No S Pen on the Galaxy Z Fold 7? That's a win, not a loss!
Ditching stylus support might be the smartest move Samsung made with its latest foldable.
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
Yesterday's announcement of the Galaxy Z Fold 7 was accompanied by a ton of good news for fans of Samsung. Many previous issues were seemingly resolved or at least critically addressed, which shows that Samsung is paying attention to its still leading position in the foldable market.
The phone comes with vastly improved design language, fully clad with premium materials all around, featuring a stronger hinge, minimizing the unsightly crease in the middle of the screen, and Samsung finally gives us a seemingly great camera that should fit the Galaxy Z Fold 7's premium status.
Of course, it's not all roses. Notably, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 still features a laughably small 4,400 mAh battery, which isn't something people paying $2,000 for this phone should be content with (I know I won't be, because I wouldn't get this particular foldable in the first place).
But there's one major omission from the Galaxy Z Fold 7's feature list that most people will surely bemoan, but I welcome with open hands and hope Samsung "brings" to all of its future products.
S Pen support on the Z Fold 7 is gone, and that's a good thing
Yes, you read that right, and if you have missed the news, I'm sorry to be the bearer of ill news.
Apparently, the phone lacks the hardware digitizer in the screen, which allows for the phone to accurately register the S Pen input.
There could be a few good reasons for the S Pen's dethroning from the new foldable phone, and most of them have a lot to do with costs and design language.
Sure, a modern display digitizer is definitely splitting hairs in terms of thickness, so I'm far from thinking that we had to get rid of the digitizer to get a Galaxy Z Fold that's below 9 mm in thickness. Costs? While I bet a digitizer pane costs pennies, we don't really know the scope of R&D and economies of scale here.
The new ultra-thin glass might have also prevented the digitizer from working correctly. I guess we'll know more about the exact reasons for the lack of S Pen support in due time.
It's your fault that the S Pen is gone
There could be another reason for nixing the stylus support. Samsung probably had more than enough data to determine that not enough Galaxy Z Fold users actually bought S Pen styluses, which sealed the fate of the accessory.
As Steve Jobs once said at the original iPhone announcement in 2007, "Who needs a stylus?," and it's apparently not Galaxy Z Fold users.
Since the Galaxy Z Fold 3, which first scored support for soft-tip S Pen styluses, which were designed specifically for Samsung's foldables, using the stylus with the device has been weird at best and uncomfortable at worst. There was no built-in silo to tuck the S Pen in, and you had to rely on an unsightly case that only added unnecessary heft to Samsung's foldables.
The crease of previous Folds also meant that writing or drawing with the S Pen will always be a peculiar experience when you go across the middle of the display. Not a particularly good user experience there, especially when you compare it with the standard Galaxy S Ultra candy bar flagships, which never had such an issue in the first place.
A move in the right direction that the Galaxy S26 Ultra hopefully catches on
See, I've tried multiple times to get into using the S Pen regularly during my stints with Samsung flagships, but apart from the novelty aspect of it in the first week, the S Pen is one of the more forgettable hardware features on Samsung's phones. No wonder it lost Bluetooth connectivity with the Galaxy S25 Ultra.
I know the S Pen has many fans that will gladly stick the S Pen in my jugular, but that's just how I feel.
While I wouldn't want to see future Galaxy S Ultra flagships lose the S Pen support altogether, I believe Samsung should remove the built-in silo and fill in that empty space with battery, which to this day turns out to be a fairly lackluster aspect of Samsung's phones. Or don't do that, and just focus on making the Ultra thinner without sacrificing the battery capacity.
There's "sort of" a precedent to that: most Samsung high-end tablets boast an S Pen in the box that attaches to the back of the device magnetically. Having an S Pen in the box of the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but not in a dedicated silo inside the phone itself, will allow Samsung to give us a better Ultra, unconstrained by the limitations of having to accommodate an S Pen.
See, we wouldn't have had this problem if the Note lineup was still alive and kicking. Having one range dedicated to camera prowess (the Ultra) and another aimed at productivity-obsessed zealots who need a stylus in 2025 (the Note) would have solved many of those self-infllicted problems.
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