The engineering on the Z Fold7 is world class, but in striving for thin, Samsung has made compromises that won’t please every folding phone fan.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Astonishingly thin design | Astonishingly expensive |
| Power you can use across every screen | Battery life isn’t comparatively good |
| Improved cameras | No S-Pen. Not “No S-Pen included”. No S-Pen support at all. |
Score: 4/5
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In this review
Specifications
Design
Camera
Performance
Battery
Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Galaxy Z Fold7 used in this review was loaned to me by Samsung Australia for the purposes of review, and it’s going back to them pretty sharpish. That kind of deal is quite standard for reviews. If you’ve read my reviews before you know the deal; my reviews are independent, ethically produced and companies have no editorial input into them.
In this case there is one limiting factor I do want to highlight early on, however. For complex timing reasons (including my unavailability during the Fold7’s early launch period) this review is based off a single week’s testing of the Galaxy Z Fold7. That’s less than I’d typically like, to be entirely transparent with you, but it is what it is, which is why I’m noting it here.
For more on ART’s ethics policy, see here.
Design
The existence of the Galaxy S25 Edge made it rather obvious where Samsung was going to go for its crop of 2025 foldable phones. I’ve long been a fan of the bigger Fold models – those that expand out from a regular sized phone into a smaller tablet – but even I couldn’t help but feel a little constrained by how bulky they were.
That’s not a problem that the Galaxy Z Fold7 has, because it’s quite spectacularly thin. I really do have to take my cap off to Samsung’s R&D department, because in terms of phone design, there’s just nothing like the Z Fold7.
The Galaxy Z Fold7 is very thin for a foldable phone, in case that wasn’t clear to you.
Where with the S25 Edge I was left wondering if thin was “enough”, here it serves some practical purpose, because it does make the Galaxy Z Fold7 considerably easier to stow in a pants pocket or just simply use one-handed like a regular 6.5 inch phone.
To give this some context, I grabbed the Galaxy Z Fold7 and the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Samsung’s other premium flagship phone for this year for a quick photo shoot.
Yeah, that’s nicely thin. Top engineering work, Samsung. Have a gold star!
There is a slight catch here, quite literally. Like the Galaxy S25 Edge, that thin design only covers the screen frame, not the camera bump, and it’s prominent.
Without a case, the Galaxy Z Fold7 will never sit flat on any surface, and while my review time has been limited, I’ve noticed more than once that the camera bump will stick on the lip of a pants pocket because it protrudes so particularly noticeably.
Sir Mix-A-Lot approves of the Galaxy Z Fold7’s camera bump. I’m not quite so sold on it.
The other catch that I’ve noticed with the Galaxy Z Fold7 is that it’s quite the slippery character, which isn’t really something you want out of a phone at this price point. I had one accidental instance of a drop test when it slid out of my hand, thankfully landing on carpet with no damage at all – but with pricing starting at $2,899, that’s near-heart attack territory for sure.
The presentation of the Fold line has always tended towards a more businesslike aesthetic, and Samsung’s colour choices this year back that up, with an elegant array of options covering Silver, Black, Green and Blue, or Blue Shadow, Silver Shadow, Jetblack and Mint if you like marketing names for colours.
Mint isn’t available at regular retail however; if you’re in the Kermit camp you’ll have to get a Galaxy Z Fold7 direct from Samsung itself.
In display terms, Samsung has extended itself, offering up a 6.5 inch cover display – or in Samsung-speak for some reason, the “Sub” display, I’ll let you make the jokes in your own time – that unfolds out to an 8 inch internal display. That’s a pleasing bump up from last year’s Galaxy Z Fold6, which features a 6.3 inch and 7.6 inch display respectively.
Open the Galaxy Z Fold7 up and while you’ve got a bigger display than last year’s model, you’re also faced with a noticeable internal camera punchhole.
For the past few generations Samsung’s opted for an in-display camera, leaving you with a full screen display that had a small, slightly grainier presentation to accommodate that lens. The in-display camera was never great as a camera in its own right, but some may feel the loss if they don’t like the visual look of a camera hole in its place.
When I went hands-on with the Galaxy Z Fold7, Flip7 and Watch8, I made a mistake, based on an assumption, and I do believe in full transparency. I assumed that Samsung didn’t show off much in the way of S-Pen action because it’s been such a key part of the Fold story to date that it was just, well… assumed.
You know the old adage about assumptions, right?
One of the potentially biggest tradeoffs with the Galaxy Z Fold7’s new thin design is that while, like prior Folds, it doesn’t ship with an S-Pen, there’s also no option to buy one for the Galaxy Z Fold7 at all.
The nature of the Galaxy Z Fold’s display has always meant you had to buy a Fold-specific S-Pen, but there’s simply no support for Samsung’s proprietary stylus at all baked into the Galaxy Z Fold7 in any way.
