Review: The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 foldable is almost too much fun

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip7 is a story of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The blue part is easy — my review sample, provided by Samsung, is the Blue Shadow colorway. The highlight of the phone is definitely the “something new.” Samsung massively updated its pocket-sized foldable phone with a huge cover screen. At 4.1 inches, it’s the largest external display on a flip-style phone to date.

“Something borrowed” comes in the form of the Exynos processor that lives inside the phone. Past versions of Galaxy Z Flips in international markets have been powered by Exynos silicon in the past, but U.S. phones have typically had Snapdragon hardware from Qualcomm, which we strongly prefer. The “borrowed label” is my hope that Samsung will go back to Snapdragon hardware in the future — more on that later.

Finally, “Something old” — one of my biggest frustrations with the phone, which is a little bit better this year (but honestly not that much better than the Galaxy Z Flip6). It has to do with the way apps appear on the external display (what Samsung calls the Cover Screen) and Samsung’s refusal to treat that beautiful canvas like a proper screen. It’s a little maddening, though it didn’t stop me from having fun with the phone.

Shortly after Samsung unveiled the Z Flip 7 (and its incredibly thin older sibling, the excellent Galaxy Z Fold 7) this July, I hit the road to sunny (and devastatingly hot) St. Louis, home of the Gateway Arch, Six Flags, and Meremec caverns. Over the course of five days, I put this “AI Flip Phone” through the ringer for my Galaxy Z Flip 7 review.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 is the Flex you think it is

Before I dive into the hardware, I need to discuss the highlight. Samsung — finally — responded to market pressure in the U.S. (and abroad) by bringing a large Cover Screen display to its flip phone, and thank goodness. The previous two generations also had larger screens, but they had odd notches in them to accommodate the camera modules, while everyone else was just cutting the display around the cameras.

One of the first things you should do when you get this phone is enable apps to run on this display. The problem is, it takes 13 steps to do it, and unless you’re a geek (which, admittedly, if you’re reading this review, you might be), most people won’t bother. That’s fair, but you’ll be going into this fight with one hand tied behind your back.

The 4.1-inch AMOLED screen is large, gorgeous, and should absolutely be used to the fullest. Like the main display, it has 2,600 nits of peak brightness and a 120 Hz refresh rate. Not all apps can handle the Cover Screen (confusingly, Samsung also refers to this screen as the Flex display and/or FlexWindow), but many of them will. The good news: once you do those 13 steps, you’re done fiddling with settings. You can simply add the apps that you want. The bad news: Samsung doesn’t really want you to do it at all. You might be wondering what I mean by that.

A hobbled experience

If Samsung wanted you to run apps on your home screen, it wouldn’t require you to go into the Labs section of your settings and install a separate app from the Galaxy store to do it. It wouldn’t force you to use the Samsung keyboard on the Flex display, with its lack of voice typing, regardless of which keyboard is your default keyboard (Gboard FTW). Plus, if I had to see “open your phone to continue” one more time, I was ready to throw the phone out the window while riding in a car through central Illinois.

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

Everything from adding apps to the launcher to setting up widgets, to reordering widgets, all has to be done with the phone open, for some reason. It makes me sad.

Once you work around those picadillos and get down to business, the cover screen itself is lovely. Most apps work well on there, including Gemini and Gemini Live, which is a fun way to work with Google’s AI. The display also goes right up to the edge of the phone.

The rest of the hardware

Samsung built a really solid phone here, and it’s great to use. The casing is armor aluminum, and the hinge has been redesigned this year, slimming down the phone just a bit. The hardware is more squared off than Motorola’s Razr, which can make one-handed opening a little harder. But it’s tight and functional. When you close the phone, you will do so with one of the most satisfying “Thwaps” you’ve ever heard. Speaking of which, it makes hanging up on people way more satisfying than it already was. 

