Why Didn’t Samsung Improve Galaxy Z Fold 7 Battery Tech?
As exciting as the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is, anytime I talk about it my comment section is immediately flooded with lamentations over the size and charging speed of the battery. We now exist in a world where devices that are close to 4mm thick have batteries in the range of 6,000mAh which also happen to charge at speeds bordering on incomprehensible.
While Samsung appears set to deliver a device considerably thinner than the last generation with a plethora of upgrades like an improved primary camera, larger and wider screens with the latest Qualcomm chipset cooled by a larger vapor chamber and a new and improved UTG and hinge combo, the battery is said to remain essentially the same as last year: 4,400mAh with 25W charging.
Over the last few days we’ve gotten a couple of posts on Twitter that I think might help shed some light on exactly why Samsung is so reluctant to keep up with the Chinese OEMs pushing the limits of battery tech in their ultra-thin foldables.
Denser Lithium Ion
The first post comes from tipster Ice Universe and focuses on the recently released S25 Edge. For whatever reason, Samsung decided to make a normal slab style phone, but quite a bit thinner than their other S25 devices. Due to its reduced thickness, the phone has a fairly small 3,900mAh battery. In the post, Ice Universe talks about Samsung’s attempt to increase the density of traditional lithium ion batteries instead of switching to the Silicon Carbon OEMs like Vivo, Oppo and Honor have been using.
Importantly, he hits on Samsung’s checkered past with battery tech. More on that in the second post.
Avoiding Another Controversy
Tech tipster PandaFlashPro posted on the 16th that Samsung is indeed testing several different battery technologies with their intent being to find a tech that is more dense, but also one that has a longer lifespan. One concern with Silicon Carbon is that while it starts off great, it tends to be prone to losing capacity faster than Lithium Ion.
Panda once again brings up Samsung’s explosive history with battery tech as a reason they are being so cautions, saying “Samsung doesn’t want to use any type of new battery technology without long-time testing.” For those that somehow don’t know, Samsung had a multi-billion dollar disaster with their Galaxy Note 7. Battery defects could cause that otherwise great phone to overheat and then literally explode. Samsung was forced to do a massive recall and the entire ordeal gave Samsung a massive black eye that has lingered for years.
While none of this is particularly shocking, it does at least shed some light on exactly what’s going on with Samsung and batteries and why they seems so hesitant to compete directly with the folding battery kings of the world.
TL;DR, they’re working on it, but they’re not going to rush into a new battery tech.
