We are now onto the seventh generation of Samsung foldables. To put things into perspective, I played with a Galaxy Z Fold 2 recently and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. Every sort of issue I had with that hardware has been addressed by now. The phones are much slimmer, there are no more gaps between the main display when folded, and bezels have been trimmed down significantly. Up until this year, Samsung was also holding out in the camera department, but 2025 has brought about some serious upgrades there too. Basically, if you’re someone who vibes with foldables, your life is pretty good right now.
Galaxy Z Fold 7 is an exciting step for Samsung. It launches with Android 16 (One UI 8), was finally fitted with a serious camera system, and to sum it up, Samsung seems to have realized that when people are spending this much money, they deserve to have the best of the best with little to no compromise. This is the way it should be.
This is our Galaxy Z Fold 7 review.
What I Like
Hardware: When thinking of this phone’s “wow factor,” it has to be the thinness. Everyone has seen a folding phone by now, but when I take this phone out in public, the eyes light up like they first did when foldables were new to the market. It’s incredibly good looking and feels so good in hand, people can’t seem to help but ask to try it for themselves. Samsung nailed the hardware this year, 10 out of 10.
But I suppose it can’t all be good. I joked that there was a hidden feature on this phone previously, the built-in telegraph. When sitting on a flat surface, there is a serious wobble, but that’s one of the downsides to having the big cameras on the backside paired with a thin body. It’s not the end of the world, but something you immediately notice when you start using the phone. For hardware gripes, that’s been the only issue.
One-handed use is right up there with any other phone when folded, thanks again to this thin body. Samsung has yet again reworked its hinge system to make it even more compact, which has me thinking, where do we even possibly go from here? When unfolded, the device’s thickness has become dictated by what appears to be the USB-C port. Any thinner and we wouldn’t be able to house it properly. And while the idea of an even thinner foldable may provide a small bit of existential dread, I can at least appreciate the moment and declare Z Fold 7 to have the best foldable hardware I have used to date. And seriously, it’s not even close.
Z Fold 7 weighs in at just 215 grams, lighter than a Galaxy S25 Ultra. Samsung really nailed the weight and feel of this device, coupled with an extremely satisfying open and close of the hinge system. The investment Samsung has put into the hardware on these devices is paying off big in my mind. I can’t help but think about early iterations of this phone, nowhere near where we are now in terms of refinement and dare I say, sophistication. I don’t like saying that any phone should cost this much, but at least the Galaxy Z Fold 7 feels like it could cost $1,999 and I wouldn’t question it. If you can’t tell already, I really like this hardware.
Displays: Like every other Z Fold device, we have two displays to talk about here — the cover display and main display. For 2025, each got upgrades, such as peak brightness and overall size. They’re incremental upgrades in terms of year-over-year, but again, after playing with a Z Fold 2, it is amazing to see how far we have come in a relatively short time. Let’s cover the newness.
The cover display now measures in at 6.5-inches (1080 x 2520, 21:9 aspect ratio, 2600 nits peak brightness) and continues to have a refresh rate of 120Hz. The main display comes in at 8-inches (1968 x 2184, 120Hz, HDR10+, and 2600 nits), which is 11% larger than the Z Fold 6. Bezels have been trimmed down and the displays get plenty bright for usage in outdoor environments. Thanks to the slightly widened cover display, I have found myself using the phone while folded maybe 85% of the time. The cover display is completely usable with one hand and I haven’t had reason to open the device unless I want to watch YouTube or show off the hardware to friends. This was never the case on past Z Fold devices, but with the Z Fold 7, the “main” display has become my secondary display.
Under your display settings, you’ll find many options to tinker with, but I can get you started down the right path if you want a good experience. Don’t worry, it’s not a lot of work. Obviously you’ll start by enabling dark mode, though, the drawback here is that the main display shows fingerprint smudges considerably. I’ve been using Adaptive Brightness and it has been working very well, especially in low light settings. The same goes for Eye Comfort Shield also set to adaptive. On other phones, I have set that to turn on at specific times, but again, this phone seems to sense exactly the level I want without me having to fiddle with it. That’s big bonus points.
Your motion smoothness will be set to Adaptive as well, as there is no way to “force” the higher refresh rate. This isn’t new for Samsung and still a little odd. Screen mode will be on Vivid. Lastly, because I use gesture navigation versus button navigation, I always have Edge Panel disabled. I accidentally opened it too many times and it got annoying. If you use buttons to navigate, you may opt to keep the Edge Panel for quick access to favorited apps and actions. That should get you started nicely.
Specs and Performance: Galaxy Z Fold 7 and its $1,999 starting price comes packed with some top notch specs, but I’m sure there is someone out there who will be disappointed by the lack of 16GB RAM base. That’s fair. The phone comes with a top of the line Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset (boost of 41% in NPU, 38% in CPU, and 26% in GPU speeds versus the previous generation), 12GB RAM (unless you get the 1TB model), 256GB of base storage, IP48 rating, stereo speakers, WiFi 7, side-mounted fingerprint reader which is extremely fast and accurate, 4,400mAh battery (more on that later), and Android 16 with One UI 8.
