“Success breeds complacency” — an old adage that’s very apt when discussing Samsung’s latest foldable line-up. If you’d been hoping for Samsung to rip up the playbook in favor of more daring fifth-generation foldables, disappointment was inevitable. The Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 may remain the pinnacle of the form factor, but it’s hard not to have come away from the recent announcements a little deflated, perhaps even bored by the industry’s supposedly most innovative area of development.
Aside from the bigger cover screen on the Flip, flatter hinge, and marginally upgraded internals, you’d struggle to tell these products apart from their predecessors. It’s all very incremental and has been for years. You could go back two, perhaps even three generations, and still struggle to pick out a compelling reason to upgrade to the new model. The sluggish pace of innovation is all very iPhone-esque — a pretty sorry state of affairs for the industry’s fledgling form factor.