Thinnest, lightest, strongest… all the adjectives are in place when talking about the new foldable phone from Samsung. Called Galaxy Z Fold7, the phone highlights the necessity to go beyond the marketing chatter created by a few Chinese brands. The phone with a bendable display still open like a book to increase its screen size and closes up — without leaving a gap — to fit in the pocket. It is the technology inside that can make Galaxy Z Fold7 a success.

Slim but for a reason

One of the biggest challenges with foldable phones has been their weight and thickness. Both have been slayed substantially, not just to give it a skinny vibe but to make it far more usable for long hours.

Being only 215g, it is just 8.9mm thick when folded and 4.2mm thick when unfolded. At the same time, it comes with a large 6.5-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2x cover display. It’s a wider screen with a new 21:9 aspect ratio that brings the device closer to the slab factor we are used to when a foldable phone is shut. On unfolding, there is a large 8-inch QXGA+ Dynamic AMOLED 2x display boasting 2,600 nits of brightness that can handle sunlight effortlessly.

The phone comes with a 200MP wide-angle camera that captures 4x more detail

Why is this important? Huawei, for example, is trying to market a trifold phone in the form of Mate XT, which never fails to draw attention but where it falters is practicality. The Huawei phone weighs almost 300g, making it difficult to hold for several minutes at a stretch.

Companies like Huawei are promoting hardware to compensate for what it lacks on the software side, besides, access to chipsets has become difficult, so most of the processors are nowhere near as powerful as what is being offered by Samsung or the likes.

For Fold7, there is Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, which delivers performance boosts of 41 per cent in NPU, 38 per cent in CPU, and 26 per cent in GPU over the previous generation. The power fuels Galaxy Z Fold7’s ability to process more AI experiences on-device without compromise.

New AI tips and tricks

Samsung’s collaboration with partners continues, especially Google, making every one of its foldable devices highly usable. It takes into account all the latest artificial intelligence tools, which are in abundance on the new phone.

Not only will the latest foldable come preloaded with Android 16 and OneUI 8 out of the box, but the AI features are mind-boggling.

A few new and enhanced AI features? Gemini Live comes with multimodal AI that understands what users see, say and do, making it possible to seamlessly type or speak contextual questions and get answers without having to toggle back and forth between apps.

By screen sharing or camera sharing on Gemini Live, you can get difficult questions about your surroundings answered. For example, we looked at a chair of a certain shade of brown. The design is perfect but not the shade. Gemini quickly helped us find a chair with just the right shade. All within a few seconds.Circle to Search, which has been a top-drawer feature for Samsung users, takes a new turn by becoming associated with gaming tips, which now appear whenever you need them. Just circle an item on screen and get instant results, tips or tactics in a floating view that ensures a smooth, uninterrupted experience.

The Galaxy AI you get here is optimised for large screens. AI Results View displays results from AI features in a separate Split View or in a Floating View, so the user’s original content remains unobstructed and visible. Users can be more efficient with Drag & Drop AI-generated content, including images and text, directly from Multi Window.

Secure strategy

A question that could be on your mind: Samsung works closely with Google but does that mean Samsung AI shares plenty of information with Google Gemini? It’s quite the contrary. Only the information that you want to be shared with Gemini gets shared.

Samsung has long touted its security features and it is being reinforced on the new phone.

Galaxy Z Fold7 comes with One UI 8 and Android 16 out of the box

One UI 8 offers enhanced privacy to personalised AI experiences with the new Knox Enhanced Encrypted Protection or KEEP, which creates encrypted, app-specific storage environments within the device’s secure storage area, ensuring each app can access only its own sensitive information and nothing more.

With One UI 8, Samsung is advancing Knox Matrix to deliver more proactive and user-friendly protection across the Galaxy ecosystem. The company is also integrating post-quantum cryptography into Secure Wi-Fi. It makes the key exchange process at the core of encrypted connections safer, helping ensure robust privacy even over public networks.

An eye for detail

The difference in camera quality between the Galaxy S phone and the Z Fold has been narrowed. Galaxy’s pro-grade camera experience is now available on a foldable. AI-enhanced imaging automatically optimises lighting, detail and realism, so photos and videos stay sharp and vivid.

You get the first 200MP wide-angle snapper in the Galaxy Z series, which can capture four times more details, producing images that are 44 per cent brighter.

The 10MP 100-degree ultra-wide camera expands the frame, so when users unfold their phone, it’s easy to capture group selfies.

Samsung’s next-generation ProVisual Engine processes images faster, enabling every photo and video to be crisp, vibrant and full of detail.

With Night Video, intelligent motion detection now separates moving subjects from still backgrounds to reduce noise. Further, 10-bit HDR provides more colour depth.

With Circle to Search, gaming tips appear exactly when and where you need them. Just circle an item on the screen and get instant results

Hinge secret

Making the phone thinner and lighter is the newly implemented “multi-rail structure”, which importantly reduces visible creasing and strengthens durability by evenly dispersing stress. The cover has been strengthened using Corning Gorilla Glass Ceramic 2, a new glass ceramic that has crystals intricately embedded within its glass matrix.

Further, Advanced Armour Aluminium in the frame and hinge housing increases strength and hardness by 10 per cent. To make the display better, Ultra-Thin Glass (UTG) has been increased to be 50 per cent thicker.

The reporter is in New York on an invitation from Samsung Electronics