Why no S Pen support just killed my interest in the Galaxy Z Fold 7

“Writing is learning!” That’s a core belief my primary school headmistress instilled in me when she spoke to the class before the soon-to-follow series of tests. Over the last 20-plus years, I have diligently followed her wisdom, and writing has been crucial in distilling my thoughts.

This tendency also influences my inclination towards devices that let me use a pen-like contraption on digital screens — the Galaxy Z Fold being one of them. However, as Samsung introduces the newest foldable, the Galaxy Z Fold 7, which is slimmer than ever, it makes one crucial change: dropping support for the S Pen, which leaves me heartbroken.

In the simplest of expressions, a Samsung Galaxy Fold is a Galaxy Tab that can be folded in half. Therefore, the removal of the S Pen from the Galaxy Fold 7 feels like stripping it of one of its key characteristics.

But the S Pen has been much more than a trivial trait in the Galaxy Fold’s identity. For over four generations, the Galaxy Fold has been the only book-style foldable — among those available globally — to support an active stylus. The S Pen, therefore, made the Galaxy Z Fold a more desirable outlier for people like me, even despite frustrating inadequacies like the awkwardly-shaped cover display on previous generations.

More than that, Samsung has always advertised the Galaxy Z Fold as a device for prosumers and go-getters who like to ace their workplace commitments while on the go. And the S Pen fit right into that depiction of productivity.

As it eliminates that possibility, Samsung risks upsetting that section of its target audience and potentially losing their Wall Street moolah.

But perhaps it doesn’t make sense for Samsung to cater to a small sub-section of the audience when it can gain another chunk of buyers by flaunting the Galaxy Z Fold 7’s razor-thin form factor. Perhaps that was the plan all along, and we got our first signals of the change last year.

Just months after Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Fold 6 last year, it followed up with a sleeker Special Edition Fold, exclusive to the Chinese market. To ensure this exquisite Fold remained slim, Samsung eliminated the digitizer from its foldable displays, a key component that allows squiggles from any stylus to be detected more accurately on a phone’s screen, enabling features such as pressure sensitivity. Naturally, the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition ditched S Pen support in favor of a lean figure.

Another sign came a couple of years ago, when Samsung proudly displayed a Galaxy Z Fold prototype with a built-in S Pen. The said prototype never evolved into a real product due to its implications. A built-in S Pen slot would mean Samsung would have to either compromise on battery capacity in the Fold or increase its thickness, or both. The weight of the foldable would increase considerably, too.

However, that shouldn’t have truly meant a complete exclusion of S Pen support.

Instead, Samsung was reported to be partnering with another Korean firm, HiDeep, to create a display chip that can detect stylus input without the need for a digitizer. A simple solution is to add a battery inside the stylus along with the dedicated chip hooked to the display.

At the time, the solution was purportedly intended for another client: a Chinese smartphone manufacturer also working on foldable phones, which sourced its foldable OLED screen from Samsung Display. So, if Samsung could deliver the same solution to a client, it shouldn’t have had to think twice before adopting the same itself.

This is further supported by the fact that HiDeep already supplies similar solutions to Apple, which has already replaced digitizers in its iPad screens, allowing for a slimmer profile.

So while the Galaxy Z Fold 7 doesn’t have active S Pen support — at least not at launch, I hope that’s certainly not Samsung’s final decision. There are two rationales behind this hope. First and most obvious, if the report about Samsung’s partnership with HiDeep is true, it could revive S Pen support on future models, including the Galaxy Z Fold 8.

Second, I’m holding out hope that, despite the initial announcement, the Z Fold 7 will at least end up supporting some basic S Pen capabilities in the coming months. Even if it’s not the full-blown Bluetooth-Air Commands S Pen Pro extravaganza and just the rudimentary, affordable, battery-less S Pen, I’d be okay with it. That, however, would rely solely on the fact that Samsung has already deployed the aforementioned chip, which substitutes a digitizer, but has decided to keep mum because it’s not ready yet. The chances of that being true, though, are very, very slim.

However, if that turns out to be false, I can only hope it is not the end of the road for the S Pen on the Galaxy Z Fold — hope being the chief emotion here. Or that Samsung points to good Z Fold 7 sales, despite the lack of S Pen support, and goes, “Oh, see? No one needs that.”

Until some form of S Pen support is confirmed, though, I will reluctantly walk away from the Fold 7 and recommend others who actively take handwritten notes to do the same.

But if you’re not one of us and are looking for a sleek foldable with years of software support and great performance, this might still be the best option available to you.