The phone is extremely fast already from my usage, but I also haven’t been pushing it to any extremes. My day to day has been so busy that I haven’t been mobile gaming as much as I would like, but the sessions I did have were enjoyable and free of lag. The big main display is capable of some serious multitasking, with the phone running multiple apps simultaneously with zero issue. You can easily surf Chrome on one side while watching YouTube videos on the other, then bring up the Gemini overlay to generate some silly images and videos. Everything is as smooth as you would expect in 2025.
Deep in your settings under Device Care, there are performance profiles owners can select from. You can choose between Standard and Light, with Light prioritizing battery life and cooling efficiency. I didn’t try this Light mode, but with the way I’ve been using the phone, maybe I could give it a run for a few days and see if it doesn’t help with my battery woes. More on the battery stuff in a bit. There is also an “auto optimization” feature which is not adjustable. It automatically performs “optimizations,” which includes closing background apps and cleaning your memory. While not able to be turned off, it at least tells you the last time that it performed these optimizations, which seems to be nightly when the device is charging. I haven’t had any issues with it, but it does seem like a very Android thing for a phone to do.
Camera: Samsung hyped Galaxy Z Fold 7 as an “Ultra” experience, and by that, the company meant it was finally bringing a good camera system to the series. In my testing, they pretty much nailed it. The main shooter is a 200-megapixel wide angle lens, (f/1.7, 24mm, multi-directional PDAF, OIS), paired with a 10MP telephoto lens (with 3x optical zoom) and 12MP ultra-wide lens. When shooting at 200MP, the amount of detail you can capture is very impressive, though there’s no way to have the camera set to always shoot with those big file sizes. You have to manually adjust each time, as it always opens to the 12MP setting.
Note that out of the box the phone is set to “Maximum” quality optimization which uses software to make photos appear higher quality (brighter, crispier, etc). If you’re someone who posts things to social media and doesn’t care about that, it works very well, but if you want a raw image with no alterations, you’ll want to select “Minimum” for there to be no post-capture optimization done.
I’ve shot in quite a few different settings with the phone and it’s been great. Colors look really good look and detail is very sharp. However, I wouldn’t say it’s as versatile as I’d hope for, mostly due to the limited 3x optical zoom. 10x would’ve been the absolute sweet spot, but likely not possible due to the phone’s overall thinness. 3x zoom, while it works fine, does mean that anything past that will give you that digitized look which isn’t very appealing. I’ve found that instead of zooming in, I can shoot in the 200MP mode and then zoom in relatively well after the fact and still have plenty of detail to play with. When shooting with 200MP, zoom while capturing is limited to 1x, 4x, and 5x. Certain features, like Motion Photo and live filters are disabled when shooting in 200MP, too.
You have all of the different shooting modes available to you, which include Expert RAW, Pro mode, Pro Video, Night, Food, Panorama, Slow Motion, Hyperlapse, Portrait Video, Dual Recording, and Single Take. I had one night that I used Night mode and it was fine. It’s still not quite as good as Pixel phones and their post-capture processing, but it’s completely usable for most people. Another feature I recommend, especially for those with kids or animals, is the Tracking Auto Focus. It’s not enabled out of the box, so be sure to enable it. With it, the rear camera will stay focused on your selected subject even when they move, which is obviously what you want when shooting kiddos and pups.
Below are some camera samples, unedited except for resizing and the compression that this website’s gallery plugin puts them through.
(10x zoom with patented digitization)
Software: This is the first non-Pixel device to launch with the latest version of Android, that being Android 16. It has One UI 8 running on top, but you definitely get the vibe that custom colors/themes and bubbly icons are a big part of what Google and Samsung are going for. Getting this part out of the way, the only real frustrating thing Samsung has done is completely mess up the Do Not Disturb button. Like on Pixel phones, before Google corrected it, you couldn’t simply hit it to activate it. You had to do an extra button press, which is frustratingly still present in One UI 8. When you tap Do Not Disturb, you’re asked how long you’d like to set it for. It shouldn’t be as obnoxious as it is, but it really does bug me.
Another initial pain point was the Quick Settings panel. Thankfully, this one is fixable. Under “Panel settings,” there are two options: Separate and Together. Out of the box, it’s separate, so your pulldown for notifications happens on the left and pulldown for system settings happens on the right. I don’t want that. I want to pull down and access everything. For this, you’ll want to select Together. It was such a relief when I realized there was an actual setting for that.
