is a reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
It’s the flip phone paradox: if you want to be more mindful about your mobile device usage, you need more screen, not less.
I know. But I swear it’s true: with a bigger cover screen, you get more than just a new way to check notifications. You can actually get shit done. Things that are annoying or even impossible to do on a smartwatch, like sending a text or reading an email, are the perfect candidates for a larger-but-still-small screen. Best of all, you can avoid opening the phone altogether, which is a win for attention spans everywhere.
That’s what makes the $1,099.99 Flip 7 kind of a big deal. It finally offers a proper edge-to-edge screen on the cover. The previous two iterations offered a smaller screen with thick bezels that cut around the cameras, shaped like a file folder. Samsung finally took a cue from Motorola’s all-screen approach, trimming down the bezels and just letting the screen flow around the camera cutouts. Now, the file folder is in the recycling bin where it belongs — at least on the main Flip model. You can still get the previous design for a little cheaper in the Z Flip 7 FE. But with more space for your daily tasks and the option to embrace chaos and run full apps on the cover screen — even at the risk of losing stuff behind the camera cutouts — the Flip 7 is a significant step forward for Samsung’s foldable line.
The cover screen is the biggest update on the Z Flip 7, so that’s a good place to start. With the slimmer bezels and the full-panel display, it’s gone up to 4.1 inches, from 3.4 on the Z Flip 6. By default, Samsung will keep cover screen content above the camera cutouts and use the space next to them to display things like live activities, navigation buttons, and a mostly useless AI summary of your day called the Now Brief. If you’ve opted for gesture navigation rather than three-button nav on the front panel, you’ll see the time and date fill that spot as you swipe between panels. Even using the cover screen this way, which sort of approximates the file folder effect from earlier Flips, there’s still more screen real estate to work with.
Things get more interesting if you let the Z Flip 7 run full apps on the front screen. As it has in the past, Samsung makes you jump through a couple of hoops to do this. You can add an apps widget to the front panel by enabling it as an “experimental” feature, but that only gets you access to a few preapproved apps, like Messages. As Flip phone realheads know, you need to download Good Lock and an extension called Multistar to let any app run on the cover screen. To its credit, Samsung added a shortcut to do this in the settings menu, but this still requires you to understand what “Multistar” is. This is still far too much work, and I don’t understand why Samsung keeps making this difficult when Motorola lets you run any old app on the cover screen without all this rigmarole.
Once you’ve done all this, the real fun starts. I use the Flip 7’s cover screen to glance at walking directions in Google Maps, start and end a bike ride in Strava, respond to texts that would otherwise languish in my notification tray, and punch in my coffee order as I’m running out the door. Doing all this stuff without having to come face to face with everything on my phone feels like a super power, and I always miss it when I switch from a flip phone to a regular one.
The Galaxy Z Flip 6 offered a smaller file folder-shaped screen. Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge The bigger screen on the Z Flip 7 flows all the way around the cameras. Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
Of course, a 4-inch screen isn’t ideal for running modern apps — probably why Samsung makes it so difficult — and sometimes the thing you need to tap is hovering underneath the camera cutout. For these moments, Samsung provides a little icon at the bottom of the screen you can tap to cycle through three window sizes: full screen with content flowing behind the cutouts, everything above the camera lenses, and a teeny-tiny vertical window designed for ants. I was usually able to get to what I needed by tapping through these views, and in the worst-case scenarios I just opened the phone. A little awkwardness is worth it for the freedom of the full cover screen, if you ask me.
Outside of the cover screen upgrade this is a mostly incremental update, aside from two big-ish changes: the switch to a bigger battery, and the inclusion of a Samsung Exynos processor rather than a Qualcomm one. Exynos chips aren’t generally thought to be as powerful as their Snapdragon counterparts, but I didn’t see any noticeable performance hiccups in daily use. I can take a dozen back-to-back portrait mode photos before there’s a pause to clear the buffer. The phone warmed up with 20 minutes of Diablo Immortal gameplay at the highest graphics settings available, and I noticed a little jitter here and there, but nothing serious.
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