Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold4 Is 5G’s Next Great Hope, and It Arrives Just in Time
The big-screen phone is rumored to arrive in August, when 5G will enter a new phase in the US.
By Sascha Segan
Finally, they’re building it. Our annual Best Mobile Networks feature, coming out soon, will reveal that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are all finally putting mid-band 5G networks out there that have real performance differences from 4G, with real coverage across cities.
And according to Slashleaks, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold4 is coming at us on Aug. 10, and it’ll potentially be the first phone in a year or so to really put 5G forward. Here’s why.
Hope, Then Disappointment
We used to hear a lot about 5G during phone launches. When the iPhone 12 launched in 2020, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said 5G so many times, someone made a supercut . 5G and cloud gaming also played a big role at the Pixel 5 launch in 2020. But 2021 and 2022 phone launches haven’t made much of a big deal about 5G, probably because the 5G experiences in the US have been disappointing so far.
But also all the way back in 2020, I felt how 5G made a huge difference when video chatting on a big-screen, foldable phone over 5G from Korea. At the time, of course, I also fell for the hype: I thought my experience was going to herald a new era of applications on the Galaxy S20 series, and it completely didn’t. The problem, of course, was how the carriers oversold their networks. In 2020, any “5G” you were getting was either basically rebranded 4G, or had so little coverage as to be very difficult to find.
Mid-Band to the Rescue
That’s changing in a big way with mid-band. T-Mobile has promised to cover 260 million people with mid-band by the end of 2022, and Verizon says it has more than 100 million covered.
The Galaxy Z Fold series makes high-resolution, big-screen experiences more important than on any other phone. Those experiences need bandwidth. Mid-band 5G has that bandwidth.
And with the Z Fold4, the big screen is going to be everything. Other rumored features out there don’t sound like a huge change from the Galaxy Z Fold3, although the new phone will have an updated processor and such. What may end up really mattering is the timing, the confluence of that big screen, finally, with new networks.
The 5G, Z Fold4 experience will also be improved with some of the new features in Android 13. Google has said that it’s creating new APIs for “tablet style,” big screen apps in Android 13, as well as releasing a reference-model Google Pixel Tablet in 2023.
Tablet-style apps work well on (mostly Wi-Fi) tablets, but they’re also the kinds of apps that set life with a foldable phone—which is often out, on 5G-apart. That will enhance the Galaxy Z Fold4 experience significantly.
So I’m really looking forward to the Z Fold4, and especially how it intends to use higher-bandwidth networks. And I’m bored of my Galaxy S21 Ultra. It’ll be time to make a change.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
