Year after year, Samsung seems to stick to the tried and true formula with a Z-fold series phones. The star of the show is the large foldable inner screen, which is as big as a mini tablet when you fold the device and tuck that inner screen away. You can use the cover screen on the outside, and the experience is similar to that of a regular smartphone.
Design and Build
Not a whole lot has changed this time around. What you do get on the Z-fold 5 is a more refined design and a new chipset. Let’s start with the design. The phone is more eco-friendly, using more recycled materials, and the external panels are covered by the sturdier Gorilla Glass Victus too. The Z-fold 5 is also thinner than the previous model and noticeably lighter too, at 253 grams. This is still no featherweight, but the slimmer form factor makes it a bit more elegant and comfy to use. You still get the IPX8 protection here against water, which is really nice.
The new flex hinge is made from armor aluminum and reinforced by a dual rail structure to be extra sturdy. This hinge allows the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5 to fold flat, finally getting rid of the gap between the two halves. That’s a welcome change over the previous generations with their wedge-shaped gaps when folded. The hinge can also hold the phone open to any angle, sort of like what you’d expect on the hinge of a laptop.
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Display on Z-fold 5
While the Z-fold 5 is folded, you’ll be interacting with this cover screen, which is virtually identical to the Z-fold 4’s external panel. It’s a 6.2-inch OLED with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 23×9 aspect ratio, a bit taller and narrower than we would have liked. The inner display is also basically the same as before: a 7.6-inch foldable OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 5×6 aspect ratio.
Samsung claims that this display is brighter now, and when put to the test, we measured nearly 800 nits maximum with the manual slider, which could boost to 1100 nits in auto mode. That’s indeed a little better than the thousand nits of the Z-fold 4. The cover display is similar, with 735 nits on the manual slider and nearly 1150 nits in auto mode. A nice feature is that when you’re using the manual control, the brightness matches between the inner and the outer screens.
The refresh rate behavior is the same between the inner and the outer displays. The 120Hz smooths out movements on the screen while you swipe around and is quick to dial down to 24Hz when you stop interacting with the screen to save power. Samsung claims it can go down to 1Hz as well, but we didn’t encounter such use cases.
New S Pen
Stylus support is maintained on the Z-fold 5, along with a bunch of exclusive apps to take advantage of it. You still don’t get a holder for the stylus built into the phone, though. What you can get is a new S Pen slim case, sold separately. It can hold the stylus for you while adding only a few millimeters of thickness. The S Pen stylus itself is thinner and more compact this year too. It’s worth mentioning that only the foldable internal display supports the S Pen; you can’t use it on the cover screen.
Audio
For audio, the Z-fold 5 has a pair of stereo speakers. They’re louder than last year, with a very good mark on our charts. The quality is great too, with some bass, nice vocals, and well-presented highs. You can click the provided link to check how they sound for yourself.
Storage
For biometrics, the Z-fold 5 has a side-mounted fingerprint scanner built into the power button. It’s fast and reliable. And although it isn’t expandable through MicroSD, you can get a ton of storage on the Z-fold 5. The base version has 256 gigs, and there’s 512 gigs or a whole terabyte also available.
Feature
The interface of the Z-fold 5 is Samsung’s One UI 5.1.1 on top of Android 13. At its core, it’s the same UI you’d get on the other Samsung flagships, but there are plenty of extra functions to take advantage of the foldable form factor. One of these is a taskbar at the bottom for quick shortcuts, like you get on a tablet. This provides easy access to recent apps. If you’re doing something on the cover screen, you can easily continue with it after you open the phone.
You can choose separate wallpapers for the inner and cover screens, and if you want, you can mirror the app icons to match between the two. The Flex mode panel splits the UI of certain apps between the two halves of the screen when the phone is partially folded. It includes a touchpad, a toolbar, and even media playback controls. Having the buttons migrate to the bottom is useful for the cameras too, so you can easily shoot while the phone is resting stabilized on a flat surface.
A big focus of the software is multitasking. It’s quite easy to drag and drop app icons to split-screen mode, with up to three apps running at once. On top of that, you can have apps open within floating windows, and you can minimize these floating apps into a bubble on the side of the screen to be hidden yet accessible. You can interact with the UI with both hands now. With one hand, you can select an app or an image, while the other manipulates the screen around it for a drag and drop.
Battery Life
The Z-fold 5 has the same battery capacity as last year, at 4,400 milliamp-hours. And despite the new chipset, battery life is virtually unchanged, with the Z-fold 5 earning an endurance rating of 95 hours when we tested it using the internal display. The cover screen’s battery performance turned out similar to that of the inner one; the phone earned a rating of 96 hours when tested there.
The Galaxy Z45 supports up to 25-watt wired charging, just like the previous model, and there’s no charger included even at this price. With a proper adapter, we were able to charge the phone from zero to fifty percent in half an hour. It’s alright, nothing great. There is support for wireless charging too.
Camera on Z-fold 5
The cameras of the Z-fold 5 are carried over from the Z-fold 4. There’s a 50-megapixel main cam, a 10-megapixel 3x telephoto cam, and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide. The main camera saves 12-megapixel photos by default, and they’re quite likable. They have good detail and sharpness, and foliage looks natural without over-sharpening. The colors are quite vibrant, as is typical of Samsung. And while there is plenty of contrast, the dynamic range remains wide.
