Samsung's New Phones Show How Far Ahead China Is on Innovation

WIRED

2 days ago

Just like it has done with EVs, China's investment in smartphones is leaving big brands playing catch up. Forget iterative updates: China is already working on what's next. A Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Galaxy Z Fold 7 during Galaxy Unpacked in New York on July 9, 2025. Photograph:All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Earlier this week, Samsung announced the latest generation of its high-end foldable phones at its Summer Galaxy Unpacked event. The Galaxy Z Fold7 and the Galaxy Z Flip7 are variously lighter, thinner, less crease-prone than before. They are more expensive too. Some call them the 'foldables to beat.'
It's Samsung messaging and a commentator response that sounds an awful lot like what we heard last year. And the year before that, for that matter, in a hall of echoes typical of the iterative progress loop much of consumer tech hardware has fallen into. It's not that we think they'll be bad—we liked their predecessors just fine. It's just that when you compare them to the progress being made by Chinese competitors, they feel a bit dull, and already a step behind in an area they are widely thought to lead.
Yes, calling the latest tech boring has a touch of The Simpsons' 'Old Man Yells at Cloud' meme energy to it. But it's symptomatic of a truth that could have serious implications further down the line for all of us: China is winning consumer tech, in a big way. Déjà Vu
It's a situation we are already watching unfold with EVs, something that was most stark at this year's Shanghai Auto show. WIRED writer Alistair Charlton called the show a 'warning to the West,' as Chinese brands showed off innovation and scale that far surpasses what Western brands have managed in the same time.
Chinese car-makers push harder on features, design, charging speeds and simply getting their cars out there—and it's now ready to start the push outside of its own (already huge) market. China's biggest EV-maker BYD has already launched in the UK and Europe, and the same would likely be true for US streets were it not for tariffs and the dangerous political spotlight this would put on the giant car-marker.
The old idea that Chinese-designed tech is trash, that Japan, South Korea and the West do the innovating while China provides the factory floor, is out of date. And its innovations are not (entirely) from IP theft either. Its early investment in EVs proves it, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Let's bring this back around to foldable phones. From the perspective of a shopper in the West, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 was beaten to the sub-9mm foldable milestone by Chinese brand Honor. It announced its Magic V5 a week before Samsung's Unpacked launch event, in timing that has an eye-roll-worthy schoolyard feel to it—particularly when it comes in just 0.1 millimeters thinner.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7, Z Flip7 and the Flip7 SE at this week's launch. Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The China tech contingent has made a habit of these headline-grabbing stunts. And there's no better example than Royole. Its Flexpai was rushed to launch in order to become the 'first foldable phone' in 2018. It was labelled with such things as 'charmingly awful' and it was about as close to vaporware as you can get while also being a product that existed … somewhere.
China no longer relies entirely on such thin wins, though, as you realise when you take a single step back. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold7 wasn't really beaten to market by a week, but by almost half a year. Above the Fold
In early 2025, Oppo announced the Find N5 in China. It is a 8.9mm-thick foldable, just like the Galaxy Z Fold7, with the more normal-shaped style of front screen Samsung now aims for.
But Oppo also went places Samsung is yet to touch. Both inner and outer displays of the Oppo Find N5 support a stylus, which Samsung has backed away from in this generation. The Galaxy Z Fold7 now doesn't support the Samsung S-Pen at all.
The Oppo Find N5 was also among the first phones to incorporate one of the few genuinely experience-altering recent technologies in mobile phones, a silicon-carbon battery. This battery design allows for higher energy density, leading to battery capacity of 5600mAh versus the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7's 4400mAh. Same thickness, but a battery life world apart.
Match that 30 percent higher battery capacity with speedy 80W charging, versus Samsung's 25W, and you've got a six-month old phone strides ahead in a key area compared with one that's just launched. But that's not all.
In September 2024, Huawei—another Chinese brand—announced the Mate XT, a true next-generation foldable. It's what is known as a tri-fold design, even if it only actually folds twice. You start off with a 6.4-inch screen, but an ambitious dual-hinge mechanism opens up to form first a 7.9-inch display, and then a tablet-like 10.2-inch one.
The tri-fold Huawei Mate XT was released last year. Photograph:And despite all those hinges and all that complexity, the Huawei Mate XT is only fractionally thicker than Samsung's last-generation Galaxy Z Fold6, released just a few months earlier.
