Galaxy Z Fold7 Review: Samsung’s Stunning Folding Phone Revival

Galaxy Z Fold7 Reception And Sound Quality

Considering the Z Fold7’s ultra-thin design and minimal internal volume, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the stereo speakers, which sound loud and clear. Obviously, there’s no headphone jack here, but the Z Fold 7 supports aptX HD, LDAC, and enhanced SSC (Samsung’s newest proprietary codec) for high-quality wireless playback over Bluetooth, plus wired listening via USB Type-C (digital accessories only).

Galaxy Z Fold7 Performance

As you’d expect, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold7 boasts Qualcomm’s flagship 3nm chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy. Despite this phone’s slim form factor, this is the 8-core SoC with the faster clock speeds exclusive to Samsung, not the regular 8-core variant, or the 7-core version found in the Oppo Find N5. It’s paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, or 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for the top model. There’s no microSD support.
Day-to-day, the Z Fold7 feels satisfyingly quick and responsive, no matter what you’re doing. We didn’t experience any hiccups running our usual suite of social media, productivity, and entertainment apps. But perceived performance is only half the story. In our benchmarks, the Z Fold7 generally matched other Snapdragon 8 Elite phones we’ve tested, except for sustained workloads, where it experienced thermal throttling.

Our review unit dropped to 45.4% of its initial score after 20 iterations in 3DMark’s Wild Life unlimited stress test. That’s among the lowest sustained performance we’ve ever recorded on this benchmark. We realize that this won’t matter to you (or most people, really) unless you’re a hard-core gamer pushing the Snapdragon 8 Elite to its limit, but it’s vexing to see this amount of thermal throttling in a phone that costs two thousand dollars. This is the price we pay for ultra-thin phone designs.

Galaxy Z Fold7 Geekbench Results

GeekBench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics calculation scenarios. We tested all of the smartphones featured here with GeekBench's single and multi-core workloads.

GeekBench 6 includes new ways of testing multicore configurations and uses higher-resolution assets. As you can see, the Z Fold7 performed quite well in this test.

Galaxy Z Fold7 PCMark For Android Results

UL's PCMark for Android is an excellent suite of tests if you want to benchmark a wide range of tasks on a handset -- things like image and video editing, as well as lighter-duty, everyday workloads such as email and web browsing. When you see the test running live, it's clear the scripted application tests are carefully selected and tuned to make use of the mobile platform in a very controlled way.

Here the Z Fold7 shows similar performance to the rest of Samsung's flagship lineup, slotting just below the Galaxy S25+.

Galaxy Z Fold7 AnTuTu 8 Benchmarks

AnTuTu’s latest benchmark returns a number of metrics ranked with somewhat nebulous scores, rather than frame rates or time to complete. Here we're running the latest version of AnTuTu across multiple Android devices. AnTuTu returns four top level performance results which are all included here: CPU, RAM, 3D, UX (or User Experience), along with a total score.


According to AnTuTu, the Z Fold7 offers an notable increase in performance vs. previous generation Android handsets, slotting below the Galaxy S25 Edge in terms of its overall score.

Galaxy Z Fold7 Graphics And Gaming Benchmarks Results

Now, let's take a look at how the Z Fold7 stacks up in GFXBench, which has been one of the standard mobile graphics/gaming performance benchmarks for years. To ensure that display refresh (v-sync) and resolution aren't limiting factors, we're comparing off-screen test results here. GFXBench tests OpenGL ES graphics workloads and we're specifically testing OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0, as well as Vulkan in the latest iterations.

As usual, we're seeing great performance from Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped devices like the Z Fold7. This phone delivers excellent scores in these graphically rich, gaming-oriented benchmarks.

Galaxy Z Fold7 3DMark Sling Shot Benchmark Tests

UL's 3DMark Sling Shot is a newer benchmark module that's been added to the 3DMark mobile suite. Unlike previous gen 3DMark mobile tests, Sling Shot is a much more advanced OpenGL ES 3.1 and Metal API-based benchmark that employs more advanced rendering techniques, like volumetric lighting, particle illumination, multiple render targets, instanced rendering, uniform buffers and transform feedback.

Z Fold7 3DMark Wild Life Benchmark Tests

Galaxy Z Fold7 Additional Features And Battery Life

The remaining specs match other Snapdragon 8 Elite handsets. You’ll find sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G under the hood, alongside CAT 20 LTE, tri-band WiFi 7 (802.11be), Bluetooth 5.4 (LE), NFC, UWB, A-GPS / GLONASS, Galileo / BDS positioning, plus the standard array of sensors. The linear vibration motor delivers strong haptics, and the side-mounted capacitive fingerprint sensor is fast and reliable. So is face unlock.

Unfortunately, the Z Fold7 retains the small 4,400mAh battery capacity and slow 25W (USB PD) wired charging speeds of the Z Fold6, Z Fold5, and Z Fold4. It also still lacks a charger in the box. Like before, the Z Fold7 features 15W (now Qi2-ready) wireless charging and 4.5W reverse wireless charging. By contrast, the Oppo Find N5 boasts a 5,600mAh silicon-carbon battery with 80W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
In our PCMark Work 3.0 battery test, the Z Fold7 scored 12h 08m. That’s not great. While we generally expect this phone to last a full day on a charge, it’s not going to match the battery life of most of today’s flagships. It’s definitely not in the same league as the Chinese competition, which is rolling out silicon-carbon cells with 2-day (or longer) battery life across the board – from folding phones to flagships to mid-range and budget handsets.