Samsung Bets Big on Foldables (and Finally Kills the Note)

Samsung held its August Unpacked event today, and the big story isn’t any single device — it’s what wasn’t there. This is the first late-summer Unpacked in years without a new Galaxy Note. Instead, Samsung is putting its full marketing weight behind foldables, and honestly, it’s about time.

The headline devices are the Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3. The Fold3 is the more premium of the two, but the Flip3 is the interesting one strategically — Samsung is clearly positioning it as a mass-market foldable, with a starting price lower than previous Flip and Fold generations. That’s the right move. Foldables have spent the last couple of years as a curiosity for early adopters willing to pay a premium and accept some durability risk. If Samsung wants folding phones to become a real category instead of a niche flex, price is the lever that matters most.

Whether the Flip3’s price cut is enough to actually move units at scale remains to be seen, but the signal is clear: Samsung thinks foldables, not a stylus-equipped slab, are its flagship future. Given how little the Note lineup had differentiated itself in recent years beyond the S Pen, retiring it (or at least benching it for a season) to focus resources on foldable hardware and software polish seems like a reasonable bet.

Wear OS gets a reboot

The other major announcement was the Galaxy Watch4 and Watch4 Classic, which matter less for their hardware specs and more for what’s running underneath: they’re the first smartwatches built on the newly unified Wear OS platform that Google and Samsung jointly developed. Samsung has spent years running its own Tizen-based watch software while Wear OS languished as an also-ran to the Apple Watch. Merging efforts is an admission that neither company was going to out-execute Apple alone.

This is worth watching closely. A single, better-supported Wear OS could finally give app developers a reason to build seriously for Android smartwatches again, instead of treating the platform as an afterthought. If Samsung’s hardware polish gets paired with a software base that other Android OEMs can also build on, it’s a much stronger combined pitch than either company managed solo.

Rounding out the event, Samsung also introduced the Galaxy Buds2 earbuds — a solid but unsurprising update, clearly meant to fill out the ecosystem around the new phones and watches rather than to make headlines on their own.

Taken together, this Unpacked reads less like a single product drop and more like a repositioning. Samsung is telling the market that its most interesting hardware innovation is folding glass, not a bigger screen with a pen, and that its wearables strategy now runs through a shared platform instead of a proprietary one. Both bets carry real risk — foldables still have to prove long-term durability, and a unified Wear OS is only as good as the app support that follows it. But after a summer of shortages and restock frustration across nearly every other hardware category, it’s refreshing to see a major manufacturer make a genuinely bold play instead of just shipping incremental spec bumps.