Samsung did their summer Unpacked thing yesterday in Seoul, and I stayed up way later than I should have watching the stream because I've been half-considering a foldable since the first Z Flip came out and looked, frankly, kind of dumb. The Flip5 and Fold5 are out now (well, preorders are open, you actually get one in your hands August 11th), and the thing everyone's going to write about is the price staying flat: Flip5 still $999.99, Fold5 still $1,799.99, no stealth markup this year, good for them. But that's not actually the interesting part to me.
The interesting part is the hinge.
Every foldable Samsung's made up to now closes with a gap. You fold it shut and there's this sliver of space where the two halves don't quite meet, which means dust gets in, and which means the phone in your pocket is thicker than it needs to be because of an air pocket that's doing nothing for you. The Flex Hinge on both the Fold5 and Flip5 finally closes flush. No gap. It sounds like a small thing and I guess it is a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that tells you a company actually used their own product for a year instead of just iterating on a spec sheet.
The Flip5's cover screen is the other genuinely new bit — 3.4 inches now, up from the postage-stamp 1.9 inches on the Flip4. That's big enough to actually run widgets on, reply to texts without unfolding, see a full notification instead of three words of it. The Flip4's cover screen was always the thing reviewers apologized for. This one they're calling the "Flex Window," which is a dumb marketing name, but the screen itself is the first cover display on this line that feels like a feature instead of an afterthought.
Everything else is what you'd expect from a Samsung refresh. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy in both phones, so performance won't be the bottleneck. Same 50MP main camera setup carried over from the Fold4. The Fold5 is thinner and a little lighter, which matters more than it sounds like it should once you've actually carried a Fold in a jeans pocket for a week (I have not owned one, but a friend has, and he complains about this constantly).
They also refreshed the Tab S9 line, and buried in that announcement is something I think is a bigger deal than it got credit for on the stream: IP68 water resistance, first time ever on a Galaxy Tab. That's a genuinely useful thing for a tablet that's been historically the one device in Samsung's lineup you had to baby. And the Watch6 lineup split into two personalities again: the regular Watch6 goes bezel-less/flat, and the Watch6 Classic brings the rotating bezel back for people (me) who think a touchscreen-only watch interface is a worse way to scroll through menus than a physical dial.
Am I buying one? Probably not the Fold5, not at $1,799.99, not when my current phone still does everything I need it to. The Flip5 I'm more tempted by, mostly because of that cover screen, but I've been burned before by early-adopter foldable anxiety (screen protector peeling at the crease, careful not to fold it wrong, the whole routine), and I'd rather let a few more owners put a few more months on this hinge before I hand over a grand.
Also, completely unrelated, but I can't let it go unmentioned: this is the same week Twitter decided to rename itself X and swap out the bird for a logo that looks like a font sample. I'm not going to spend a whole post on it because every tech site on the internet already has, but I will say this — I've typed "tweet" as a verb for something like twelve years now and I am not retraining that muscle memory for a company that apparently can't keep a consistent name for more than a decade. Anyway. Foldables. That's the actual story this week, even if nobody's talking about it that way.