What you need to know
- Samsung wants to make a thin foldable phone that still supports pen input.
- In order to make the thinner Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition, the company needed to remove the screen's digitizer, which enabled S Pen support.
- According to a new report out of Korea, Samsung could take inspiration from the Apple Pencil in order to achieve this goal.
Samsung is desperately trying to make its best foldables thinner in an effort to better compete with brands like Google, Huawei, and others. Prior reports indicated that the company was having trouble making a thinner screen that also offered S Pen support. For reference, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition — which is thinner than the standard Galaxy Z Fold 6 — lacks a display digitizer and S Pen support.
According to a new report from the Korean outlet ET News, Samsung could take inspiration from the Apple Pencil and develop a thicker, larger S Pen with a battery. Using active electrostatic (AES) technology, the S Pen would be the part that creates electricity, rather than the display. The move would come with pros and cons: the Galaxy Z Fold device would be thinner, but you'd have to keep your S Pen charged.
This would be a departure from the way S Pen styluses have been implemented in the past. Previously, Samsung used electromagnetic resonance (EMR) technology for the stylus. This allowed the company to make the pen thinner — and in the case of the Galaxy Note and Ultra models, thin enough to be stored within the phone itself. However, the thickness of the necessary display technologies, such as a digitizer, has made thinning the Galaxy foldables more difficult.
"Samsung is vigorously reviewing how not to install a digitizer on the foldable phone to be released next year," a number of industry sources told ET News, translated to English. "A new pen input method to replace the existing technology will be decided early next year, along with or without installation."
Notably, Samsung is only reviewing possible implementations of S Pen support on displays without a digitizer at this stage. The company could choose a variety of paths for the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 7 device, including the status quo, which is a thicker foldable with a digitizer and S Pen support. It reportedly doesn't want to drop S Pen support altogether for the sake of thickness.
Despite lacking S Pen support, the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition appears to have been a hit in Korea. Samsung shaved roughly 1.5mm of thickness off the Galaxy Z Fold 6 to make the Special Edition, in part by removing the digitizer.