“S-Pen? Never heard of it guvnor. Have I mentioned how thin I am, though?”
I am on the record as not being a huge user of the S-Pen, but that’s a downgrade if the larger display was one you used for note taking, screen captures or just doodling silly faces during boring work meetings. Hey, I won’t judge what you might have done with an S-Pen…
In terms of durability, while Samsung has talked up the durability of its new hinge and chassis, the limited review time — and lack of desire on my part to get into mostly-pointless destruction porn — means I’ve not really tested that side of the Z Fold7’s construction to speak of.
The Galaxy Z Fold7 is rated at IP48, the same as its predecessors, which basically means it’s potentially protected against immersion in water, but dust could rather more easily find its way inside its enclosure.
That’s identical to prior years, and my advice, hand slippage nothwithstanding would be to try to avoid getting it either wet or dusty, because most warranties aren’t that friendly to damage caused by water or dust ingress.
Camera
One of my primary complaints about the Fold line since its inception has been that they’ve been Samsung’s most expensive phones, but in return for your fat stack of cash, you never quite got the best cameras that Samsung was offering at the time.
The bad news for the Galaxy Z Fold7 is that this is still essentially true; if you want the best Samsung camera phone right now, that’s the Galaxy S25 Ultra.
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The good news is that the Galaxy Z Fold7 seriously ups its camera game, grabbing the 200MP sensor found on the S25 Edge, combining that with a 12MP ultrawide and 10MP 3x telephoto zoom camera at the rear, while both selfie cameras – cover display and interior main display – are 10MP models. As noted above, there’s no more in-display 4MP camera to play with, but honestly, that was a pretty lousy camera in most situations, so that’s an upgrade too.
Here again the thinner nature of the Galaxy Z Fold7 really does pay dividends, because it’s a much easier camera to use when folded up, helped as well by slightly more rounded corners than its predecessors.
Fully open in Tablet mode is, as you’d expect, less simple to operate, though its low carrying weight – less than a S25 Ultra or iPhone 16 Pro Max does help a little here.
Camera results are pleasingly good, too; that 200MP primary sensor gives you a lot of room for experimentation and cropping, and while you can’t quite zoom out to the same extent as the S25 Ultra, capped at 30x, those extreme zooms are rarely all that good anyway.
If you’re after the best in a Samsung camera phone this isn’t it, but it’s a big jump up from what the Galaxy Z Fold6 offered, and it makes a more compelling argument in favour of the Galaxy Z Fold7’s asking price.
Still, I’m old school, and I can still recall that the very first generation Galaxy Z Fold, when first announced, had the best cameras available to Samsung at that time. Maybe next year, Samsung?
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 Sample Photos
The Internet was made for cat photos, and the Galaxy Z Fold7 does a good job capturing them.
Focus is nicely quick; this was just a simple handheld shot of a bubbling water fountain.
Lower light environments are handled well, even in areas where lights might blow out an image.
Just one more cat photo. I promise.
Samsung’s post-processing is quite vivid — but most people do tend to like that approach.
Close-up detail works well.
OK, I lied. Of course I took more cat photos.
Performance
Like its other flagship phones in 2025, the Galaxy Z Fold7 is built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite For Galaxy processor, paired with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, though if you want the higher RAM count you’ll have to pony up an eye-watering $3,549 for the 1TB model. The less-wallet-bashing 256GB and 512GB storage models ship with 12GB of RAM. Samsung loaned me the 256GB variant, so it’s the 12GB of RAM version I was testing with.
Not surprisingly, this leads to some truly excellent performance when put up against its competition, both in the premium phone price space and against other foldable devices. Here’s how the Galaxy Z Fold7 compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
It’s still not worth it upgrading year over year, even though that bump up in performance from the Fold6 is quite marked, and the distance between the Galaxy Z Fold7 and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is even wider.
It’s a similar story looking at graphics performance by way of 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme benchmark:
There’s plenty of power here, and in a foldable phone that makes a little more sense than it does on a standard screen, simply because there’s more scope for app multitasking, whether that’s side by side displays or floating ones, though there’s a practical limit here to quite how far you can push that kind of play.
On the software side, the Galaxy Z Fold7 is an Android 16 phone with Samsung’s typical 7 year upgrade cycle for both OS upgrades and security updates. You won’t see those quite as rapidly as you might on a Pixel device, because Samsung’s OneUI sits on top of everything, but it’s at least consistent and a great promise of future support to enhance the value proposition of spending quite this much on a phone.
Of course, it’s 2025, so I have to talk about AI for a least a little while. The Galaxy Z Fold7 supports Google’s own Gemini AI and features that have been around for a while like circle to search, though of course you’ll have to do so with your grubby human finger, not with an S-Pen on this phone.
