Samsung is cooking up a sequel to its nearly $2,000 foldable tablet/phone hybrid, the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Well-known Samsung leaker Ice universe posted the first official render, albeit in a blurry, low-resolution form, but it’s good enough to get some information out of.

The photo shows two Fold2’s stacked on top of each other, with the top one showing the inner screen and the bottom one showing the front display and the rear camera. The first detail we can make out in the picture is the new branding for Samsung’s foldable smartphones. The Fold2 is actually the “Galaxy Z Fold2,” a name that reflects “Galaxy Z” as the new catch-all sub-brand for foldable smartphones, just as “Galaxy S” denotes the non-folding flagships. This change is already sort of live on Samsung’s site, where you’ll see the old Galaxy Fold one listed under the unified “Galaxy Z” page, along with Samsung’s second, smaller foldable, the Galaxy Z Flip.

The best news from this image is the bigger front screen, which nearly fills the front of the device, just like a normal smartphone. The original Galaxy Fold had an abundance of problems that will hopefully be corrected with the sequel, and one of them was the tiny front display, which only covered about 50 percent of the front. By Samsung’s own admission, the device was supposed to be a smartphone when closed and a tablet when open, but the tiny front display wasn’t big enough for normal smartphone duties. Typing on the tiny keyboard was difficult, and the screen wasn’t even big enough to fit a normal home screen with a four-wide grid of icons. The bigger front screen will make the front of the device a lot more useable, which is crucial in a foldable for any on-the-go usage, quickly replying to a text message, or checking notifications.

On the inside we’re hoping to see big improvements, too. The original Galaxy Fold’s ridiculous camera notch appears to have vanished, and while it’s not clear from this image what the inside (or front) camera solution will be, Ice universe previously shared a rough mock-up of the interior of the Fold2 with a hole-punch camera. An obvious plan for the Fold2 would be to bring the improvements from the Galaxy Z Flip to the bigger Galaxy Fold, and one of those was a hole-punch camera.

Another Z Flip improvement we’ll hopefully see on the Fold2 is the glass display cover. As one of the first foldable smartphones, the original Galaxy Fold had a squishy plastic display. The Galaxy Z Flip, introduced a flexible glass layer in the display, and while that didn’t help with scratch resistance (the top layer was still plastic), it did provide a more solid surface to slide your finger around on. The glass layer also greatly helped with the optics of the display, producing a brighter, more vibrant image than the cloudy plastic Galaxy Fold display. A glass display layer isn’t something you’d see in the image, but it’s an obvious improvement that will hopefully come to the phone.

It also looks like the Fold2 will share a few design elements with the Galaxy Note 20, another upcoming Samsung phone that has leaked. The first is the flagship color—a striking bronze—and the second is the design of the camera bump, which is a rectangular setup with circular highlights around the camera lens.

Samsung recently said it would unveil five devices at its Galaxy Unpacked hardware event on August 5. The obvious entries that have seen considerable leaks are the Galaxy Note 20, the Galaxy Watch 3, the “Galaxy Buds” wireless earbuds, and this Fold2 entry, which is already being teased by Samsung’s UK Twitter account. An exact number is not particularly helpful since it’s unclear if Samsung will count the Galaxy Note 20 twice, as the device will come in two sizes. For the possible fifth product, we might see a 5G version of the Z Flip or a new Android tablet.

Listing image by Ice universe

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1692890