As someone who bought mostly Samsung phones before (went from Samsung A3 2015 -> S8 -> Z Fold 4 -> Z Fold 6), their recent few years have been painful to watch. I’ll take the Z Fold series as an example since that’s what I use, but from what I heard their other devices aren’t better off.
The Z Fold 7 is a downgrade over the Fold 6 I have in every way in my opinion (but I can at least thank the Fold 7 for making the Fold 6 new in a sealed box cheaper with 512GB than an iPhone 17 Pro Max with 256GB and thus making an upgrade viable).
And it seems like this has been happening to their other devices as well. I won’t buy another Samsung phone (and foldable at that; Samsung had the only good format, IMO).
Just a few things which would make me never buy a Fold 7:
No Under Display Camera, instead it has a big hole (This cam is used only for meetings anyway, for selfies you use the main camera anyway. A big uninterrupted plane of screen is far far far far better than a better cam for meetings that gets compressed and then is a tiny square in the corner anyway.)
No unlockable bootloader worldwide (is a OneUI 8 issue, not specifically a Fold 7 issue)
They made it thinner instead of giving it a bigger battery, which makes it way harder to open and hold
No S-Pen support (Seriously, why? The Fold is one of the main devices where a pen is cool. It makes more sense to include it in the Fold than the S Ultra.)
They completely destroyed the aspect ratio (The outer screen was thin and tall, perfect for one-handed use, kinda like a TV remote; you can reach everywhere with one hand. The inner screen still is taller than it is wide, while almost being 4:3. This makes older content like shows and emulated games fill almost the entire screen without giving overly huge black bars on 16:9 content. Now on the Fold 7 the outer screen is almost like a normal phone and the inner screen is almost a perfect square. This makes the outer screen way worse to use one-handed and the inner screen has huge bars on everything and apps that are fullscreen scale terribly with just a few way oversized UI options showing.)
It is thinner, too thin. The Fold 6 was perfect in that regard, but when I tried to open the Fold 7 on one of those showcase units in a store it was not possible to get a good grip on the side to open it. Instead they should have just increased the battery size or included the S-Pen in the bottom like with the S Ultras.
Worse hinge that snaps open after 90° instead of being able to stay in almost every angle like the Fold 6.
The only upgrades are:
The camera isn’t that much worse anymore (Literally 0 use for me, I never take images and the ones I do are pretty much only to note something quickly, but I understand that that was a huge downside for most people so that is a good upgrade.)
Better dust protection
Snapdragon X Elite (This is the one thing I wish my Fold had)
And all of these downgrades for 100€ more MSRP. Also those downgrades are just what I remembered off the top of my head.
Most of the compromises were just to make it thinner (the removal of the UDC and S-Pen support and the worse hinge for example), which like I said was in and of itself a downgrade.
To me it feels like they only listened to the reviewers that never used a Fold and after their 2 hours of the hands-on experience will never use one again. It’s not a normal phone; it’s not supposed to be. So trying to make it 1:1 like a normal phone removes everything that made it good because I specifically didn’t want a normal phone. Especially since the biggest issue was the price, so increasing the price further (over the already increased price of the Z Fold 5/6) is so stupid.
But enough of my rambles, I’m probably the only person that uses their Fold this way if I look at all the reviews which call the Fold 7 the best foldable Samsung ever made and a huge improvement over all the other Z Folds.
I hope it was at least somewhat readable since it’s still very early, I’m tired, and English isn’t my native language.