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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 review: An ultra foldable in all but name

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The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 gets a series of upgrades in the form of a thinner build and better camera — but it’s also ultra expensive.
We’re a number of years into the availability of foldable phones, but it feels like they’re just now, finally, coming into their own. Gone are the days when buying a book-style foldable meant carrying around a phone two times the thickness of a traditional phone or using totally sub-par cameras. These days, there are a few foldables that are about as thick as a slab phone when folded. Case in point: The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.
The new device keeps a similar overall look as the Z Fold 6, and isn’t going to break any records when it comes to performance or camera quality. It’s also expensive. Very expensive. Ironically, you’d pay less for two Samsung Galaxy S25 devices that you could glue together — and for the money, you’d get double the processing.
So, what do you actually get for a cool $2,000? Well, you get what’s arguably the best pocketable productivity machine out there. Only one problem. Even with a phone this size, are you really going to be more productive?Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 specsSamsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 review: Design
By far the biggest and most important change to the Galaxy Z Fold comes in the form of the new design. At a glance, and based on images online, you might not assume the design is a big deal. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 looks very similar to the Galaxy Z Fold 6 in all ways but one — thickness.
For a foldable phone, that’s kind of a big deal, and the device does truly feel very thin, especially when unfolded. It’s hard to overstate this. The device is 4.2mm thick unfolded, which is around half the thickness of a device like the iPhone 16 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. The end result? When folded up and in your pocket, you might not feel much of a difference.
Truly, the phone feels amazing to hold — and it feels much different than it looks. That’s true both folded and unfolded — folded up it feels like a standard phone, instead of a thick phone. Unfolded, it feels incredibly thin. It is sometimes a little tricky to unfold, but you get used to where to place your fingers to do so easily. Just don’t expect to be able to unfold it with one hand.
To be clear, there are other super-thin foldable phones out there. For example, the Honor Magic V5 is around the same thickness, and Honor has been making thin foldables for a while now. But, those other super-thin foldables aren’t available in every market, and if you live in the U.S., the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is indeed a big deal.
That ultra-thin build does have its trade-offs. Namely, cameras haven’t gotten magically thinner just because the rest of the phone has, and while Samsung could opt for thinner cameras if it wanted, that would come at the expense of camera quality. We’ll get into how the cameras perform later, but for now, you can probably tell that they protrude from the back of the phone a fair more than they did on the Z Fold 6. When you’re holding the phone, you won’t really notice it, but you will when the device is on a table or desk — it moves a whole lot more. Perhaps a Pixel-style camera bar would be a better choice here, as it would avoid the phone wobbling around if you set it on a table. It would still move when unfolded, though.
There are some other design changes. The phone has a wider and taller footprint, which means that it offers larger screens.
While the thickness of the phone is clearly a step forward, there are other design changes that some might consider a step back. Notably, the front-facing camera on the inside screen has moved from being under the display to being a pinhole cutout. I’m not sure how I feel about this. To be sure, the pinhole camera is much higher-quality than the under-display camera, but I only ever used the front-facing camera of the inside screen for video calls. That said, the under-display camera was far from invisible. I’m basically indifferent about this change.
The hinge on the device felt strong enough. I didn’t conduct any durability tests during my review (I agreed not to as part of Samsung’s review program), but it generally felt like it was about as durable as the Galaxy Z Fold 6.

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