While using the phone, you won’t notice the hinge on the main display.
Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

The buttons on the side of the phone aren’t raised by much, which can make it hard to locate them without looking. I often missed the fingerprint sensor in the power button because I had trouble finding it. But the rest of the hardware is absolutely solid. The 6.9-inch AMOLED main screen is also larger than previous generations at 6.9 inches. The screen has the same teardrop shape closing that minimizes the crease, which you can see but won’t care about.

The phone is powered by a 4,300 mAh battery that’s just 100 mAh smaller than its larger sibling, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7. As such, it can easily last all day, especially if you perform most tasks on the cover screen. I noticed the phone tended to run hot, but only when I was already outside baking in a water park or at the St. Louis Zoo, so I suspect the weather was just as likely at fault as the phone itself.

The software on the inside

Having talked about the software on the cover screen, the software when open is… basically the same as any other Samsung phone. OneUI 8.0 is built onto Android 16, making these phones the first to ship with Android’s latest operating system. That’s no surprise — Google and Samsung have been joined at the hip for a while now. OneUI 7 was a divisive operating system because a lot of Samsung users liked how their phones worked before it rolled out (my wife among them).

Personally, I loved OneUI 7.0 because it brought back the vertical scrolling app drawer and the Pill, which apes Apple’s Dynamic Island in a lot of great ways. OneUI 8 adds all those benefits and takes things a step further, bringing 90:10 multitasking to the phones. What that means is you can run two apps, one on top and one underneath, but you can move the separator so you only see 10 percent of one of the apps. Tap that 10 percent and the app pops up to become the 90 percent, and vice versa. It works better on the Galaxy Z Fold 7, but it’s also quite nice on the Flip 7. 

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

When you half-fold the Flip, you activate Flex Mode, which lets you make the most of the foldable design. In Flex Mode, the app lives in the top half of the screen, and the bottom half becomes a sort of control panel in supported apps. In YouTube, for example, the bottom half gets a play bar and play controls, which is pretty neat.

I also love that Dex is available on the Flip7. Samsung Dex basically turns your phone into a CPU when you connect a monitor, mouse, and keyboard to it. It gives you a windows interface similar to Windows. I spent some time with Dex on my trip to St Louis, but most of the time I’m using Dex is on long-haul flights, getting some work done with a set of Xreal One glasses. Now that is a rollicking good time and I’m happy Samsung’s smaller foldable has that capability.

We have to talk about the AI

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

The Flip 7 has a lot of the same AI tricks as other Samsung phones, including camera tricks and AI photo editing, such as moving subjects around or using generative AI to fill in the background. Two notable improvements include Gemini on the Flex screen, including Gemini Live. That’s a nice bonus. Gemini Live also works with the external camera (when the phone is open, to be clear) to become multimodal. At the St. Louis Zoo, I could point the camera at an animal and ask what I was looking at, and in every case, it was correct, which was surprising, to be perfectly honest.

What was a little annoying was how chatty Gemini Live would get. “That’s an Asian Elephant! You can tell by the size of the ears. Would you like to know more about the Asian elephant? Do you have any questions about it? Please for the love of all things holy talk to me!” That’s not an exact quote, but you get the point.

The other AI features, like Samsung’s Now bar, also appear on the Flex screen, even if the Now Brief is still less than good. It still returns news stories that aren’t relevant to me. It kept me up to date with the weather even as I traveled, so that was nice, but I still don’t have much use for it.

Battery life and performance

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 comes with an Exynos 2500 processor built on a 3nm process, similar to flagship processors from Qualcomm and Mediatek. This is Samsung’s homegrown silicon. What’s odd this year is that all Flip 7s will be sporting the Exynos processor. In the past, Z Flip phones sold overseas had Exynos while the U.S. versions had Snapdragon processors. Because of this, we know that Snapdragon usually outperforms Exynos. This year, we can’t make that comparison, but it’s fair to say history is not on Samsung’s side.

Geekbench is a benchmark tool you can use to get an idea of how a processor performs. Geekbench returns scores of 2,354/7,340 single/multi-core scores on the Flip 7. For context, the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 returns a 2,430/8,823 score, so it doesn’t exactly blow it out of the water. Day to day, the only real stutters I noted were in the camera software occasionally, and sometimes when running multiple windows in Dex. They were minor hiccups, but still noteworthy.

