Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 Review: The Gap is No More!

TechLekh Verdict

The Samsung Fold 5 is an amazing phone. It’s a Samsung flagship in all its glory. We wouldn’t exactly call it a value-for-money phone but it does feature some insane innovations in the tech department.

It’s now tougher than before and the gap is basically seamless when the phone is shut. The phone delivers exceptional performance and the cameras are outstanding as well.

However, for the price, it is a bit difficult to recommend to the average Joe out there. With that said, if you absolutely need a fold, this is the one to get. 

The Fold 5 is Samsung’s flagship phone. It’s a testament to their innovation in the field of technology. We believe it’s the culmination of what Samsung has been building the fold lineup to represent: Power, Productivity, and Entertainment.

If we could choose a term that fits the Fold 5, it would be “Multimedia Monster”. I think we can leave it at that. 

Samsung Nepal held the Galaxy Unpacked event in Kathmandu on August 13, 2023, to launch the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and the Galaxy Z Flip 5. Building on the success of the fourth generation of the foldable series, the Galaxy Fold 5 is Samsung’s über-tier phone list’s new member.

It’s been quite the journey for Samsung’s foldable phones since they initially launched in 2019. Iterative improvements have been made every generation and the Fold 5 feels like the culmination of Samsung’s efforts. Compared to the 1st generation foldable the Fold 5 is significantly better.

The Fold series was and is pretty expensive. The Samsung Z Fold 5 price in Nepal is Rs. 2,26,999 (12/256GB) and Rs. 2,39,999 (12/512GB), making it Samsung’s most expensive phone in Nepal, toppling the S23 Ultra. So, let’s see what it’s packing.

Howdy, welcome to our Samsung Fold 5 review. We’ve been using the phone for over 2 weeks now and have compiled what we think are the good and bad features of the phone. It’s very similar to the previous generation but makes some good quality-of-life improvements as well. Alright, as usual, let’s get started by looking at the specifications below.

Samsung Galaxy Fold 5 Review

Bulky Design

• Unfolded: 129.9x 154.9 x 6.1 mm
• Folded: 67.1 x 154.9 x 13.4 mm
• Aluminum frame
• Glass back

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 is made up of premium materials. The back features a glass back with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and the sides of the phone are made from aluminum. It’s a pretty heavy phone due to the materials but the feel is immaculate. It truly feels like you’re holding a very expensive phone. 

The good thing about the phone is how easy it was to get used to it. Folded or Unfolded, the phone is easy to hold with one hand but you definitely can’t reach all corners, even in the folded state, due to its taller aspect ratio. 

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 boasts a premium design with premium materials. There is ample protection on the glass and the frame but the phone is still IPX8 rated, like the previous generation. 

Using it in its folded state is pretty similar to how you’d use other phones. It feels a bit heavier compared to normal smartphones but other than that, it’s basically the same. Unfolded, however, you’re greeted by a large 7.6″ display. We’ll talk more about the display a bit later in the review but it’s an incredible display. 

The hinge has been redesigned and the phone is basically seamless when folded. Samsung calls it their Flex Hinge and it offers less stress on the display as well. You can read more in-depth here.

We found the magnets to be strong and the hinge a bit on the tighter side. The phone would often fumble in our hands when we tried to unfold it and the lack of any indent to stick your finger/nail in meant it would often slip when trying to open it. Regardless, this tightness also allowed us to pause the hinge at multiple angles and it would not move about from its position which was pretty good.

The camera module at the rear does protrude a bit so the phone wobbles when placed on a table. Also, the fingerprint sensor is a bit on the lower side but you’ll get used to it easily. The phone features dual stereo speakers which are pretty good as well. However, consuming media in landscape mode, you’re more than likely to cover the speakers with your hand so maybe a quad speaker setup in the next fold? Samsung, please?

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Stunning Display

• 7.6″ Foldable Dynamic AMOLED 2X main display
• 1812 x 2176, 120Hz, HDR10+, 1750 nits(peak)
•  6.2″ Dynamic AMOLED 2X cover display
• 904 x 2316,120Hz

Alright, let’s start with the cover display first. The cover display is a 6.2″ 23.1:9 display. It’s pretty tall but the quality of the display is first-class. The cover display is practical enough that you can only use it for any tasks that you might want to do without unfolding the display. 

This sharp display is exactly the same as the one on the Fold 4 but with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for protection. 

The main star of the show is the 7.6″ foldable dynamic AMOLED display. It’s now brighter than before at 1750nits of peak brightness. It’s sharp, colors look amazing and the 120Hz refresh rate makes it a fluid display. The display is of such high quality that it feels unfair to keep it in your pocket closed. 

While the technical specs of the display are quite outstanding, the crease is still pretty visible. When you look at it off-axis, the crease gets more visible, and running your fingers across it confirms how there is more room for improvement.

However, during our testing, the crease wasn’t as distracting as we first thought. After a couple of hours of using the phone, we got used to the crease so much that our brain wouldn’t register it anymore when viewing content, unless lighting conditions changed and the crease became visible again.