Some believed Samsung would tease a tri-fold phone at this year's Samsung Unpacked launch, but it didn't materialize. Instead it announced after the event that it was 'working hard' on one, and that it would be coming at the end of 2025. Cutting-edge tech is beginning to look rather blunt in Samsung's hands. So what's going on?
Why is every major top Chinese manufacturer, from Xiaomi to Huawei, set to launch a foldable this year while Samsung seems afraid to make more than piecemeal upgrades, and others, like Apple, remain incredibly quiet. And why do we in the West get to see so few of these phones, even from the brands not—like Huawei—sanctioned by the US government?
Apparently part of it is down to Chinese audience being more interested in looking for something new, compared to the average UK or US buyer.
'Chinese consumers have matured significantly, with many now on their fifth or sixth smartphone. This experience has led them to actively seek unique and advanced devices,' says Counterpoint Research Vice President Neil Shah.
'China is the largest foldable market globally due the growing demand and appetite for differentiated smartphones. The foldable penetration within China smartphone sales is also consistently higher than any other markets. Two out of three foldable phones sold globally are in China.'
'Other affluent markets such as the USA and Western Europe are still around the global average of 1 percent penetration of foldables, of the total smartphone sales.' Same Old, Same Old
Despite an undeniable interest in them, it seems most of us are still not willing to actually buy foldables, much as we may complain about smartphones never changing. The result: Chinese phone brands have evolved rapidly while others focused on Western sales have stagnated. It's a point the UK's Nothing has made a fulcrum of its own marketing.
Nothing CEO Carl Pei and co-founder of faux start-up OnePlus called current consumer tech 'boring' at the launch of the Nothing Phone (3), suggesting the old magic and excitement of new tech has vanished. While Nothing's own innovations are arguably largely superficial, he does have a point.
But why are the Chinese phone brands, in China at least, able to be less conservative and still stay afloat? The global market leader in foldables, Huawei, has the added draw for the Chinese buyer of having survived as a 'local' hero despite dramatic US sanctions, applied in 2019. It's a good story.
Technological supremacy is also a key goal for the Chinese government, not just the country's most famous brands. And that comes with perks.
Car-maker BYD has reportedly been subsidised by the government to the tune of upwards of $3.7 billion. Back in 2019 the Wall Street Journal claimed Huawei had benefitted from a collective $75 billion in state subsidies.
It's easy to forget that before its blacklisting, Huawei had made it to second place in global smartphone shipments, second only to Samsung in Q4 2019 according to Canalys. That stratospheric rise wasn't cheap, and didn't happen overnight, but it out-innovated its competition—particularly in camera tech—and the sales poured in. Its comeback has been heavily government-supported too, again according to the Wall Street Journal, showing how far China is keen to push its brands to succeed without US support.
This isn't just about Huawei being too big to fail. It's linked to what MIT economist David Autor calls an upcoming 'China Shock 2.0.'
The first China shock was the decimation of US manufacturing in favour of low-cost Chinese production. The second may see China win out again, in the production of more advanced technologies, from semiconductors and EV tech to 'AI, quantum computing, and fusion energy,' according to Autor.
This is already happening, and the US's actions against Huawei only focused these efforts, pushing Chinese phone brands to work ever more closely (and even exclusively) with the manufacturers behind the flashy gadgets—the Chinese component-makers.
'Huawei and Honor pioneered working actively with local ecosystem players in China, such as BOE, Chinastar, Visionox to launch thinner, lighter innovative multi-fold devices,' explains Shah.
China's display manufacturer BOE is key to why the country's foldables no longer have to play second fiddle to Samsung, which has its own display-making arm, Samsung Display. By some metrics, BOE is the largest display manufacturer in the world. It is even on track to make the majority of panels for Apple's MacBook range in 2025. And it's a pioneer, just like Samsung Display. The worry for those concerned about China's future dominance in any market, is that the country is getting more of these pioneers as the years pass by.
Its next focus? Winning the race to semiconductor supremacy, with mainland China on course to overtake Taiwan as the lead producer of chips by 2030, according to research by Yole Group.
Meanwhile, the US and EU are—relatively—floundering, with America's CHIPS Act intended to reduce reliance on foreign states under threat from a Trump presidency. Whether tariffs offer a viable alternative to this remains to be seen, but from the outside, it looks like a fight that no one wins, least not the consumer.
While we wait for the outcome to play out, China's stronghold on its supply chains only gets more secure, and its ability to push for innovation across burgeoning markets—as EVs once were—is bolstered. When Apple finally launches its long-rumored foldable smartphone and finally drags this market out of the sidelines into legitimacy in the West, the Chinese brands will be ready and waiting.