Samsung could reinvent the S Pen for its next foldable phone

Samsung is reportedly making a major stylus input change for its next book-style foldable device as it moves forward in pursuit of slimmer phones. According to a report from ET News, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 will switch the stylus input to a format similar to that of the Apple Pencil.

Citing industry sources, the Korean outlet mentions that Samsung has decided to remove the digitizer element from the upcoming phone’s display assembly. The digitizer is a pressure-sensitive layer that converts the physical input from a stylus and converts those strokes into digital information.

Removing the digitizer layer has reportedly allowed Samsung to shave 0.6 millimeters from the phone’s cross section. The report mentions that the thickness profile of Galaxy Z Fold 7 will be under 10 millimetres, and that it has been modeled after the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition.

The latter is slimmer than the current-gen Galaxy Z Fold 6, and packs a larger inner display. For the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, the company is eyeing a slightly bigger 8-inch inner foldable screen, but one without a digitizer element to trim the phone’s waistline.

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So, how is a stylus going to factor in the equation without a digitizer? Samsung is reimagining the entire stylus stack, it seems, and will reportedly adopt the active electrostatic (AES) system.

Instead of a digitizer layer, the AES tech requires specialized sensors integrated within the display to produce an electrostatic grid. These grids interact with the stylus, which comes fitted with its own transmitting unit, among other innards.

Here is Wacom’s explanation of the interaction process for an AES stylus:

“One sensor grid and the pen act as the transmitting unit that generates an electrical field; the other grids act as receiving units. The pen’s position is identified based on differences in the charge amount detected on each sensor grid receiving unit.”

This approach reduces input latency to milliseconds, without sacrificing input accuracy or niceties such as pressure sensitivity. On the flip side, the stylus gets heavier.

That’s not necessarily a bad sign, as the likes of Apple Pencil work just fine for basic note-taking as well as advanced sketching. It has found widespread acceptance in the creative community that uses an iPad on a daily basis.

The only major hassle is that the stylus will have to be charged on a regular basis to top up the battery inside. How Samsung manages that, remains a mystery. Apple’s stylus options rely either on magnetic charging, or use a wired USB-C format to juice up the battery pack fitted inside their cylindrical chassis.

So far, Samsung has sold a custom stylus under the “Fold Edition” label for the Galaxy Z Fold series phones, which is thicker and more rounded than the one it offers with the Galaxy S series, or the erstwhile Galaxy Note series phones.

It would be interesting to see what design language (and pricing model) Samsung implements for its new foldable-friendly stylus. And yeah, it’s quite likely that a price hike is in the pipeline.