Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 review: cutting-edge excellence at eye-watering price

By putting both a powerful smartphone and 7.6in tablet in your pocket, Samsung has created the device of choice for gadget lovers. But the price means it is not ready yet for most consumers.

The hinge holds the display open at any angle, shutting with a satisfying snap. The main display is great for videos, games, reading sites and books, or multitasking with two or more apps open at the same time.

The Fold 4 takes about 80 minutes to fully charge, hitting 50% in 30 minutes using a 25W or greater USB-C power adaptor (£11.90 from Samsung), which is not included.

Several internal components are made from 20% recycled nylon or plastic. Samsung offers trade-in and recycling schemes for old devices. The company publishes annual sustainability reports but not impact assessments for individual products.

Most of the upgrades within Android 12L are behind the scenes to make apps work better when multitasking and switching forms. The new taskbar is great, acting like a dock for quickly getting to your most-used apps and putting them in split-screen mode by dragging and dropping from it.

Using a pair of apps on a screen roughly the size of two phones side by side is remarkably powerful and enables things I would usually reach for a laptop to do, such as budgeting, meal planning and comparison shopping. Most apps are stable and work great in various combinations. Rotating the Fold 4 to landscape gives you dual-pane views in some apps too, including Gmail, so you can see your inbox on the left and a reading pane on the right.

The Fold 4 has five cameras in total: a new triple system on the back, a 10MP selfie camera on the front and an additional 4MP selfie camera hidden under the top right of the internal screen.

The back cameras are essentially the same as those fitted to the S22+ and are a marked upgrade on the Fold 3 from last year. The main 50MP camera is great, capturing excellent images in a variety of lighting conditions with very good low-light performance. The 3x optical zoom is useful and the ultrawide camera is good for landscapes and group shots.

Video shot by all three is very good, too, but the ultrawide is limited to 30 frames a second for some reason.

The under-display selfie camera is novel but of poor quality for photos, so only good enough for video calls. The outside 10MP selfie camera is one of the best but you can shoot much better selfies and group shots with the main cameras using the outside screen as a viewfinder. It is a little awkward to hold but worth the effort.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 costs £1,649 ($1,799/A$2,499) with 256GB of storage.

For comparison the Galaxy Z Flip 4 costs £999, the Galaxy S22 Ultra costs £1,149, the Galaxy S22+ costs £949, the Microsoft Surface Duo 2 costs £860, the Google Pixel 6 Pro costs £649, and the Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max costs £1,049.

The Galaxy Z Fold 4 is unrivalled outside China, where some local brands make similar devices for the local market. Lots of small refinements add up in this new iteration. The Fold 4 is easier to use as a phone for messaging and calls when closed. Opening it up like a book for the beautiful, large internal screen is still magic, as is shutting it to put it into standby with a snap.