Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 battery size
Granted, the giant Galaxy Z Fold 3 main display eats the battery like candy floss when you are gaming, but you are getting enough hours of the day on it for watching videos or browsing. If you mainly use the external display, the battery life gets better, but then why get a foldable.
A similar fate awaits the Z Fold 4’s endurance benchmarks on a charge, it seems, though the phone is expected to ship with a more frugal Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset as well as new OLED display technology that allows for more granular refresh rate management.
If the partnership with ATL materializes, it will mark the first time that Samsung will be using batteries other than the ones from its SDI subsidiary for its foldable phones. Recently, LG has also been thrown in the mix as Samsung battery supplier, so the company is obviously trying to diversify its sources.
The battery packs aren’t a huge contributor to the total assembly cost of a phone (that would be the display) but every lit bit of fat trimming counts. A typical phone battery costs $6-$8 but when you mass produce, every bit counts.
Samsung is trying to popularize the foldable phones niche and for them to become mainstream the bendy handsets need to fall in price at least to the level of current rigid flagships, so the ATL and LG battery supply diversification spree over at Samsung is one piece of its market penetration puzzle. One way to achieve lower Galaxy Z Fold 4 prices yet still add new features and hardware to the phones is by replacing expensive suppliers in the chain with alternatives that are no less experienced but can produce the component for less and Samsung seems to be doing exactly that with its battery unit.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 battery life and charging speeds
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 will likely have a 4,400 mAh battery, as mentioned. That’s big, but not really gargantuan by today’s standards when the S22 Ultra ships with a 5000mAh pack.
With the same battery size, the Z Fold 4 predecessor lasted 8 hours and 15 minutes of screen-on time in our browsing test with the high refresh rate turned on and a bit shorter endurance of 7 hours when streaming YouTube videos. Gaming on the big display is actually a rather frugal activity with more than 8 hours of screen-on time, but when you turn on the 120Hz mode, the battery life went down to 5 hours and change.
Thus, we expect the Galaxy Z Fold 4’s battery life to be average to very good, depending on whether you are mainly using the external display with sporadic unfurling to read or watch videos on the main display, or whether you plan to game extensively on it in a dynamic refresh rate mode.
