Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4 is expected to arrive in a few months and this year’s foldable smartphone could offer better battery life without needing to get any thicker or heavier. The downside of a compact foldable is that there is less room available for the battery, which has to be divided into smaller, connected packs. This results in reduced battery life when compared to standard rigid smartphones. Since this is one of the very few complaints about previous generations of this popular device, any improvement will be welcome.
The third-generation Galaxy Z Flip features a much better screen technology, offering up to a 120Hz refresh rate and a 1,200-nit display brightness. Perhaps even more important, the Galaxy Z Flip 3 has a more durable screen, surviving being folded over 200,000 times in a third-party stress test. This had been a weakness in earlier flexible screen smartphones, resulting in a critical improvement. While the phone should have a long lifespan, daily battery life is a more immediate concern.
Rumors suggest the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 might have improved efficiency and therefore better battery life. A recent Tweet from Ice universe claims that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ expected to be used in the Galaxy Z Flip 4 will be produced using TSMC’s 4-nanometer process, which could yield better performance and power efficiency, along with running cooler. Last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was manufactured on Samsung's 4-nanometer node. It's generally accepted that TSMC's process is better and results in faster and more efficient chips, as noted by semiconductor analyst Robert Castellano in a Seeking Alpha article. That may change in the future as Samsung continues to invest in manufacturing improvements.
Galaxy Flip 4 Performance Boost
Ice universe also shared an earlier Tweet, which revealed a Geekbench screenshot that was claimed to be test results of the upcoming Galaxy Flip 4. The post highlights performance improvements coming to Samsung’s next small foldable. While still no threat to Apple’s system-on-a-chip dominance, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ looks like it will become the leading Android processor, outpacing the previous top single-core score of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in a Lenovo Legion Y90 by 9-percent. The supposed Galaxy Z Flip 4 tested at 1,277 versus 1,170 for the older smartphone.
In the multi-core test, the margin was even closer. A Lenovo Legion 2 Pro with Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 reached an impressive 3,592 while the Ice universe image showed 3,642 for the new Samsung phone. When producing new chips, they can be tuned more for speed or for efficiency and these small gains suggest efficiency might have been favored. For a compact foldable, that is clearly the best decision. The new smartphone and new chip are both expected later this year, potentially resulting in a longer-lasting Galaxy Z Flip 4.
Source: Ice universe/Twitter, Seeking Alpha