new Z Fold; it's gonna happen

Mike Mercury · 08-25-2020, 8:34am

Samsung finally announced the follow-up to the beleaguered first generation Galaxy Fold, the Galaxy Z Fold 2, earlier this month, but the phone still isn’t out yet — Samsung promised to reveal more on September 1st. Ahead of then, though, it seems at least one Z Fold 2 has made it into the wild, as a Chinese YouTube channel has already posted a review of the upcoming foldable (via SamMobile).

(video link at bottom)

Perhaps most noticeably, the outer screen seems like a major improvement, as it now takes up almost the entire front of the phone:

The inner screen gets a nice upgrade, too. Not only is it a 7.6-inch screen, up from the Fold’s 7.3-inch panel, but the Z Fold 2’s hole-punch camera seems to be less distracting than the entire corner that was dedicated to housing the cameras on the original Fold.

One particularly cool new feature: it looks like you’ll be able to use the Galaxy Z Fold 2’s front display as a viewfinder for the back cameras, which could make the Z Fold 2 really useful for vloggers or great for taking a higher-quality selfie. As far as I can tell, you couldn’t do that with the first Fold (if so, you’d think that Samsung would want to highlight that in either of these videos about how to use the Fold’s camera), so that feature alone could be a huge upgrade for some.

The video also shows off the Z Fold 2’s “Flex Mode,” a feature Samsung brought over from its flip phone-like Galaxy Z Flip that lets you show different content on each screens when using one side of the phone as a stand.

video: