Samsung has officially announced when it will hold its next Unpacked product event: August 11th at 10AM ET / 7AM PT. It is widely expected to announce the next version of the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 — both of which have already leaked quite a bit. Samsung’s not being shy about those expectations, as a quick look at its invite reveals the outline for both of those devices.
Samsung is also expected to announce new Galaxy watches, which would be the first to use the new combined Wear platform that was announced at Google I/O earlier this year.
Samsung is holding the event virtually again on its website, and it promises to post more details on the livestream here. It’s also keeping up another Samsung trend: letting customers “reserve” “its next flagship” before it’s even been officially announced. Samsung says it will offer “increased trade-in credit and 12 months of Samsung Care+ at a discounted rate” for early reservations.
According to the images leaked by Evan Blass, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 looks very similar to the current iteration of the folding phone. The largest upgrade will apparently be compatibility with Samsung’s S Pen stylus. Samsung itself has been telegraphing that it would add stylus support to the Fold line for a very long time now.
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Photo: Evan Blass / Twitter (tweet now deleted)
As for the Galaxy Z Flip 3, the biggest update may be on the outside, where Samsung will replace a very tiny screen with a slightly larger but still fairly small screen.
Samsung has done a better job with durability on its folding devices since it switched over to using “Ultra thin glass” under a plastic sheet for these displays. However, the screens are still much more fragile than regular smartphone screens. If Samsung is intending to encourage users to poke at the Z Fold 3’s screen with a plastic stick, that folding screen will need to become more durable.
Though it’s not likely to get top billing, the new Galaxy smartwatches are likely to be a bigger shift than the iterative updates to the folding phones. That’s because it’ll be the first Samsung smartwatch to run Google’s Wear operating system in over half a decade. Samsung had been using its own Tizen-based OS on smartwatches, which had benefits over Google’s Wear OS but did not have an app library worth using. Now that the two operating systems are combined, this upcoming Samsung watch will be how first real look at what the new Wear operating system really works.
We are expecting both a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 with a rotating bezel and a Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 4 without to be announced, both in multiple colors.
It’s always possible there will be more on tap — Samsung’s Galaxy Buds lineup could also be due for a new model. We’ll find out for sure when Samsung kicks off its livestream on August 11th.