Less than six months after original release, Samsung reboots its Galaxy Z Flip pholdable for the 5G age

Great, more $1,500 kit to trash

Pholdables remain a vanishingly small niche of the smartphone market, due to their high costs and endemic durability concerns. Nobody, it seems, told Samsung, which just announced an upgraded 5G version of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip.

So, what's changed? Truthfully, not much. In addition to the inclusion of 5G (which supports sub-6GHz networks only), the processor has been bumped to the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ platform.

This is a fairly modest upgrade on its predecessor's Snapdragon 855+, with incremental improvements in GPU and CPU performance. There's also support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, courtesy of the platform's FastConnect 6900 chip.

And that's about it on the hardware front. The device maintains the same form factor as its predecessor, although the exterior glass has a new fingerprint-minimising coating that Samsung describes as "soft to the touch", but what normal people would call "matte",

There are also a few software tweaks as well. Most notable is a "flex mode", which (as the name implies) allows punters to use the phone in various different bendy configurations. So you can, for example, twist the phone's body to adjust the camera angles, while controlling the phone from the bottom-half of the display.

It's all fairly modest. Except for the price. Clocking in at $1,499.99 (or just under £1,180), the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G is expensive.

Of course, within the broader context of foldable phones (of which there are few), the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G isn't too bad. It's cheaper than the Galaxy Fold, which is due a refresh later this year, and is on par with the launch price of the (widely panned) Motorola Razr.

Still, nearly $1,500 will prove unpalatable for many – particularly when they are known to break easily. ®