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I spent over a week with the Galaxy Z Flip 7 and it’s not the foldable I wanted it to be

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 The Galaxy Z Flip 7 is a good flip phone. It has Samsung's best-ever cover screen hardware, a larger and wider main display, and a surprisingly thin design. But with a disappointing choice in its chipset and truly annoying cover screen software, the Flip 7 isn't an amazing flip phone. It's a great buy for Samsung fans, but it's also not the flip phone king it could have been.

For a company that basically invented (or at the very least popularized) foldable flip phones as we know them today, Samsung’s commitment to the form factor has left me disappointed over the last couple of years. While Motorola has pushed the niche forward in the US with innovative design finishes and impressive cover screens, Samsung has found itself lagging, seemingly with no intention of getting back on top.

That’s what makes the Galaxy Z Flip 7 so exciting. With a dramatically improved cover screen, a thinner design, a larger main display, and a bigger battery, the Flip 7 is the first flip phone from Samsung in a while where it feels like the company is actually trying.

In some ways, the Flip 7 is the most impressive Z Flip I’ve ever used. But in that same breath, it still retains compromises that have plagued previous models, and introduces a new one, too.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 is a good foldable, but it’s not quite the one I wanted it to be.

The good (and bad) of the Z Flip 7’s cover screen

Joe Maring / Android Authority

The cover screen is by far the most noticeable upgrade for the Flip 7, so let’s start there. While the 3.4-inch cover screen on the Flip 6 was serviceable, it wasn’t anything to write home about. Not only was it smaller than the competition, but it was also just a weak panel overall — with a low resolution, slow refresh rate, and lacking brightness.

Samsung fixed all of this on the Galaxy Z Flip 7, and for the first time ever on a Z Flip, the cover screen hardware feels just about perfect.

The jump from a 3.4-inch screen to a 4.1-inch one may not sound like a big deal, but put the Flip 6 and Flip 7 side-by-side, and the difference is undeniable. Gone is Samsung’s awkward folder-shaped display, and in its place is a screen that fills up the entirety of the Flip 7’s upper half. This extra space means apps are much better formatted than on 2024’s phone, the keyboard is much more comfortable to type on, and Samsung’s teeny tiny bezels are almost impossibly thin.

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