Every Android Foldable Phone Released In 2023, Ranked

Foldables are having a moment. Once the domain of manufacturers from the part of the planet that doesn't wave stars and stripes on their flags and a single manufacturer in the U.S., 2023 saw the release of a significant number of foldables in the consumer space. Samsung long held a near monopoly on foldables here in the United States, but that is no longer the case.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, foldables are breaking new ground in terms of price and form factor. That's great because it means there is more competition, more designs, and more ideas out there pushing the envelope. In short, it's a great time to dive into foldables if you're curious. Last year, we titled our Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 review "No More Excuses" and indeed, here we are. There are foldables of all form factors and a surprising number of budgets.

As such, we felt it was time to run down your options and tell you what's good and what still needs to work for all of these foldables. Before we do, however, it's important to acknowledge that we did not split up this list between book-style foldables and flip-style foldables — the space isn't quite mature enough to split the list. Still, if you're interested in seeing your next phone fold, this is a good place to start.

OnePlus began its tenure in the smartphone space as a potential "flagship killer." Its phones at the time offered flagship-like specifications while cutting a few corners and delivering powerful phones for low prices. These days, OnePlus seems to be returning to its flagship-killing roots by busting out of the gates with its first foldable, the OnePlus Open. That foldable just happens to be not only the best phone of the year, but it also undercuts flagship book-style foldables from Samsung and Google by $300 with a trade-in.

Along with that, you get impressive hardware, refreshingly refined software, and a powerful set of cameras in a package that simply doesn't seem like it should come on a first-try foldable. The phone is that good. That being said, it should be acknowledged that OnePlus's sister company, Oppo, has released foldable in the past, including the recently released Oppo Find N3, which launched in China and is remarkably similar to the OnePlus Open. As such, calling this a first-gen foldable is perhaps a bit misleading.

It's not entirely without concerns. OnePlus has never had to support a foldable before, so it remains to be seen how that will shake out, and fans of wireless charging will be disappointed. Still, 67W wired charging that comes with a plug in the box forgives a lot of sins. This phone is number one on our list because it's the best foldable of 2023 — and it might just be the best phone, period.

The OnePlus Open is available from Amazon and OnePlus.com for $1699.99.

Samsung developed the first book-style foldable phone on the market, and it has continued to improve its phones every year. It has since improved the hinge, durability, and software in pretty big ways. However, Samsung has also become very comfortable in the space, and as such it rested on its haunches for the past few years. Very little changed between the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 – in fact, the biggest change was the fact that it finally folded flat.

That being the case, the hardware has been excellent on the device for a few generations now, so radical change wasn't necessarily needed. Add to that the software improvements year over year, and Samsung's folding flagship has been the phone to beat for a few generations and the software continues to get better and better. Still, there is one big flaw.

The cover screen on the Fold 5 is borderline unusable for an average person. It is extremely narrow and tall, although it opens up into a palatial inside screen, which is perfect for two-handed use. If you're a fan of using your phone one-handed, the Fold 5 is not bad, but too many other manufacturers have shown us how to do this better. Samsung needs to improve this for next year. 

That said, the Fold 5 remains an industry leader in foldable devices — although it is also the most expensive at $1,800, available directly from Samsung.

Samsung's flip-style phone is impressive as well. While Motorola beat Samsung by a few months with its original Motorola Razr, Samsung has continued to dominate. Everything about the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 feels premium, including the most notable addition to this phone — a 3.4-inch cover screen that takes up most of the top half of the phone.

The cover screen on the Galaxy Flip 5 can handle a number of widgets that Samsung has built specifically for the screen, in addition to a few optimized apps. If you feel like jumping through a few software hoops, you can open that up to most apps you have installed. Good Lock is an app you can download to open up that capability, but you have to really want to do it.

Beyond that limitation, this phone is very solid all around, both in physical construction and the metaphorical experience. The cameras are great, and the inner screen is a good size. Sold at Samsung for a penny below $1,000, this is a very compelling offer if you like the form factor.

If you don't live in the United States, your options for foldables open up considerably, and one of the best offerings comes from the third-largest phone maker in the world — Xiaomi. The Chinese phone maker has a long history of making high-quality hardware at a low cost, and it usually delivers on that promise. The Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 is a powerhouse with an excellent camera set.

