Samsung Now Needs To Give Us An FE Foldable

You could have a Samsung Galaxy Fold FE for about Rs 65,000 and a Flip FE for perhaps under Rs 50,000. Now, wouldn't that be something?

Samsung has been un-folding its latest foldable device portfolio over the past week. The South Korean tech giant took the wraps off the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and the Galaxy Z Flip 4 last week. And recently, it revealed their prices for both devices — the Galaxy Z Flip 4 starts at Rs 89,999, while the Galaxy Z Fold 4 starts at Rs 1,54,999. Those are premium prices indeed and to be fair, are not really surprising. The Galaxy Fold and Flip series have always been premium devices,  using top-of-the-line components and flagship-level hardware. Their foldable form factor might have made headlines, but beneath that innovative form factor has been the sort of hardware you would find on a premium Android flagship — high-resolution displays with high refresh rates, the most powerful processor, stacks of RAM and storage, high-quality camera sensors with optical image stabilisation (OIS), and so on.  

And as any superhero phone will tell you, with great hardware and innovative designs comes a hefty price tag. 

Folding and Flippin' over the years: Innovative, but expensive  

That has been the story of the Galaxy Flip and the Galaxy Fold so far — fantastic, innovative hardware, but with a premium price. In case you have been on a non-tech planet and have missed the news, Samsung's latest foldables are very similar to their predecessors last year but come with design tweaks, better materials and cameras, and the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processors. The functionality has remained largely unchanged — you snap the Flip  4 to compress it into a small form factor and you unfold the Fold 4 to get a tablet-like experience, and you can even use Samsung's stylus with it. What has mainly changed is the hardware running it all, bringing it up to speed with the latest flagships. These are not just foldable devices but Android flagships in terms of hardware.

All that top-notch hardware can be a bit of a two-edged sword, though. It might result in brilliant performance but it also drives up the price of the devices, restricting their audience. As we had pointed out in an earlier article, the high costs associated with foldables and their resultant premium pricing has made many players stay away from it. The Galaxy Flip 4 is more expensive than an iPhone 13 and the Galaxy Fold 4 is more expensive than an iPhone 13 and an iPad Pro put together, and that is a zone where not too many brands would like to venture aggressively. 

Do foldables actually need flagship hardware?

An interesting point to ponder is whether foldables need that sort of flagship hardware at all. For instance, would a Galaxy Fold 4 not work well with an older or less powerful processor or lesser RAM? An executive in a top smartphone firm speaking on condition of anonymity,  assured us that this was unlikely to be the case. "The Galaxy Fold 3 still runs just fine on an older processor. In fact, one of my friends has the Galaxy Fold 2 and even that does not have any real performance issues, and that runs on an even older chip," he said. "So, there is no reason why a more affordable processor like the Snapdragon 870 or a Dimensity 8100 won't be able to run a foldable easily. It might not run as smoothly as a new flagship chip, but then how many would notice that? It is not as if we sit with stopwatches noticing the time taken to load or switch between apps."

It is also notable that, unlike other devices, it is their form factor that makes foldables special, rather than their spec sheets. This does not mean that someone investing in a foldable would not look at its processor, RAM, or cameras but that they would not give it the sort of importance that they would give in a "normal" smartphone. And many consumers would be even willing to put up with the odd hardware compromise if they get that kind of a device at a relatively affordable price. We have seen it happen in the case of the iPhone SE and Google's Pixel, a series where many users have made compromises in some departments to get a more affordable device. 

Can foldables flip into the FE and Lite path?

Interestingly, the brand that is the leader in foldables is a past master of the "make a scaled-down, more affordable version of a premium device" game. In 2011, when its Galaxy S device was a rage, Samsung brought out a more affordable Galaxy SL, changing the AMOLED display to a more affordable LCD one. It also came out with an affordable version of its iconic Note series with the Galaxy Note Neo in 2014, and has released lower-priced  Lite and FE (fan edition) versions of many of its premium offerings. What's more, these have been very popular and successful too. 

So while it is awesome to see the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 come with the latest hardware, perhaps it is really about time that Samsung started thinking of a Lite or Fan Edition version of the Flip and Fold. As per the executive we quoted earlier, such a product is not out of the realms of possibility, "Cut down the resolution of the display, go with a normal 60Hz refresh rate, keep brightness levels at around 650 nits instead of 1,200, do away with an in-display camera (as seen in the Fold 4), get RAM down to 6GB, keep two reasonably good cameras instead of two or three flagship ones, make the external display an LCD one instead of AMOLED, use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 chip or an Exynos equivalent, and you could have a Fold FE for about Rs 65,000 and a Flip FE for perhaps under Rs 50,000. Now, wouldn't that be something?"

It definitely would. And it would go a long way in making foldables mainstream, something that we have been told would happen in the "coming years" for the past four years. Some might feel that it would not make economic sense for Samsung to ‘cannibalise’ its premium foldables by offering more affordable options, but we would argue that it would actually enable Samsung to maintain its hold on the foldable segment by being the first brand to come out with options across price points. Many experts feel that the brand missed a chance to make AMOLED mainstream by offering it mainly on more expensive smartphones, allowing the likes of Xiaomi and Realme to steal a march over it in that regard. 

The fact remains that at some stage or the other, foldables will go mainstream. As a market leader in the segment, Samsung enjoys far greater credibility than any other brand does. In fact, such is its goodwill that it could even charge a little extra for the brand value and assurance it brings to the foldable table, and consumers would willingly pay it as well. So, for the sake of a truly foldable future, give us a Fold Lite or a Flip FE, Samsung.