Oh yeah, there’s also an Under display camera at the top right which is pretty well hidden. Unless you go hunting for it, it usually doesn’t interfere with your tasks. 

Blazing Performance

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (4 nm)
• Octa-core (1×3.36 GHz Cortex-X3 & 2×2.8 GHz Cortex-A715 & 2×2.8 GHz Cortex-A710 & 3×2.0 GHz Cortex-A510)
• Adreno 740
• 12GB RAM
• UFS 4.0 storage

Well, no surprises here. The Fold 5 features Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. The phone is available with only 12GB of RAM but comes in 2 storage configurations: 256GB and 512GB.

The phone is snappy as you’d expect. Throw at it any task and it will chew it up. Social media? Check. Heavy games? Check. Multiple apps running simultaneously for multitasking? Check. Now, check out these scores.

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The phone is just incredibly powerful. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is slightly overclocked than vanilla and the phone does heat up a bit when you run intense tasks on it.

The heat is especially noticeable when the phone is folded. Our unit seemed to throttle to 73% in only 15 minutes of testing it folded with the battery temperature reaching around 45°C.

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When unfolded, the phone throttled to 79% of its max performance in a 30-minute test, and the battery temperature was around 44°C. While the phone does throttle, the performance is still great as the chipset is just that powerful. 

GAMING

The Fold 5 doesn’t fold even with heavy titles being played. Instead, it welcomes them open wide. So, Let’s start off with some Genshin Impact. The game defaults to medium settings with a 30fps limit. As this was determined to be the best setting by the phone, we played the game for a while and found it ran pretty smoothly. We experienced frame drops literally only once while playing the game which was probably an outlier due to some other factors as the game ran buttery smooth all the time except that one instance, netting us an average fps of 29.7.

But this is the flagship chipset from Qualcomm. So, out goes the medium settings, and in comes the highest settings with a 60fps limit. The game ran completely fine. It wasn’t able to maintain the 60fps all the time but it never really dropped to below 30fps. Our average FPS would hover just above 40 and the overall gameplay was enjoyable.

Moving on to Call of Duty, we were able to get a pretty consistent 60fps on both low and high graphic settings. To push the FPS to 90, you need to play on Low graphics with Ultra fps settings. The gameplay was flawless. Just look at the graph and you’ll see how the FPS line is basically flat and that may be the first time we’ve seen a 0 in Stutter % and Jank. Just Incredible. 

Asphalt 9 with High settings resulted in 57 avg fps. The game didn’t have any stutters and the large dips in FPS you see on the graph are during the menu sections in the game. The actual gameplay was flawless as expected from the hardware this phone is packing. 

So, we also tried Black Desert Mobile on the phone. It’s pretty resource-heavy, especially on the GPU. With all settings maxed out, we got an average fps of 60.6. Again, the gameplay was flawless, even with so much action going on at the same time.

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In PUBG Mobile, you can play up to Ultra HD graphics settings which results in the framerate being limited to Ultra and you get a stable 39.8 average fps in the game. To push the phone to the max, we dropped the settings to smooth graphics and extreme fps and were able to get a consistent 60fps gameplay. The gameplay was yet again, flawless.

To test out how much the phone can push the FPS, we installed Real Racing 3 as well. And as we expected, the game ran incredibly well at an average fps of 116.8. Basically, 120fps in gameplay and some dips during loading menu and other settings

Camera

• Rear Camera: 50 MP, f/1.8, 23mm (wide), 1.0µm, Dual Pixel PDAF, OIS
  • 10 MP, f/2.4, (telephoto), PDAF, OIS, 3x optical zoom
  • 12 MP, f/2.2, 123˚, 12mm (ultrawide), 1.12µm
  • Video: 8K@30fps, 4K@60fps, 1080p@60/240fps (gyro-EIS), 720p@960fps (gyro-EIS), HDR10+
• Front Camera: 4 MP, f/1.8, 26mm (wide), 2.0µm, under display
  • Cover Camera: 10 MP, f/2.2, 24mm (wide), 1/3″, 1.22µm
  • Video: 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60fps, gyro-EIS

The phone comes with a triple-camera setup at the back. A 50MP f1.8 main sensor with a 12MP ultrawide and 3X optical zoom telephoto. The camera setup looks incredible on paper and that translates to real-world usage as well.

The main advantage this phone has over others due to it being a foldable is that you can place the phone on a flat surface and take long exposure, or group shots. It’s basically a tripod in itself. Furthermore, when you ask someone to take your picture, you can turn on the cover display preview to see how they are framing you and what the shot will look like. 

MAIN CAMERA

Normal photos from the main camera are binned to 12MP. It’s a Samsung flagship and the photos are of flagship quality as well. The colors are a bit saturated sometimes, but overall the images are very pleasing. They are bright and punchy, with lots of character.

