Galaxy Z Fold 7 is Official, Here's What We Got WRONG!
Ladies and gentlemen, at long last, the Galaxy Z Fold 7, Flip 7, and Flip 7 FE are official and we have several elephants in the room with us that we need to acknowledge. I think almost to a historic degree, the rumor cycle around the Z Fold 7 was fraught with misinformation. I don't want to say disinformation because I feel like disinformation implies intent to deceive, and that's not what we had here as far as I can tell. But we did get a lot of things wrong, and I got some things wrong. So, we’re going to do in this article is go over some of the details that the rumor mill got wrong in name of accountability.
The S Pen Rumor
Let's start with the thing that was mentioned in the live chat for the Unpacked Event about 237,000 times: the S Pen. I told you guys from the beginning that despite the fact that the Z Fold 7 was allegedly dropping the digitizer that the current S Pens need to function, that there was going to be an S Pen for the Z Fold 7. My gut just told me there's no way they're going to drop the pen. People got so mad when the S25 Ultra lost the Bluetooth functions.. The ability to click your pen to take a photo on your phone or wave the pen like a wizard to do actions on the phone... People got really mad when those features got removed, and I thought Samsung is just not going to drop the pen all together.
We had some leaks too. We had Panda Flash Pro talking about how they are working on a pen. It was said to be a new technology because there's no digitizer, so the pen has to be active. There's a battery in the pen that generates an electrostatic field and it allows it to function properly on that screen. We had reports from ETNews and 9to5 Google published that as well. Big giant YouTube channels like Tech Talk TV even went as far as initially saying that the old S Pens would work before backtracking. But thy maintained there was an active stylus coming. As it turns out, we were all very wrong.
I do believe Samsung is working on this technology and they are working on an S Pen, but it's not here at launch, and it might not ever be here for the Fold 7.
Thickness and Screen Size
We know that this device is going to be very, very thin. They're pushing the envelope in that direction quite far. But man, did we hear a lot of different rumors. We had Ice Universe saying it was 3.9 mm. We had OnLeaks saying that it was 4.5 mm. It turned out to be 4.2 millimeters. That wasn't the number that anybody actually ended up giving. I'm not exactly sure where that number is coming from, how they're measuring to get that number, but we got that it seems like a little bit incorrect. The good news is 4.2 is very, very good. That's right there with the OPPO Find N5. This is a very, very thin device, and it should fit in your pocket quite nicely. At 215 g, it's lighter than the S25 Ultra. Those are all good things even if we got the number a little bit wrong.
What about the screen sizes? If you remember all the way back in February, we had a post on Android Headlines in conjunction with OnLeaks renders of the Galaxy Z Fold 7, and they would end up being pretty darn accurate, but the screen sizes were a little bit off. We talked about this ad nauseam trying to figure out what the screen sizes would be, and we actually ended up getting there and getting this correct just a couple of short days before this event. But what we have is a 6.5 in cover display and an 8 in inner display. Back on that report, they were half right. They did think it was a 6.5 in outer display, but they thought that the inner display would be 8.2 in. You guys might remember that shortly after this was posted, I made a video saying I did not think that was possible. The frame of the device itself, the measurements given, should not be capable of having an 8.2 in screen without impossibly small bezels.
We also heard rumors from Ice Universe that the bezels were getting much smaller and that also did not happen.
Something else you can see in this image is the hole punch selfie camera. About a month ago, we got more official renders and it showed that hole punch. It wasn't an under-display camera, and of course, that's something that much like the S Pen has definitely upset quite a few of you.
What did we get wrong here, you may be asking? There was some speculation that I added to that perhaps what was happening here was Samsung was actually using an under-display camera but they were disabling it. Why would that be a thing? As it turns out, there is currently a lawsuit ongoing between Samsung and BOE for under-display camera technology. The Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition uses a 4mp camera for that inner selfie camera, just like the under-display camera on the Z Fold 6. When you take comparative selfies with them, they both look equally bad. I can't confirm this, but there was some thought that maybe the special edition actually was using an under-display camera that was just being filled with black to disable that effect. However, the Fold 7 appears to use a 10mp sensor for that selfie camera, ruling this out.
The Pricing
Last but not least, we had lots of rumors about the prices. They were going up, they were staying the same, they were going up a little, they were going up a lot... It was just complete chaos when it came to the pricing rumors. In reality, in the United States, it did go up by $100 from $1899 to $1999. That is definitely a bummer. It was already very expensive, and it got a little bit more expensive than that.
So, guys, that is the Galaxy Z Fold 7. I've already got my blue model ordered, so I will have that here to cover a whole bunch for you very, very soon. Hopefully this little bit of accountability is meaningful to some of you guys. I think it's important to just acknowledge these things, acknowledge where the rumors and the leaks were wrong, and kind of put that in the back of your memory and keep that in mind going forward. I think that's a good habit for us to all get into doing.
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Galaxy Z Fold 7: https://howl.link/yyk6v6j5nnggk
Galaxy Z Flip 7: https://howl.link/slxstf1tzaur0
Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE: https://howl.link/3l31kmn59w0j4