Specifically, this set of cameras comes with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 10-megapixel 3.2x optical zoom lens, a 10-megapixel 5x optical periscope lens, and a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera. All of those cameras return very good results, and the appeal of a 5x optical zoom camera on a foldable cannot be underestimated.

Of course, this phone lives overseas and will never be available to buy in the United States. If you don't live in the U.S., this isn't necessarily a disadvantage. The phone is very thin, measuring just under 11mm when folded and 5.3mm when unfolded, which is even more impressive considering that it also carries a 4,800 mAh battery with 67W wired and 50W wireless charging. Even then, believe it or not, that's not the thinnest foldable on this list. You can buy the Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 at Giztop for around $1,499.

Motorola moved aggressively into the foldable market with the Moto Razr Plus, also known overseas as the Moto Razr 40 Ultra. This phone carries the largest cover screen on a flip-style foldable while also managing to be the thinnest phone of that style. The cover screen takes up most of the top half of the phone, even wrapping around the dual camera lenses. Motorola really doubled down on that cover screen, even building a set of apps and games specifically for it — but it goes further.

While Samsung conditionally allows you to run almost any app on the cover screen, Motorola built an app launcher onto its cover screen interface and lets you add almost any app you want to run on that screen, whether it was built for it or not. It simply takes less battery to power half a screen over a full one, and with the Moto Razr Plus, you can do a lot without ever having to open the phone.

There are two main reasons why you might want to skip this phone — build quality and cameras. The build quality of the phone is not bad, but it lacks the polish that Samsung puts into its phone. The Moto Razr Plus is a redesign from previous generations of Razr, which makes it feel like first-generation hardware.

The cameras are pretty bad and extremely dependent on either good lighting or your ability to edit photos after the fact. Even in daylight, describing video quality as decent is being very generous. You can pick up the Moto Razr for $999.99 from Motorola or Amazon. If you're a T-Mobile subscriber, we highly recommend the Viva Magenta colorway.

Google's first foray into the foldable space brings an attractive book-style foldable with a very high price tag. If you squint just right, you can see some Microsoft Surface Duo 2 DNA in this build, even though the phones are officially unrelated. Google went in a very different direction than its biggest rival in the U.S. by adopting a squatter cover screen that opens into a spacious, wide-screen phone with large bezels, making it ideal for content consumption.

The Pixel Fold, in keeping with the Pixel tradition, also has one of the best — if not the best — camera set on the back of the phone with a 48-megapixel main sensor, a 10.8 megapixel 5x optical zoom lens, and a 10.8 megapixel ultrawide lens. Photos captured by the Pixel Fold are great, but the auxiliary sensors don't do as good a job in low light.

One area where Google is weak is its inability to adequately use the inner screen. Many apps have optimized for Samsung's near-square inner aspect ratio, but since Google changed the formula, those apps don't work as well on the Pixel Fold. Instead, Google allows you to double-tap on either side of an app to move it over to that side of the screen. This is helpful, but often the app on the inside is not much bigger than the app on the cover screen. Considering Google is in charge of the Android ecosystem, we'd really like to see it make better use of that space. 

You can buy the Google Pixel Fold at the Google store or on Amazon for $1,799 — the same price as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5.

The Oppo Find N3 Flip launched alongside the Oppo Find N3, which is basically the Oppo version of the OnePlus Open. This flip-style foldable comes with a cover screen that is larger than most older models from competitors, such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, but not quite as large as those found on newer phones like the Moto Razr Plus and the Galaxy Z Flip 5. 

This makes the Oppo Find N3 a nice compromise between the two, and while the number of full apps that can run on the cover screen is limited, the ones that do run well and make sense on a portrait screen. Apps like TikTok, Accuweather, Google Calendar, and Gmail all work very well. However, the compatible apps are limited to just over a dozen. Oppo has said it will bring more apps to the experience, but for now, that remains to be seen.