Skin tones are super nice with the shadows and highlights being well maintained and images are usually clean without much visible noise. The focus and sharpness are on point but the binned shots do lack a bit of detail, especially if cropped in, you’ll notice a lack of fine details. 

Worry not, you can shoot with the 50MP mode turned on to capture all those details. However, the color science is a bit different. Compared to the 50MP shots, the binned shots look very saturated in color. If you’ve ever shot raw photos, the 50MP photos have a similar feel to those and are filled with much more clarity and small details, which become clearer the more you zoom in.

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ULTRAWIDE AND TELEPHOTO

The story is pretty much the same for the ultrawide photos. They don’t have a lot of details when you crop in but the sharpness and colors are incredibly well done. There is some noise in indoor shots if you pixel peep, but the photos in general come out clean. We enjoyed using the ultrawide cameras but not as much as the telephoto.

The telephoto lens is a 3X optical zoom and is just downright gorgeous. You can zoom to a maximum of 30X but the images start getting a bit muddy beyond the 10X mark. Photos from the telephoto lens come out stunning in sharpness, details, and contrast. It does start struggling when the light dwindles but can shoot some amazing perspectives.

Personally, we used the 10X more as it gave us quite stunning shots of landscapes, and the 3X was used mostly in portrait mode. And in case you’re wondering, Yes, you can shoot the moon with this phone as well.

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NIGHT

You get a dedicated night mode on the phone. The main sensor defaults to a longer shutter speed in low light but the dedicated night mode can be used to get cleaner, more controlled images. The white balance is shifted to suit the scene, and the highlights and shadows are also maintained a bit better when you shoot with the dedicated night mode.

Also, if you like shooting far far away galaxies, there’s also Astro mode hidden within the Expert Raw which conveniently shows you the real-time location of constellations as an overlay on the display itself to get that perfect shot of the Milky Way.

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PORTRAITS

The phone takes incredible portrait pictures. Edge detection is outstanding and the best bit is your subject doesn’t have to be a human for portrait mode to kick in. It works on animals or other objects as well. The photos are sharp with good tones and present an overall pleasing image. We’ll let the samples speak for themselves.

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FRONT CAMERA

There are actually two front cameras on the phone. On the cover display, you get a 10MP f2.2 camera and you get an under-display camera when you unfold the phone. The under-display camera is a 4MP f1.8 shooter and even under the best lighting conditions, it’s not that great which is understandable given its low resolution and placement criteria.

The shots from the cover display front camera are good. They have good details and sharpness but the white balance can feel a bit off in some shots. It’s a very typical Samsung front camera with pleasing colors.

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VIDEOS

The phone can capture up to 8K@30fps videos. Videos are stunning and brimming with details. 8K videos can get large pretty quickly so we mostly used the 4K@60fps option. The footage is stable and the videos look like they’ve indeed been taken from a flagship phone.

The colors are good with face tones being represented naturally. Some colors do have a hint of saturation but overall the videos look natural. Videos in low light are of good quality as well albeit with some noise. Furthermore, portrait videos are also good with some rough edges in tough situations, but the outcome is still pretty good.

You also get the option of shooting in 10-bit HDR but personally, we didn’t like the output as much and there is still the issue of compatibility with other apps. Also, if you want to switch between the lenses in the middle of the recording, you’ll need to shoot at 4K@30fps. Above that, the lens can’t be switched after the recording has started.

Good Battery Life

• Non-removable Li-Po 4400mAh battery
• 25W fast charging
• 15W wireless
• 4.5W reverse wireless

About the battery, the battery life is decent. The capacity is unchanged from the last gen but even with a powerful chip like the SD 8 Gen 2, we were netting about 5-6 hours of Screen on time with mixed usage of apps and the screens.

Using only the cover screen would significantly boost battery life performance but it wouldn’t be an actual representation of the phone’s use case. The battery endurance was average. Overnight, it would lose around 8% while connected to Wi-Fi, but the final results for the screen on time would come out pretty similar at the end of the day. Most of the days, the phone would end up at around 20% charge left after a full day of usage.

The phone supports 25W wired charging but there’s no adapter in the box. We used a 33W charger and the phone took about 1 and a half hours to fully charge. It’s a far cry from flagship status in this regard. The phone does support 15W wireless charging and 4.5W reverse wireless for your earbuds and accessories.

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Decent Software

• Android 13
• OneUI 5.1.1

The phone comes with Android 13 out of the box with OneUI 5.1.1 on top. The software experience was pretty good. Samsung requires you to download even essential apps from their Galaxy store so the experience is bloatware-free.

Furthermore, the software is now more optimized for fold phones, and the overall experience during our testing was enjoyable. However, our gallery app was bugged and required a phone reset to fix it. Other than that, it’s smooth sailing on the fold 5.

We also got the security patch update for August pretty quickly and Samsung has a good track record of providing timely updates. Samsung has promised 4 years of major Android updates and 5 years of security updates on the Fold 5 so it’s pretty safe for software support in the long run.

So that was our review of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5? How’d you like that? Let us know in the comments below!