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

The Galaxy Z Fold7 runs Samsung’s One UI 8, which is based on Android 16. In fact, this phone, alongside the Galaxy Z Flip7, is one the first to ship with Android 16 out of the box. Despite running updated software, the Z Fold7 delivers pretty much the same experience as One UI 7 and Android 15 did on the Galaxy S25 Edge. We suggest you read our review of Samsung’s other slim handset… Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Galaxy Z Fold7 Software, User Experience, And AI

One UI 8 retains the vertically scrolling app tray and further banishes Bixby in favor of Google’s Circle to Search, Gemini, and Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing – not to mention Galaxy AI’s expansive and comprehensive features, which range from really useful to quite gimmicky. This includes generative AI features like transcription, formatting, summarization, interpreting, and live translation – to name a few.

In addition, the Z Fold7 benefits from Samsung’s excellent AI-based image-editing tools, which can run completely on device. These let you move, scale, erase people or objects, and fill in the background (Generative Edit), create stylized portraits (Portrait Studio), and generate pictures based on what you draw (Sketch to Image). You can also compare original and edited photos on the large inner display (Side-by-Side Editing), which is helpful.
Unfortunately, Now Brief (and the related Now Bar) still doesn’t feel very personalized, and still doesn’t surface much beyond the current weather, upcoming calendar events, and one news article. On the plus side, Samsung keeps refining One UI’s taskbar and multi-window features, and the Z Fold7’s multi-window experience is now almost on par with Open Canvas on the Oppo Find N5 and OnePlus Open.

Like Samsung’s other flagships, the Z Fold7 benefits from seven years of OS upgrades and security updates. As a bonus, our unlocked review unit was light on pre-installed bloatware. Beyond the usual collection of Google and Samsung apps, it shipped with only a handful of Microsoft apps (M365 Copilot, Outlook, and OneDrive), alongside LinkedIn and Spotify, all of which were easy to disable or uninstall.

Galaxy Z Fold7 Review Summary

The Galaxy Z Fold7 is a stunning achievement. It is, without a doubt, Samsung’s most technically sophisticated handset yet, and a quantum leap over its predecessors. Obviously, what stands out the most is its Z Fold7’s ultra-thin and light design, which allows Samsung’s feature-rich software and broad ecosystem to truly shine, and finally brings a competitive book-style folding phone experience to the US market.
Despite being a remarkable device overall, the Z Fold7 does fall short in a few areas, especially when compared to the Chinese competition. Battery life is middling at best, and charging speeds are slow by today’s standards. The Z Fold7’s telephoto configuration is lackluster, and zooming suffers because of it. Plus, without S Pen support, Samsung risks losing one of its most loyal audiences. Then there’s the Z Fold7’s weaker sustained performance.