You also get Samsung’s own “Galaxy AI” features for matters such as photo and audio editing. They’re a mixed bunch, and the one feature that I do appreciate is side-by-side photo editing, if you’re using generative editing to modify your photos.
I’ll give you a visual example of how this works. Take this shot of the side of a bridge, with ugly graffiti tags spoiling the view.
I don’t want the graffiti, but frankly, the beam is dominating the image altogether, so let’s get generative AI to remove it.
Once you’ve made a selection and generated a change, you can quickly bring up the original shot for side-by-side comparison.
The end result image is automatically tagged as AI generated, which I do like for the sake of transparency, though you wouldn’t have to peer too hard at the fake trees to figure out that something was off about this image:
I do wish this wasn’t just tied to generative editing, however; the screen’s right there, so why not make it a regular editing feature for non-AI adjusted photos too?
Of course, you can take this too far, and naturally I did, quickly sketching in a cat (badly) on the remaining crossbeam and letting the Galaxy Z Fold7’s “Galaxy AI” make a new image of it.
It’s not worth it, though.
Galaxy AI features are unique to Samsung’s premium Galaxy phones, but the company remains tight-lipped about how much it might charge for them come the end of 2025, when they stop being free. For those with calendars handy, that’s only a few months from now. So far, I’ve not seen anything in Galaxy AI that I’d pay any money for, but tastes and needs can vary.
On the network side, the Galaxy Z Fold7 is 5G capable, but (sigh), it’s still just sub-6Ghz 5G, not mmWave for the Australian models.
I think everyone knows how I feel about major phone makers dudding Australian consumers in this regard, but it feels particularly galling to have it happening on a phone that costs this much. If you’re going to charge eye-watering amounts, surely a little speed boost isn’t too much to ask for… is it?
Battery
Being thin does bring with it some compromises, though again here I’ve got to give Samsung some serious credit for clever engineering that leads to a battery capacity of 4,400mAh.
Hang on, Alex, I hear you cry. The average Android phone packs in a 5,000mAh battery. Why does Samsung gets any credit for a lower-than-average battery size?
Primarily because while the Galaxy Z Fold7 is the company’s thinnest foldable phone by a wide margin, it actually hasn’t dropped the battery size in two generations. The Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Fold5 both had the exact same battery capacity. That’s some smart engineering, right there.
Capacity and capability are different beasts, however, and while my time testing out the Galaxy Z Fold7 has been somewhat limited, I was struck by the fact that while its engineering is quite fine, its actual battery capability in real world situations isn’t as good as it could be given its high asking price.
First stop, my standard YouTube battery test. If you want to find out more about how I test phone batteries, you can read here for the full set of details, but the basics here are that I look for at least 90% battery left after one hour – phones that can’t do that typically can’t last a day’s moderate usage – and every percentage point above that usually denotes superior battery performance.
So how did the Galaxy Z Fold7 compare?
92% by itself isn’t a terrible figure, and more anecdotally all-day battery life is definitely achievable, but it’s below par not only against its predecessor in the exact same test, but also every other phone you could buy for this kind of premium money right now.
The gap between the Fold7 and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is particularly marked, with the Pixel Fold managing better battery life after three full hours compared to just two for the Fold7.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is expected to launch later in August, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up against Samsung’s best here. Stay tuned for my review of that phone.
As with Samsung’s flagship phones of late, there’s no charger in the box, so you’ll have to provide your own wired or wireless charger, with support for 25W wired and 15W wired charging, under that weird sub-set of the Qi2 specification that supports the charge rate but not actual magnetic connectivity unless you spend even more on a magnetic case.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7: Alex’s Verdict
Samsung’s Fold phones have, since their inception, always been expensive. That just goes with the territory, and it’s not as though you’re awash with alternative choices in the Australian market, with only Google really bringing the battle to Samsung.
Most people won’t be able to afford or justify the asking price of the Galaxy Z Fold7, but it was ever thus. For those who can or are keen, the real question then becomes whether the Galaxy Z Fold7 is the best foldable phone you can buy right now?
Absolutely.
The engineering is truly world-class on this phone, and it’s genuinely the first “thinner” phone where I can see the point of making it thinner, unlike the S25 Edge where it felt more like a gimmick than a useful feature.
It’s very powerful, it’s backed by Samsung’s long-term commitment to upgrades, giving it great long-term value, and the improvements in camera technology, while not making it the best camera phone in Samsung’s phone family are quite welcome.
On the downside, the battery life is lower than on older Fold models or any other competing handset at this price point. Not to a level where it’s a disaster, but certainly to a level where heavy users of the Galaxy Fold7, and especially that larger main display may need to reach for a charger a little earlier than they’d like. It’s also slippery in the hand, and that could be problematic unless you invest in a case, at which point it’s nowhere near as thin as it was.
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