While some questions have been answered about the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 – the launch date is set for August 10, for example – there’s still plenty that we don’t know, including how much these phones are likely to cost.
Retailer listings published ahead of time and picked up by GSMArena (opens in new tab) show prices for these two phones that are marginally higher than the ones we saw for their predecessors last year. The difference isn’t great but it is there.
Speculation about how much the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 will cost has been swirling for months, and while it’s disappointing that Samsung hasn’t been able to bring costs down, at least we’re not seeing a huge price hike (according to this leak).
The price is right?
According to the unconfirmed retailer listings that have popped up, the Z Fold 4 will cost you €1,864 for the cheapest model, the one with 256GB of internal storage. That’s an increase of €64 over the €1,800 starting price we saw for the Z Fold 3.
As for the Z Flip 4, that’s apparently going to start at €1,080 for the variant with the 128GB storage, which is again a small increase – the 128GB Z Flip 3 that Samsung launched last year originally went on sale for €1,049.
You still need to convert those figures into your own currency – we haven’t done that here as Samsung is unlikely to use a straight currency conversion – but expect small increases over the previous starting prices of $1,799 / £1,599 / AU$2,499 (Z Fold 3) and $999 / £949 / AU$1,499 (Z Flip 3).
Analysis: pricing is key
The price of any smartphone is an important factor in how appealing it is to potential buyers, but that’s especially true when it comes to foldable phones: these handsets need to win over people who are used to their standard, affordable smartphone designs.
The Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Galaxy Z Flip 3 actually managed to bring prices down compared with the models that came before them, so it’s something of a shame that Samsung hasn’t managed to repeat the trick in 2022.
That said, we can understand the challenges: folding phones are much more challenging to engineer than phones that use a traditional form factor, and then there are all the supply and labor problems brought on by the global pandemic we’re living through.
With that in mind, it’s actually impressive that Samsung has managed to keep pricing more or less the same – assuming that the information in this new leak is accurate of course. We’ll find out for sure on August 10.