Do folding smartphones make anyone else feel like a dweeb?
I'm still putting together the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 review, albeit very slowly. 🐌🐌🐌🐌It's going at a snail's pace. It's as if I've never written a phone review before.
Part of the issue is that I'm not quite sure the story I want to tell about the foldable book-style phone. The reviews have been mostly positive, lauding this as some of Samsung's best manufacturing work to date. I don't deny any of that, and I'm personally excited to have the Z Fold 7 back in my life after the Galaxy Z Fold 6's unenthusiastic arrival last summer. But I'm still reckoning with whether this is something I'd ever adopt full-time. And to be honest, I don't think I would.
I've always wanted to be the person who would wield a foldable. But then I took the Z Fold 7 to Warped Tour, and I felt like the biggest dweeb. Auntie Flo was whipping out her iPad-sized device to zoom in on who was on stage. I still feel a little bashful when I'm out testing a smartphone in a form factor that isn't entirely standard—book-style foldables are barely a few percent of the market (they were at 2 percent as of 2023). Anyway, most people at a music festival have an iPhone, and I doubt the foldable iPhone of the future (2026, they're saying?) would get that much play out in the pit anyway.
My review of the Galaxy Z Fold 7 remains a work in progress, though you can look for it as early as next week. Until then, hear what my experience was like having it in the dirtiest, hottest place I've been in a while on this week's Android Faithful. The good news is that it made it out alive, without any scratches, though I am still cleaning out dust from the charging port. There are still a couple of things I'm testing with it, and I'm hoping I'll get better performance out of its cameras at a Tamagotchi meetup this weekend than I did trying to zoom in on Saosin's lead singer from far, far away.
It's Galaxy Z Fold 7 review time. Everyone shares their experiences with the foldable and discusses whether it's worth the harrowing $2,000 starting price tag. Plus, Jason shows us a neat little fixture called Tuneshine that displays pixelated album art based on what's playing through a music client. And since we remain the Android faithful, Mishaal walks us through the ecosystem's second build of the developer-only Canary channel.