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

As for battery life, despite spending all day, most days out and about, away from Wi-Fi and in hot temperatures besides, the phone never died before bedtime. I wouldn’t call this a multi-day phone, but it’s very not bad, and you’ll get a lot more mileage out of it if you use the cover screen as often as possible.

Cameras are as good as your lighting

There are three cameras on this phone, but you’ll only really ever need to use two of them.

To be honest, I didn’t find much use for the 10MP selfie camera.

One of the key benefits to using a flip-style foldable phone is the ability to turn the Cover Screen into a preview window for taking selfies. The hinge is very rigid, so you can even use the phone as its own tripod and use gesture controls to take photos and videos. I took a bunch of fun selfies at the St. Louis Arch, Meremec caverns, and all points in between using that flex hinge, and I got some great shots. You can also hold the camera half open at a 90-degree angle for a camcorder grip if you’re nostalgic (a feature you’ll also find in the Motorola Razr Ultra). 

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

The results you get will be highly dependent on your lighting conditions. For example, at Six Flags during the day, my shots were brilliant. Meremec Caverns and the St. Louis aquarium were both a bit hit or miss. I would recommend that if you’re in low-light conditions, take a lot of shots (to increase your odds of getting a good one) and make sure your subjects are as still as possible. Photos of stalactites are going to be very good. Photos of the people standing in front of them, not so much.

The camera software offers shots of up to 10x, but you will never want to go that high. In my experience, the 4x zoom is usable; at 10x you lose all depth and texture. The shots might be OK for social media, but in general, you’ll want to avoid those. As often as not, they’re not good.

Left:
Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

Right:
Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

Left:
Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

Right:
Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

I also saw a surprising amount of grain in a lot of my lower-light shots. Samsung is usually pretty good at cleaning those things up in low light, but even some of the daytime shots, particularly ultrawide and macroshots, ended up grainy in darker areas.

Shooting video is much the same, though less forgiving. Low-light video is not terrible with the main camera, but don’t move or walk while shooting. The judder gets pretty bad when you start walking. Good shots are possible in the dark, but that’s more the exception than the rule.

Credit: Adam Doud / Mashable

Overall, this is a pretty good camera setup that does very well in the day, and even when the sun is starting to go down. Find yourself in a cave — as one does — and your results will fall into the range of “mixed bag” down to “dumpster fire.”

So, is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 worth it?

Flip phones are really fun. I love using them, especially when taking selfies with the main camera. You can do that with the Fold 7, but holding that phone open is awkward. Holding a tiny little pocket square in your hand is so much easier and a much better experience. For $1,099, I think you will like this phone, too. Plus, it’s cheaper than its primary competition, the Motorola Razr Ultra, which has a comparable camera and a higher price tag.

There are some corners cut here. The Exynos processor is not bad (Motorola’s flagship foldable has a Snapdragon processor), but not the best you can buy. I can’t hate on Samsung’s cover screen software too much because it’s a curated experience that Samsung wants you to have, and it really only makes me sad because I’m a nerd. The cameras are very good for this category, though it wouldn’t hurt Samsung to take some notes from overseas competitors.

So, should you buy the Z Flip 7? Again, if you’re a fan of the form factor, this is the most compelling foldable on offer here in the United States. If you’re already looking at something like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus, this one folds in half for only $100 more. I like what Samsung has finally done here, catching up to its contemporaries and restarting a competition war in which the consumer will ultimately win.

Where to buy the Galaxy Z Flip 7

You can buy the Z Flip 7 at Samsung, Amazon, and Best Buy (or just about any place that sells phones) for $1,099.99. The base version only comes with 256GB of storage, but if you pick up this phone at Amazon, you can get a $200 gift card at no extra cost, which is hard to argue with.

At Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, Samsung also debuted a mid-range version of the F Flip 7, following Motorola’s lead. The Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE offers most of the same features for $899.99.