SAMSUNG FOLDABLE FLAGSHIP RAISES THE BAR

Thinner, lighter, and more powerful than ever, Samsung's latest foldable-the Galaxy ZFold 7-is a masterpiece of engineering with just a couple of familiar quirks

- Sahil Mohan Gupta

LET'S BE brutally honest: it cannot be a barrel of laughs being Samsung. For more than half a decade, the company has bled for the foldable category, wrestling with the very physics of pliable glass and complex hinges. Imagine throwing the most spectacular party imaginable, only for your eternally cool rival, Apple, to saunter in late and get all the credit for the trend you started. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the foldable phone, and Samsung has been its tireless, often underappreciated, protagonist.

The throne it built has been eyed not just by Cupertino, but by a legion of ambitious contenders from China who have crashed the party with their own pyrotechnics. Honor’s impossibly thin devices and Vivo’s photographically gifted foldables created a pressure cooker of expectation.

Statement of Intent

So, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 arrives feeling less like a routine update and more like a thunderous statement of intent. Written in shimmering Gorilla Glass and stern Armor Aluminium, it is Samsung's glorious two-fingered salute to the sceptics before the Apple-shaped shadow inevitably falls upon this category. With the conventional smartphone market having plateaued into a dreary sea of nearidentical slabs, the foldable represents Samsung's high-stakes wager on a future where hardware can still elicit a genuine gasp of wonder. The fear was complacency, of doing the thankless spadework for others to profit.

Instead, the Z Fold 7 is a declaration of sovereignty. It's a device so accomplished and breathtakingly polished it borders on the sublime; a masterpiece with just enough of that classic Samsung oddness to remind you who’s boss.