Samsung has spent the better part of half a decade trying to convince us that foldables are normal. The Galaxy Z Fold 6, released in 2024, showed just how far that campaign had gone and where it stalled. It was polished, expensive, and technically impressive, yet it still felt like a device constantly asking for patience.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 doesn’t ask anymore. It just gets on with it.
That’s the real shift here. This isn’t the Fold that changes the category. It’s the Fold that stops getting in its own way. Thinner, lighter, calmer. Less eager to remind you that it’s special. More interested in fitting into your life without commentary.
Samsung’s problem has never been engineering. It’s been restraint. Previous Folds felt overbuilt and under-considered at the same time, stacked with capability but awkward in the hand. The Fold 7 finally feels like someone was allowed to remove things instead of adding them. The weight reduction matters. The hinge feels deliberate rather than defensive. The crease no longer dominates your peripheral vision like a flaw you’re meant to ignore politely.
Those changes quietly resolve several of the frustrations I raised in my Galaxy Z Fold 6 review, where refinement had drifted into complacency. The Fold 7 corrects course by addressing the fundamentals. Ergonomics. Balance. The simple question of whether this is something you want to carry all day. For the first time, the answer is yes without qualifications.
The outer display deserves specific credit. For years, Samsung treated it as a necessary inconvenience. Narrow, usable in theory, irritating in practice. On the Fold 7, it finally feels like a real phone screen rather than a holding pattern before you unfold. That single change alters how the device behaves in the wild. You stop opening it out of obligation and start opening it by choice.
There’s also a quieter admission embedded in the Fold 7’s design. The absence of an S-Pen doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, it feels honest. Foldables are pitched as productivity machines, but most people don’t live their lives annotating documents on the move. The Fold 7 feels designed around how people actually use big screens now. Reading, scrolling, splitting apps, and watching things they probably shouldn’t be watching at work. In that context, the S-Pen’s absence isn’t a loss. It’s clarity.
Software, too, feels less performative. Multitasking works because it’s predictable, not because it’s clever. The interface doesn’t constantly push you toward showing off the fold. It trusts you to decide when the bigger screen is worth it. That trust makes the whole experience feel calmer and more grown up.
What caught me off guard is how completely this device disarmed my own scepticism. I’ve been openly anti-foldable and had long since drifted away from Samsung after years of iPhone loyalty. The Fold 7 is the first Samsung phone in a long time that’s made me pause. Not in a spec-sheet way. In a lifestyle way. It’s the first Fold that feels like it belongs in someone’s pocket rather than in a pitch deck.
Even stacked against the HONOR Magic V5, which is bold and technically impressive, the Fold 7 wins where it counts. Refinement. Confidence. A sense that Samsung finally knows what this product is for. HONOR’s approach feels ambitious. Samsung’s feels settled. At this stage of the foldable experiment, settled is the more persuasive argument.
That sense of settlement may soon be tested. If the long-rumoured foldable iPhone does arrive this year, Samsung’s experience advantage will finally face a very different kind of scrutiny. Apple doesn’t tend to arrive first. It arrives late and reframes expectations. The Fold 7 feels like Samsung preparing for that moment, not by chasing novelty, but by making sure its foldable story is coherent, credible, and lived-in.
That contrast becomes sharper when you look at Samsung’s future-facing ideas. I spent a few minutes with the Galaxy Z Trifold in Dubai. While I still believe a device unfolding into a true tablet makes more conceptual sense than a book-style foldable, the execution felt heavy and oddly restrictive. It can be a phone or a tablet, but nothing in between. That rigidity feels like a step backward.
The Fold 7, by comparison, thrives in the in-between. It’s flexible in the way people actually work, scroll, message, and procrastinate. It doesn’t force you to commit to a mode. It lets you drift.
None of this makes the price easier to swallow. In South Africa, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 remains a luxury device, catering to a narrow audience. This is not a democratic phone. It’s a confident one. It assumes you know why you want it and aren’t asking permission.
That confidence is new. And it’s why the Fold 7 stands out. It’s one of my favourite phones of 2025, and one of the best foldables any brand has produced. Not because it’s ambitious, but because it finally feels at peace with itself.
That might be the most radical thing Samsung has done with the Fold yet.