The cameras on this phone are quite good. The sensors are for all intents and purposes the same as those on the OnePlus 11, whose cameras we also really liked. Good light and low-light performance at both quite good, and the 2x telephoto adds a nice bokeh effect to portrait mode. These are among the best cameras you will find on a flip-style foldable. However, the downside is that it's hard to buy the Oppo Find N3 in the United States. It's slated for overseas release only, but you can pick it up on Amazon for $1,299

Next up is a very compelling book-style foldable, the Honor Magic V2. This is the sequel to the Honor Magic Vs that we saw earlier this year, but Honor has upped its game in a big way. The Honor Magic V2 is currently only available in the Chinese market, but what makes this phone so compelling is how incredibly thin and light it is. Closed, the phone measures just 9.9 mm thick, and when you open the phone, it shrinks down to a miniscule 4.8 mm. To make things even more ridiculous, the phone also sports a 5,000 mAh battery.

The cover screen on the Honor Magic V2 has a very comfortable 20:9 aspect ratio, which combined with the thickness of the phone while closed makes it feel very much like a non-folding candy bar-style phone. Basically, there's no learning curve to using the phone when closed. When you open it, the phone feels incredibly thin while still remaining quite sturdy.

As we said, the biggest downside is that this phone is limited to the Chinese market. Rumors suggest that the phone will launch globally very late in 2023 or even in early 2024, so if you're not in China, it'll be a long wait. Still, it will be worth that wait as, if not for this limitation, this phone would be an easy favorite.

The Tecno V Fold is fairly obscure — you would be forgiven had you not heard about it until now. However, Techo is well known among certain circles for building remarkably inexpensive phones, and it jumped into the foldable fray earlier this year. However, the Tecno Phantom V Fold's price tag of roughly $1,100 USD is its most attractive feature. After all, just over $1,000 for a book-style foldable phone is extremely cheap.

Of course, a lot of corners were cut to get to that price point. Most notably, the phone only opens to 90 degrees and 180 degrees, with no room in between those. While the 50-megapixel camera sensors sound good on paper, they disappoint in all but the best light. Plus, the phone overall just feels cheaply made, with a wobbly hinge and not-great-feeling vegan leather on the back.

Still, how amazing do you want a folding book-style phone to be for around $1,000? What's attractive about this phone is simply its existence — it will force other phone manufacturers to take its presence into account when designing future foldable, and that's a good thing. India is this phone's primary market — it is unlikely to ever be sold in the United States.

When Motorola introduced the Razr Plus and the Razr earlier this year, it promised that the Moto Razr would be meaningfully cheaper than its more powerful sibling. Apparently, meaningfully cheaper translates to around $400 off, which is an amazing price for a foldable in 2023. To cap it all off, you can buy it in the U.S.

The cover screen is very small, and Motorola has only developed a few widgets for it, but the widgets themselves are smart and logical. Plus, you can monitor your notifications on the cover screen, which will help you keep the phone closed when you're looking to get offline for a while. Speaking of which, Motorola bundled in its new Moto Unplugged software which cuts off access to all but a few of your curated apps, letting you disconnect a bit.

However, the camera is not good. In fact, it's very not good. The processor is a midrange Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 chip, which won't win any speed awards, but is very serviceable. If neither of these issues bother you, then a $600 foldable is a compelling offering. If they do, then there are other options higher on the list that are available at home and abroad. You can buy the Moto Razr at Motorola.com for $599.99

Motorola wasn't the first company to launch a cheap foldable. That honor belongs to Tecno with its Phantom V Flip foldable that starts at around $600. At least, it would start at that price if you could buy it in the U.S. Instead, Tecno is focusing on overseas markets like India for this foldable, which is not a bad strategy.

As for the cover screen, Tecno took an interesting path by making its cover screen and camera module into a large circle reminiscent of a large smartwatch bolted to the exterior of the phone. It will come as no surprise to learn that you can't run any apps on the exterior screen, but Tecno provided a series of widgets that'll work well in the space. You can also use it as a viewfinder when snapping photos with the main cameras.

Not surprisingly, the camera is the area that really suffers at this price point. Photos are not great and neither is video. Tecno cut quite a few corners to hit its target price, but it is extraordinarily inexpensive, which along with the Moto Razr, provides a niche that foldables desperately need — a midrange lineup. You can buy the Tecno Phantom V Flip overseas on Amazon India for ₹54,999 which, as of this writing, is around $660.