Samsung Unveils Slimmed-Down Foldable Smartphone \u2022 Channels Television
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Samsung unveiled on Wednesday the new generation of its foldable smartphone, the Z Fold7, dramatically slimmed down in an attempt to jumpstart this still-niche market.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 percent of smartphone sales, according to Ben Wood from CCS Insight.<\/p>\n Their low penetration in the mobile phone world is largely due to their thickness, inferior camera quality, and high price.<\/p>\n Samsung, the leader since introducing its Galaxy Z Fold in 2019, has recently lost market share to Chinese competitors, particularly Honor and OnePlus, as well as American company Motorola.<\/p>\n \u201cSamsung, 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,\u201d said Wood.<\/p>\n The new offerings \u2014 the $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold7 and $1,100 Galaxy Z Flip7 \u2014 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\u2019s earliest designs.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a reset of Samsung\u2019s 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,\u201d said Avi Greengart from Techsponential.<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially in the United States, no one has seen anything like this,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The analyst also highlighted improvements in material composition, making it a more solid and potentially more durable device.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The South Korean tech group has also taken advantage of this new product line to integrate more generative artificial intelligence (AI) features.<\/p>\n These are mainly powered through Google\u2019s Android operating system and the search engine giant\u2019s Gemini suite of AI products and models.<\/p>\n Users can now query Google\u2019s Gemini about elements captured with the smartphone\u2019s camera, for example asking for advice when shopping for clothes or how to repair a bike.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a radical change with a new multimodal interface that drastically reinvents the consumer experience,\u201d cautioned Thomas Husson, an analyst at Forrester.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\nNot \u2018radical change\u2019<\/h2>\n