The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold could be the perfect mobile movie machine – and I can’t wait to try it out

A could-be cinema champ

Features By Jamie Richards published 15 December 2025

(Image credit: Samsung)

It’s a great time to be a folding phone fan. The best folding phones are getting slimmer, stronger, and more powerful every year, and having used a selection of foldable devices this year I’ve been amazed by the progress in this niche segment of the phone market.

Though flip phones have a charm, I much prefer tablet-style folding phones because of their large inner displays, which offer a much better experience for web surfing, scrolling, gaming, and – you’d think – watching videos.

But the fact is that most tablet-style folding phones have an inner display with an almost-square aspect ratio, which means videos don’t always end up much larger on the inner display than on the outer panel.

Take the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, for example. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 6.5-inch cover screen with a 21:9 aspect ratio, meaning a typical widescreen video with a 16:9 aspect ratio takes up 5.22 inches of diagonal space with the phone turned on its side, or just over 76% of the screen area.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7’s inner display comes in with an unusual aspect ratio of 91:82. With the phone turned on its long side, a 16:9 video takes up 6.88 inches of diagonal screen space, or about 64% of the screen area.

That’s only an extra inch and a half or so of visible video – and while it does make some difference, you can get almost as good a viewing experience for much less money with a large-screened slab phone like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus (or even something like the mid-range Galaxy A36).

This also means that the Galaxy Z Fold 7’s inner display is actually less efficient at showing video than its cover screen – you’ll get a larger image on the folding display, but also much larger black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.

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