Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 ditches S Pen support – here’s why
It’s the least “Ultra” thing about it, but Samsung has a method to the madness
📱 Samsung just announced the Galaxy Z Fold 7 at Unpacked
👀 It’s equipped with a slew of upgrades, but has a glaring omission
✍️ Samsung dropped S Pen support after including it for the past few generations
1️⃣ It’s a confusing choice, but one that was necessary for one particular reason
Samsung announced the Galaxy Z Fold 7 this week at Unpacked, and it’s been met with a lot of positive feedback. We gave it the flowers it deserves in our hands-on, highlighting all the ways Samsung has improved its foldable game year-over-year. However, one glaring omission is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of some customers, potentially deterring them from buying a Z Fold 7 themselves: no S Pen support.
✍️ Why the Galaxy Z Fold 7 doesn’t support the S Pen
Since the Galaxy Z Fold 3, Samsung has sold a special version of the S Pen as an optional accessory for its large-format foldables. It’s given users the ability to sign documents, sketch, and take notes on a much larger screen than the Galaxy S Ultra series, which limits you to displays smaller than 7 inches. Drawing on such a large canvas has been delightful in my testing of previous Galaxy Fold devices, so I was disappointed to find out the Z Fold 7 doesn’t support it at all.
Samsung isn’t selling an S Pen for the Galaxy Z Fold 7 at all, and there’s no integrated stylus in a silo at the bottom, either. Instead, you’re left to draw and sign everything with your finger, which many users might not prefer. So what gives?
Two words: ultra-thin.
While Samsung has been propping up the Galaxy Z Fold 7 as an indirect iteration of the Galaxy S25 Ultra that can unfold, it seems like supporting the S Pen would’ve gotten in the way of that vision, despite the S Pen being a core component of the S25 Ultra experience.
Samsung chose form over function for this reason. The company made the Z Fold 7 nearly as thin as the S25 Ultra when it’s closed; at 8.9mm, it’s just 0.7mm thicker than the Ultra itself. When open, the phone is razor-thin at just 4.2mm, making it one of the thinnest phones in the world.
But Samsung had to make sacrifices to get there, one of which was S Pen support. In order to make a stylus like the S Pen work, you need a special digitizer underneath the display. While previous Galaxy Z Fold devices were thick enough to include one, it seems that Samsung ran out of room in the Fold 7 and needed to ditch it to reach its desired thickness.
A digitizer like this is generally less than a millimeter thick, but given that Samsung needed to cram in all the components of a smartphone (the chip, battery, motherboard, etc) and include stronger Ultra-Thin Glass, it doesn’t seem like there was a way to include it in the end.
Whether this was the right decision is unclear. If you’re a regular S Pen user who loves drawing on a large display, this omission sucks. But Samsung told reporters during its Z Fold 7 presentation that not a lot of users were utilizing S Pen support anyway, so maybe it’ll only be a hurtful decision to a small subset of consumers.
Regardless, if you wanted to use an S Pen with your Galaxy Z Fold 7, you’ll be better off picking up an older Galaxy Z Fold 6 and S Pen while supplies last.
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Max Buondonno is an editor at The Shortcut. He’s been reporting on the latest consumer technology since 2015, with his work featured on CNN Underscored, ZDNET, How-To Geek, XDA, TheStreet, and more. Follow him on X @LegendaryScoop and Instagram @LegendaryScoop.