Beyond those two minor things, the software has been a lot of fun to play with, thanks to all of the intriguing Galaxy AI/Gemini stuff. Naturally, I’m not a huge user of any of it, but it was fine to play with. While Gemini has been most useful, I should highlight the Galaxy AI features, as basically anyone with a supported device can utilize Gemini. For Galaxy AI, Samsung has AI-powered Call Assist for live-time translations (not new), Transcript Assist (used for summarizing transcribed voice and call recordings), Photo Assist (allows you to add things, remove things, and resize things inside of images), as well as Audio Eraser (eliminates distracting noise from videos). There’s a whole list of things, and while I’m pretty confident that hardly anyone is using all of these things, they can be handy when needed. The Photo Assist and Audio Eraser are very good at what they do, but then there are things like Now Brief and Health Assist which I’m just not sure anyone is using.
Now Brief has been extremely unused on this device. I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I really dislike it. It shows you the weather, then some news stories from Samsung News. The stories are whatever Samsung thinks you might want, which for me, seems to be celebrity and political news. No, thank you. You can’t adjust the feed or even tell it which stories interest or disinterest you. For a newsfeed, that makes it completely useless to me. It can also help you find where you parked your car, which again, might be useful maybe two times a decade? This could just be me and I’m sure someone out there has lost their car before, but to build it into Now Brief seems overkill to me.
Galaxy Z Fold 7 is promised to get 7 years of Android OS upgrades and 7 years of security updates.
What Could be Better
Battery: Galaxy Z Fold 7 comes equipped with a 4,400mAh battery, which comes off as small due to the thinness of the device. I had hopes that the battery would be adequate, but being honest, it hasn’t impressed me at all. There was that initial few days where I assumed the phone was learning my usage and would optimize itself, but after a couple of weeks with the device, if I’m running TikTok or watching videos on YouTube, you can literally watch that battery meter drain quite quickly. In the the nature of my current lifestyle, where I could be sitting at home one night with under 30% battery left getting ready for bed, then get toned for a structure fire, there’s this bit of battery anxiety that I’m not comfortable with.
That being said, if Samsung had included some wild fast charging technology like many of the Chinese OEMs have been doing for years, this wouldn’t be an issue. Z Fold 7 is capped at just 25W wired charging and 15W wireless charging, which I won’t pull punches, seems rather lame compared to rival devices in other markets. There is a history there dating back to the Galaxy Note 7, and while we don’t want that to happen again, it’s getting to the point where fear seems to dictate what US consumers are getting offered. I could be wildly off base with that take, but seriously, why is Samsung not getting on board with what seems to be standard in other places?
Back to my actual experience, my days are typically 7AM to 11PM. Filled with pickleball, coaching, firefighting, and lots of travel lately, this phone’s battery hasn’t been keeping up as well I’d like. I have found myself wanting to plug in midday a couple of times to ensure I have juice for the night, which coming from the Pixel 9 Pro, has felt odd. As I stated earlier, I’m hardly even using the big display, so in my mind, it really comes down to the battery being too small to meet expectations. I’m averaging 2 to 3 hours of screen on time and going to bed with roughly 15 to 20-ish% battery remaining. This is not normal for me and likely way off what others get.
There are things I could do to maybe help improve the experience. I could disable Always On Display, I could enable that silly Light performance profile, and maybe not watch as much TikTok, but I kind of want to use the phone however I want. I haven’t looked at any other reviews, so I’m not sure how my colleagues are faring. All I know is, I got up at 6AM this morning, haven’t hardly touched the phone and it’s currently sitting at 92%. Something needs to be addressed, whether it be an update or I change my usage.
Other Notes
- Wife Impressions: “Really good size for one-hand handling. What I’m most excited by is that the crease is minimally visible compared to previous versions/models. And I like how the fold and unfold function feels really smooth. I’m not the biggest fan of how big the camera bumps on the back are. But overall, it’s a pretty impressive device. I like how pointy the corners are. It gives it a really trendy look.”
- No S Pen Support: As noted previously when the phone was announced, the phone lacks the physical layer in the display to support the S Pen. Some people might hate this, but I haven’t thought about it once. Z Fold 6 did support S Pen, so if you planned on upgrading and expected to find it, be aware of this change.
Should You Buy Galaxy Z Fold 7
Battery issues aside, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with Galaxy Z Fold 7. This might surprise a few, but I actually intend to continue using this device until the Pixel 10 lineup arrives. It’s that fun to use. While I do wish the battery wouldn’t cause me so much stress, the camera system has gotten the love it deserved and the fact that I can open the phone and enjoy that big tasty display makes it worth it to me. Plus, nothing beats the feeling of people being envious of what I’m running. Silly iPhone owners, indeed.
If you currently own a Z Fold device, there is little doubt to me that this phone is worth the upgrade. The hardware has gotten all of the upgrades that we dreamed about when foldables were still a new thing. Even coming from a Z Fold 5 or 6, this phone feels much better than those while in hand. I didn’t fall in love with those phones at all, but it was love at first hold with the Z Fold 7. I suppose I’m also a sucker for this blue color. I hate being so easy to please sometimes.