Why the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 should make Google feel good about Pixel Fold’s price

For the 5 year running, Samsung has released another take on the folding phone – the Galaxy Z Fold 5. Though Samsung has changed very little in this latest foldable, the price tag remains the same $1799 that we’ve seen through the years. As the foldable smartphone market grows and competitors like Google’s Pixel Fold and the OnePlus Open begin to hit store shelves, I’m a little surprised that Samsung stuck with the exact same pricing strategy, despite the modest updates.

Minor upgrades

The Galaxy Z Fold 5 isn’t much different than the couple Z Fold’s that preceded it. With a 7.6-inch inner display and a slender 6.2-inch outer display, the phone is packed with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, 12GB RAM and a choice of 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage. It runs on Android 13 with One UI 5.1.1 straight out of the box, but again, that’s no real surprise.

The same 50MP primary camera, a 12MP ultrawide camera, and a 10MP telephoto cameras are all here, along with the 10MP camera on the front display and a 4MP under-display camera on the inside. And the photos that come from that inner camera still look pretty bad, too.The Fold 5 is also powered by the same 4,400 mAh battery, with support for 25W wired and Qi wireless charging. Like I said, not much new around here.

The real changes lie in the device’s hinge, which has been redesigned to allow the phone to fold flat with basically no gap. The weight goes down a bit this time around – down to 253 grams – and the inner display now hits a peak brightness of 1,750 nits. UFS 4.0 storage rounds out the mild improvements over the previous models, leaving most to wonder about the real value in buying this over last year’s Z Fold 4.

Same big price

Despite being effectively the same phone as the Fold 4 (which itself was an incremental upgrade over the Galaxy Z Fold 3), the Galaxy Z Fold 5 still carries the same $1799 price tag of its predecessors. While you would expect a small, incremental bump like this one to perhaps allow for them to reduce the price a bit in the wake of more folding phones coming to the market, that doesn’t look like the case at all.

And in this light, I think Google looks a lot better with their similar $1799 price tag all of the sudden. Samsung want to sell phones: no one doubts this. And being competitive is how you move smartphones off shelves and into the hands of new users. If Samsung could come out with a small upgrade to their flagship folding phone and undercut the new competition by a few hundred dollars, don’t you think they absolutely would?

With rising costs and an unstable economy, however, I’m sure even Samusung is feeling the weight of distribution channels and manufacturing expenses rising. Given the fact that the Z Fold 5 was such a minor upgrade, you’d absolutely expect Samsung to get competitive if they could. And it looks like they can’t.

Pixel Fold validation?

In many ways, this is all a validation for Google’s pricing of the Pixel Fold. While it perhaps looked like Google was pricing this phone at $1799 just to keep up with Samsung, it’s more likely true that Google has the same issues with supply chains as Samsung does and the only option was to price it this high. Google’s confidence in positioning its first folding phone at this level certainly suggests that they believe in the segment and see a growing acceptance among consumers for premium-priced, high-tech foldable phones.

The good news is there are ways to get devices like the Pixel Fold and Galaxy Z Fold 5 without shelling out $1799, and they largely depend on the carrier you go with. For instance, T-Mobile is offering up to $1000 with trade-in, just like they do for the Pixel Fold. You can also shop at Samsung.com to find deals, trade-ins and other inecentives for all of Samsung’s new hardware. You can even shop all carrier deals right from Samsung’s homepage, too.

2023 is the start of a new era in folding phones for sure here in the US. We still await the arrival of the OnePlus Open, and I’m still very hopeful that the pricing of that device actually shakes things up a bit. For a company that has returned to its roots of great hardware on a budget, I’d be shocked if OnePlus didn’t at least undercut everyone else by a few hundred dollars. And if they do, we may have to revisit some of what is going on with Google and Samsung and their $1800 folding phones.