It’s normal for smartphones that get refreshed annually to occasionally have years where not much changes. It’s a lot less normal for those devices to be surprisingly exceptional despite their modest enhancements.
Samsung has pulled that off with the Galaxy Z Fold 5, which starts at the kingly sum of $1,800. Last year’s model didn’t have much to apologize for thanks to an incredible unfolding display that turned the phone into a tablet, and Samsung stuck with a winning formula for the 2023 refresh.
The Galaxy Z Fold 5’s seemingly unimportant enhancements (a flatter hinge, a thinner and lighter form factor, and a new processor) all add up to produce probably the best foldable on the market right now. If the Galaxy Z Fold 5 doesn’t at least convince you that foldables have a real place in the market, then nothing will.
Slimmed down
For starters, the Z Fold 5 comes in three colors: Phantom Black, Cream, and Icy Blue. That’s one of the biggest changes that you can actually see at a glance, as most of the other ones are more subtle. Before we get into that, however, here’s how the basic specs look:
- 7.6-inch AMOLED inner display with 120Hz adaptive refresh rate
- 6.2-inch AMOLED outer display with 120Hz adaptive refresh rate
- Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy processor
- 12GB RAM
- 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB storage
- 4,400mAh battery
The display, memory, and battery specs are the same (on paper) as last year. However, Samsung slimmed the Z Fold 5 down somewhat substantially, producing a foldable that’s never been more comfortable in the hand. It’s only 13.4mm thick when folded, and that’s a flat measurement across both sides of the phone thanks to a new hinge that allows the Z Fold 5 to fold completely flat.
For reference, the Z Fold 4 was 14.2mm on one side and 15.8mm on the other when folded. A one-millimeter change isn’t mindblowing, but it is noticeable if you ever held the Z Fold 4. The latest Samsung flagship foldable, by comparison, feels just a bit more compact. It doesn’t hurt that it now weighs 10g less than before, dropping from 263g last year to 253g this year.
The only real complaint (and it’s a minor one) I have about the Z Fold 5’s physical profile is that it feels a little tall and slim compared to the more squat Pixel Fold from earlier this year. Both phone displays measure in at 7.6-inches when unfolded, but Pixel Fold’s cover screen is slightly smaller and thus (for me, anyway) easier to use one-handed. That’s honestly not a huge deal, though. I got over it fairly quickly.
Multitasking madness
Unlike the Galaxy Z Flip line of clamshell foldables, I feel the Z Fold line does a pretty incredible job of justifying the whole “foldable” part. Just like last year, this is a phone that can effectively double as a small tablet, making it just about perfect for streaming videos, reading, and gaming.
The best part is you can do some combination of those things (perhaps minus the gaming) at the same time thanks to a robust set of multitasking features. Samsung has honed this aspect of Z Fold 5 to near-perfection, allowing for up to four open apps on the same screen at the same time.
The way this works can take a bit of getting used to, but it’s intuitive enough. Unfolding the Z Fold 5 will more or less permanently put a customizable app taskbar on the edge of the screen. This works exactly like a Windows or Mac taskbar, conveniently giving access to your favorite apps, and even allowing quick switching between apps that are currently open.
That’s not new, but it has been improved a bit, as the taskbar will now display four recently used apps alongside the ones you have locked in there. Last year’s phone only displayed two of those. As for multitasking, just drag an app from the taskbar to the portion of the screen where you’d like it to live, and it’ll stick there.
You can open up to three apps this way, while also opening a fourth app in a floating popup window by dragging it to the center of the screen. This popup window can be resized, moved around, and even hidden off to the side if you want. To be honest, there aren’t too many scenarios where I’d even want to have four apps open at once, but the ability to do so at all is pretty great.
Especially when you consider that the Pixel Fold could only handle two apps at once. Samsung is still the king of the foldable space, apparently.
Of course, returning features like the ability to drag photos from your phone’s gallery to a text message or email via multitasking are great, too. What’s less great is “Flex Mode,” which is Samsung’s name for when you lay the phone flat on a surface and tilt one half of the display at a roughly 90-degree angle. This is intended to let you do things like watch YouTube videos hands-free, but all it really does is cut the video size in half while providing player controls on the bottom half of the display.
Flex Mode definitely has its uses (hands-free photography is the big one) but I’m still not sold on it, either here or with the Z Flip 5. Still, that’s small potatoes when the rest of the Z Fold 5’s suite of foldable features is this good.
A great gaming phone
The most significant internal change Samsung made to the Z Fold 5 was the addition of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset to power this bad boy. In layman’s terms, that just means the phone has a bit more horsepower than it did a year ago.
Basic performance is expectedly great, with the Z Fold 5 seemingly never buckling under the weight of having three or four apps open at once. Everything loads quickly and there’s a real dearth of hitches and slowdown. As someone using a slightly older iPhone in his day-to-day life, it makes me very jealous.
Where this really shines is in gaming, though. I’m not a mobile gamer, really, but the Z Fold 5 is about as ideal as phones get for gaming thanks to its massive inner display and strong processor. Games look fantastic with the increased screen real estate, which also has gameplay benefits. Who doesn’t want a bigger screen than the competition?
I tried a handful of popular mobile games on Z Fold 5 and was pleased with how they looked and ran. The handsome racer Asphalt 9, the open-world adventure Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Mobile, and Fortnite all ran at or near 60 frames per second, depending on the settings I used. Fortnite and Genshin had the biggest dips at higher graphical settings, but you can easily fine tune things to get a more consistent performance profile out of those two games.
Also, aside from when I was downloading large updates for Genshin and Fortnite, the Z Fold 5 didn’t run especially hot, even without a case on. Battery life is also more than adequate, with the Z Fold 5 surviving roughly 28 hours between charges for me.
Same (good) camera
One potential source of disappointment with the Z Fold 5 comes with the camera specs. They aren’t bad, mind you, but they’re more or less exactly the same (at least in terms of megapixel counts) as the Z Fold 4:
- 10MP selfie camera
- 4MP under-display lens
- Rear triple array: 50MP wide lens, 12MP ultra-wide lens, 10MP telephoto lens
That said, the results of my camera testing were more than satisfactory. The Z Fold 5 produces handsome-looking shots with plenty of color and sharpness, to go along with software features like nighttime shooting, portrait mode, and 30x digital zoom. All of these things add up to an aesthetically pleasing Instagram profile in the right hands.
One cool thing you can do is take photos in a unique 6:5 aspect ratio, AKA the shape of the inner display when fully unfolded.
Portrait mode is also here and effective at singling out subjects with nice, natural-looking blur.
Nighttime photography also impressed in limited testing. This grill in our yard is straight up not visible in the conditions I shot this photo in. The phone did all the work to make it not only discernible, but pretty clear and sharp despite hostile lighting.
Lastly, the 30x digital zoom is better than useless, but not as transcendent as Google’s Pixel 7 Pro. The photo on the left is at 1x zoom, and the photo on the right shows the tiny water tower in the center at 30x zoom. It’s actually pretty sharp considering how far it’s zooming, but look closely and you can see some distortion.
Way beyond proof of concept
By now, Samsung has done more than enough to prove to skeptics like me that foldables have a purpose. The Z Fold 5 is the best example of that yet.
Even with a set of enhancements that looks modest on paper, Samsung knocked it out of the park this time around. The Z Fold 5’s great inner display is perfect for reading, watching, and playing things. In addition, its strong set of multitasking features actually justifies having a foldable display in the first place.
Combine all of that with great performance and battery life, and little things like the limited utility of Flex Mode or the phone being a bit too tall don’t matter that much. From this point on, Samsung is officially the standard-bearer for flagship foldables.
