NEW YORK, July 10 — Samsung unveiled yesterday the new generation of its foldable smartphone, the Z Fold7, dramatically slimmed down in an attempt to jumpstart this still-niche market.
More than seven years after the launch of the first flexible-screen phone, the FlexPai from Chinese company Royole, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2024, these devices account for only about two per cent of smartphone sales, according to Ben Wood from CCS Insight.
Their low penetration in the mobile phone world is largely due to their thickness, inferior camera quality, and high price.
Samsung, the leader since introducing its Galaxy Z Fold in 2019, has recently lost market share to Chinese competitors, particularly Honour and OnePlus, as well as American company Motorola.
“Samsung, who had become a little bit conservative, has found their mojo again, and they have delivered a product which really is a best-in-class folding device,” said Wood.
The new offerings — the US$2,000 (RM6,643) Galaxy Z Fold7 and US$1,100 Galaxy Z Flip7 — are the thinnest and lightest in the series to date, about as slim as standard smartphones when folded and nearly half as thin as Samsung’s earliest designs.
“This is a reset of Samsung’s foldable design to a different era where you really do get a super-premium phone that folds out into a tablet with software experiences designed for that,” said Avi Greengart from Techsponential.
“Especially in the United States, no one has seen anything like this,” he added.
The analyst also highlighted improvements in material composition, making it a more solid and potentially more durable device.
Foldable smartphones open in two like a book and rely on OLED technology, which has allowed traditional screen glass to be replaced with a polymer plastic layer that is flexible.
Not ‘radical change’
Samsung has also improved the performance of the integrated camera, which now offers 200-megapixel resolution in wide-angle (four times that of the Z Fold6), putting it on par with the best equipment on the market across all phones.
The South Korean tech group has also taken advantage of this new product line to integrate more generative artificial intelligence (AI) features.
These are mainly powered through Google’s Android operating system and the search engine giant’s Gemini suite of AI products and models.
Users can now query Google’s Gemini about elements captured with the smartphone’s camera, for example asking for advice when shopping for clothes or how to repair a bike.
“This is not a radical change with a new multimodal interface that drastically reinvents the consumer experience,” cautioned Thomas Husson, an analyst at Forrester.
The jury is still out on whether the AI tools will spark growth in sales, which has been slowing in recent years as users delay ever more expensive upgrades to their smartphones. — AFP
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