Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold hands-on: Im excited, but its got quirks

When I was in a band, performing on stage in front of hundreds of people fundamentally changed my relationship with music. It turned it into work. Instead of getting lost in the experience of a concert, I got hung up on the mechanics of playing the music and putting on a show. I lost the excitement a little bit. 

Today, I review phones. I have reviewed every flagship phone launched in the U.S. for the past five years (and many others before that), and it's fair to say it has changed my relationship with phones, making it harder to get excited.

The Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, which I got to try at CES 2026, makes me excited.

Book-style foldables have been great up until this point, don't get me wrong. There is a reason I don't walk onto a trade show floor with anything other than a foldable. It's great to be able to see more information at once as you try to navigate the streets of Las Vegas, or the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES. But previously foldables have always felt like half-tablets. They were never really big enough to give you that full tablet experience. The Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold is definitely big enough.

This is a phone that fits in your pocket and expands into a full 10-inch display with a roughly 4:3 aspect ratio. That's large enough that it begins to feel like a computer screen, which is just remarkable. You can finally sit down with a phone, bust out a foldable keyboard such as my favored Protoarc XK01 TP Foldable Bluetooth keyboard, and just get some work done. Another key selling point of the Galaxy Z TriFold, beyond the additional screen space, is the fact that DeX can run on the device, giving you a full windowed interface. It's like walking around with a small laptop in your pocket.

How thick is the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold?

Now, let's address the elephant in the room: the phone is extremely thick, though, right? Well, that depends on how you look at it. The Z TriFold is 12.9mm thick when fully closed. That's a lot compared to the 8.9mm Z Fold 7, but still less than the 13.4mm Z Fold 5, which is just two generations old. Users managed that just fine, and there are still people walking around today with the Z Fold 5 in their pocket. So really, the Z TriFold isn't that thick.

Just like the Z Fold 7, the Z TriFold's cover screen measures 6.5 inches. It's very comfortable to use when closed, being wide enough to type on with ease, which isn't something that could be said for any Samsung Galaxy Z Fold prior to 2025. The Z TriFold also uses the same camera setup as the Z Fold 7, including a 200-megapixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultrawide, and 10-megapixel telephoto lens. You can read our full review of the Z Fold 7 to get a sense as to what the camera experience will be like. 

The Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold runs on the same Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor featured in the Z Fold 7. Qualcomm has since announced a new generation of mobile processor in September — the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 — but few phones in the U.S. are using it today. The Z TriFold is available with 16GB of RAM along with 512 GB or 1TB of storage. We don't yet know what pricing will look like in the U.S., but it's fair to say it will be north of $2,000 and likely in the neighborhood of $2,500 or higher. Innovation comes at a price.

The Galaxy Z TriFold transforms from phone to workstation 

As far as using the Galaxy Z TriFold is concerned, there is one pain point that seems unavoidable for Samsung, even if some other manufacturers have managed it thus far. 

Other phones which fold like the Z TriFold give you choices. For example, the Huawei Mate XT allows you to use it closed, with one screen open, or with all the screens open, and the operating system dynamically adjusts with how you're using the phone. In contrast, Samsung's Galaxy Z TriFold gives you two options — open and closed — and that's it. Depending on your use case, the U-shaped closure of the phone might also not be ideal. 

I'm actually okay with this design decision. I use my foldables while they're closed most of the time, and consider protecting the Z TriFold's delicate inner screen a higher priority.

Personally, I see the Galaxy Z TriFold as a phone that expands into a workstation. I'm good with that. 

Others might want that square screen that a current foldable gives you, but that isn't possible here. If you try to open just one screen, nothing happens until you open both. Then, if you try to close the wrong screen first, the phone buzzes and warns you that you're closing it incorrectly. That's a good safety feature, but it also emphasizes that the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold is not for the same audience as single-fold phones.

As for using the phone, like most foldables, it takes a bit of an adjustment period to get used to holding it and using it on the screen. The most startling thing about the Z TriFold is how thin and light it is when unfurled. At its thinnest when unfolded it is 3.9 millimeters thick. That is not a typo. It’s ridiculous how thin this phone is.

The Galaxy Z TriFold is thick when folded, measuring the same as the Z Fold 5, however it has a very usable cover screen that's a comparable width to the X Fold 7. This is still a tad too narrow for my taste, but it’s light years better than Samsung foldables prior to the Fold 6.

As for usability, I'd need a full review period to adequately figure out how the Galaxy Z TriFold integrates into my workflow. Still, the extra screen space is amazing and I can fully buy into using this phone as a sort of mini laptop. The one bummer is that the phone case with the stand is not included in the box, though I’m pleased to report that, at least in overseas models (the only ones currently available), a charger is included. So, that’s a pleasant surprise.

Samsung DeX on the device is really solid. I did not have the opportunity to pair a mouse and keyboard to the device, which in my mind will be the real "killer app" here. But the expansive canvas that you get will make this very close to a laptop experience. What’s more, Samsung gives you the ability to have up to four desktop layouts and switch between them in the multitasking interface. You can have both a productivity layout and a gaming layout, for example.

There are some oddities that I noticed during my time with Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold. Notably, the ability to continue what you were doing from the small screen to the larger one and vice versa is missing. I asked Samsung about that and am awaiting further details— stay tuned for our full review.

Another strange quirk is that Samsung’s own news app would not resize or move into a side-by-side mode because it wouldn’t change the aspect ratio. This seems like a weird miss considering this is Samsung’s app on Samsung’s phone. Not a great look.

Even so, these were the only potential issues I identified during my brief time with the Z TriFold. I desperately want to take this phone out for a spin to find out what it’s capable of, and explore everything that a 90-minute hands on experience won’t reveal. 

Put simply, I am genuinely excited to use the Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, and you should be too.