Following months of rumors, Samsung has officially announced the Galaxy Z TriFold. The company says it’s releasing the phone in the first quarter of 2026, but it’s apparently not yet ready to say how much this phone will cost. Based on the nearly $4,000 price of the Huawei Mate XT tri-fold, I’d guess not cheap.
Rumors have put the Z TriFold’s price around the $3,000 price point, which could be reasonable to expect based on its specs. The phone is thin when it’s unfolded – 3.9mm at its thinnest point, Samsung says – which is impressive but just a bit thicker than the 3.6mm thick Mate XT. All folded up, the phone is 12.9mm thick, which is only 0.1mm thicker than Huawei’s phone. The Z TriFold’s 10-inch display, when unfolded, will be a bit smaller than the Mate XT’s 10.2 inch internal screen. The display also has a lower resolution and pixel density – 2160 x 1584 and 269ppi versus the Mate XT’s 2232 x 3184 and 382ppi. All of this folds up to be 12.9mm thick, which is only .1mm thicker than the Mate XT.
The TriFold has a 6.5-inch OLED cover display with a 2520 x 1080 resolution and 442ppi, capable of up to 2600 nits peak brightness. Like the interior display, it’s capable of 1 – 120Hz refresh rate. The phone features five cameras – a 10MP selfie camera on the cover display and one on the inside, a 12MP Ultra-Wide camera with a 120-degree field of view, a 200MP wide-angle camera with 2x optical zoom, and a 10MP telephoto with optical image stabilization and 3x optical zoom, as well as 30x digital zoom.
Inside, the phone sounds a lot like the Galaxy Z Fold 7, which we gave an 8/10 and called the best folding phone yet – and therefore one of the best smartphones overall – in our review. Like that phone, it’s packing a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and 16GB of RAM. Samsung is offering it in 512GB and 1TB storage tiers. It’s got a three-cell, 5,600mAh battery split up amongst each of its sections, and supports 45W wired fast charging and 15W wireless fast charging – so, Qi2, not Qi2.2. And great news for eSIM haters: it still supports dual physical SIM cards.
Of course, the big question around this phone, besides cost, is durability. Rather than the Mate XT’s Z-fold – which, come on guys, it’s in the name! – this phone folds inward to protect the interior display. The phone also only manages an IP48 dust and water resistance rating, like the Z Fold 7; I guess Samsung still hasn’t cracked the code to the IP68 rating that Google gave its Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Needless to say, more than any other foldable, this is not a phone you want to leave in the unsupervised, candy-caked hands of a child.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
