and Samsung Health. Sure, you can make Gemini the primary LLM on the Z Fold 7, but the newest features still come to Pixel before anyone else.
As much as I’ve been impressed with One UI and the Z Fold 7, I prefer to live on the bleeding edge of Android software in the way that Google designed it — on Pixel.
Don’t get me wrong. I still think the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is the best foldable for users who have been waiting all these years to take the plunge. Even if the phone isn’t everything I need it to be in a daily driver, the experience is worth trying to see if it’s right for you. If you’ve ever been curious about folding phones, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is the best place to start.
Verdict: Will it Stay or Will it Go Now?
So here we are — the end of the review. Did the Galaxy Z Fold 7 become so indispensable in a week+ that I simply can’t live without it? With more time, could it dethrone my Pixel for the right to live in my front pocket for the next 6-12 months or more? Will I keep the Galaxy Fold 7, or will I return it?
As much as it pains me to say it, I think I’ll send the Z Fold 7 back.
It’s a great phone — truly one of the best I’ve recently tested, and I think it might even be the best foldable on the market. If the Z Fold 7 had come out earlier this year, I could probably even justify keeping it. But alas, Pixel season is quickly approaching, and I’m already looking for an excuse to trade my Pixel 9 Pro XL for a Pixel 10 Pro XL with its rumored PWM improvements and faster Tensor G5 chip built by TSMC.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 was a lot of fun, but in the end, it wasn’t indispensable. Its shortcomings around battery life + slow charging speeds, concerns over the inner display’s longevity, and the sticker shock of that hefty price tag all led me to return it.
I’m going to miss the Galaxy Z Fold 7, but there’s just not enough room for me to keep a $2K foldable when I know a different device is getting ready to take up space in my front pocket. As for how that all turns out, you can catch my thoughts on the newest Pixel phones and watches in my next full-length review.