Allison Johnson, reporting for The Verge:

Samsung just announced its seventh-generation folding phones, and it finally retired the long and narrow Z Fold design that it had stuck with for far too long. The Z Flip is also getting an overdue upgrade to a full-size cover screen rather than the file folder shape of the past couple generations. After years of incremental upgrades and barely warmed-over designs, Samsung’s foldables are finally taking a leap forward with some bold choices — just be prepared to pay up for them.

We knew the Fold 7 would be thinner. Rumors told us. Samsung told us. But like with the Galaxy S25 Edge, seeing is believing. Or, holding the phone in your hand is, at least. Compared to the Fold 6, it’s night and day. The Fold 7 is vastly thinner and lighter, and the Fold 6 looks like a big ol’ chunk next to it. It honestly feels like a different phone.

The main problems with folding phones come down to size and durability. Everyone I know who has a folding phone says they have to baby it because even digging a fingernail into the display permanently damages the soft plastic layer, but that’s a compromise they’re willing to make for better portability, they say. (The first-generation “Galaxy Fold” was notorious for its disastrous durability, to the point where reviewers were breaking their review units.) But the size aspect has always seemed equally significant to me: Samsung’s foldables are oddly shaped compared to the more organic design of the Pixel Fold, which has a more squared internal screen but is shaped more like a normal smartphone on the outside. Samsung, until Wednesday, has prioritized making the internal screen more tablet-shaped at the cost of a weirdly narrow outer display.

Also, Samsung’s older folding phones were just way too bulky — almost double the thickness of a traditional phone. The new model appears much more usable, and I actually think its inner display is better as a square because it’s a bit much to carry around a full-blown tablet everywhere. I love the Pixel Fold for its more square aspect ratio, and I’m glad Samsung decided to adopt it. The new thin design, from what I can gather, has little to do with the display itself, but the hinge that folds outward. I’m not sure how Samsung did it, and I’m not about to sit through one of Samsung’s insufferable presentations to find out, but I think it did a fantastic job. There’s no update to the inside screen’s crease, though — something Apple has made a priority for its foldable, presumably debuting next year. Personally, I don’t mind it.

It’s quite remarkable how much Samsung’s folding phones have improved since their introduction six years ago. The original Galaxy Fold had an abysmally tiny outer display that was hardly usable for any content, and looking at this year’s model alongside it really puts things into perspective. Meanwhile, the Galaxy Z Flip — my favorite of the two models for a while now, despite its lack of utility for me — gets a full-blown display at the front, which is fantastic. The vast majority of foldable phones are Flip models because of their relatively inexpensive price, and those users have had to contend with bad front-facing screens for years now, even though I’m not sure what the engineering limitation was. To me, the purpose of a flip-style folding phone is to look at your phone less, and because the outer screen was so small on the previous generation models, it felt like more of a distraction than anything.

On the price bit: Nobody in their right mind will spend $2,000 on a phone, except me, when Apple makes one in a year. (Come back and quote this piece when it comes out — chances are I’ll be complaining about the price then, too.) I don’t know what Samsung’s thinking here, or why it hasn’t been able to lower prices in six years, but it should probably get on it. The longer a company manufactures a product, the lower its price should be, and that maxim has applied to almost every tech product in recent history. Why not folding phones? Ultimately, I come to the same conclusion as Johnson: There’s real demand for exactly this, but cheaper.