The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 Is the First Foldable for You

Every year, I say I’m going to buy a foldable smartphone, and every year, they don’t quite seem ready. There’s a missing feature here, a compromise there, and don’t even get me started on the prices! But finally, after ushering the foldable category into the mainstream limelight, Samsung has finally put together the best option you can buy in the US. Here’s why the Galaxy Z Fold7 is the first foldable I’d recommend for the masses.

Flipping Out Over the Fold

Let’s get something straight off the bat. Samsung makes two folding phones (the Z Fold and the Z Flip), but only one of them ever made sense to me. I don’t need a phone that gets smaller in my pocket; I need one that does more while it’s in my hand.

The Flip might have a cute party trick that harkens back to the good old days before sliders, keyboards, and ultimately smartphones took over, but the novelty stops just short of the nostalgia train. The Flip and phones like it (sorry Razr) just aren’t that useful. No, the holy grail of foldables for me was always a device that could be a phone when I needed it and a tablet when I wanted just a little more.

That’s exactly what the Z Fold7 offers. After years of iteratively bumping out the outer and inner displays to greater dimensions, this year’s version finally hits all the marks. Looking at the Z Fold7 head-on, you almost wouldn’t notice it’s a foldable at all. The display may be slightly slimmer than its S25 Ultra cousin, and the bezels are just a little more noticeable, but by most accounts, the outer display makes for a perfectly reasonable phone.

The same goes when you look at it from the side. The two halves of the Z Fold7 are so slim that, when folded, the width of the phone is just barely larger than the S25 Ultra — a very reasonable metric. And when you unfold it, there’s almost nothing left to hold at all!

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but this thing is slim – unbelievably slim, even. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible. I know Samsung isn’t the first company to make a device this slender, but it’s the first one to do it for the US market. Not to mention, Samsung is the largest smartphone OEM on the planet, making them the first capable of producing this thin of a device at scale. That all has to count for something, right? And if not, it’s still just so dang cool.

Foldable Funk

If I had to complain, the price tag is the worst part about the Z Fold7. It’s expensive. There’s no way around it. And it’s even more expensive in the US this year. For many, the price tag is unjustifiable, and you’d be well within your rights to think that.

For me, though, the Z Fold7 offers so much value that it’s hard to fault it on the price alone. This is a device that finally makes for a perfectly reasonable phone experience with its outer display. Early videos show that it’s easy to type, scroll, make calls — do everything you’d expect it to do. It’s great.

When unfolded, it also stands in as a great tablet. While it’s not the size of a standard iPad, it has the “mini” tablet category beat. It could easily replace a Kindle for reading books, and I’ve always loved this form factor for gaming, a feat that’s all the more enjoyable with the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy under the hood.

Then there’s Dex for light desktop tasks. It’s not going to replace a traditional desktop of PC, but Google’s desktop mode for Android 16 could change that.

High Price With a High Value

On the surface, Z Fold7 is a very pricey phone. But if you zoom out, it’s really three devices in one — phone, tablet, desktop. It does it all, and the coolest part is that you can carry all three with you in your pocket.

Is the Z Fold7 perfect? Or course not. It’s technically not the thinnest foldable on the market. The unchanged battery capacity leaves plenty of questions around day-to-day longevity. I have concerns about heat dissipation and performance throttling that haven’t been tested yet. The PWM on the display is also still locked at 480Hz from last year’s Z Fold6.

There’s room for improvement next year. But for 2025, the Samsung’s latest foldable gets so much right that the downsides don’t seem all that important. The Z Fold7 is the best foldable Samsung’s ever made, bar none, and for all the reasons I mentioned above, it’s a great first foldable for anyone who’s been curious about foldables but never took the plunge. This is the one you’ve been waiting for.

It’s the one I’ve been waiting for, too, which is why I pre-ordered on day one, and I can’t wait to try it out at the end of July. See you then!