Samsung Electronics Co. introduced three new foldable smartphones in an effort to cement its grip on the category and broaden mainstream appeal before Apple Inc. debuts its first version next year.

The new devices, the $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and $1,100 Galaxy Z Flip 7, are thinner and lighter, advancements that helps Samsung funnel their still-unique benefits into designs that are similar in thickness to standard phones. The handsets address some user complaints about past editions and weave in more artificial intelligence features across the company’s software.

Samsung is also going down market in an effort to gather more switchers to the category by introducing a $900 Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE. Lower prices will be critical if such devices are going to find an audience beyond tech enthusiasts. In addition, the company announced upgraded smartwatches alongside the handsets. All three phones plus the watches are available to preorder and will go on sale July 25.

In addition, the company confirmed it plans to release a “trifold” foldable this year — meaning, a phone that folds in two places, allowing it to transform into an even larger tablet-like device for advanced multitasking and more immersive entertainment. Samsung didn’t provide further details.

Despite their technological wow factor, folding handsets still make up a tiny share of overall smartphone sales in the US and haven’t fared much better globally. With its new devices, Samsung is hoping to change that.

“This is going to be an inflection point change in terms of what I would call the mainstreaming of the form factor itself,” Drew Blackard, Samsung’s senior vice president of mobile product management, said in an interview.

As Samsung ushers in its seventh generation of foldable phones, Blackard believes the company has already overcome many of the concerns — “adoption barriers” as he calls them — that led some consumers to shy away from the category early on. Durability has often been at the top of that list, and in an effort to assuage any fears that folding phones are more fragile, Samsung added water resistance and stronger aluminum frames to the Fold and Flip several years ago.

But two substantial downsides remain: Foldables are noticeably thicker than conventional phones when folded shut, and they can be cumbersome, especially for people who carry their handset in their pocket. Samsung set out to solve for these dilemmas with the Fold 7 and Flip 7 — especially in the case of the Fold.

The Fold 7 measures just 8.9 millimeters thick when closed, compared with a 14.9 mm thickness for last year’s Galaxy Z Fold 6. This is a dramatic improvement that makes the Fold feel much closer to a normal phone in the hand. Compared to the company’s original Galaxy Z Fold, it’s 48% thinner. A new product from the Chinese brand Honor, the 8.8-millimeter-thick Magic V5, technically remains the world’s thinnest foldable, but Samsung came close.

Samsung is also responding to a long-running customer gripe: The Galaxy Z Fold’s outer display has always been slightly too narrow, which can increase the frequency of typos when composing emails or text messages on its virtual keyboard. Now it has wider proportions that are closer to what Samsung offers on its main handset, the Galaxy S25.

The 8-inch inner screen is 11 percent larger than that of the Fold 6, and Samsung has made further progress in making the crease less noticeable. Even with the device’s slimmer profile, Samsung is using a thicker layer of “ultra-thin” glass to increase the display’s overall durability, and the front and back glass is made from Corning’s latest, strongest Gorilla Glass.

The Fold 7 is powered by Qualcomm Inc.’s Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, a chip commonly found in newer high-end phones that should give it a performance advantage over Google’s year-old Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Samsung is also promising users seven years of Android software updates and security patches.

The Fold 7 includes a 200-megapixel primary camera, though the size of a camera’s sensor is more indicative of image quality than megapixel count — and this is one area where regular slab phones have outperformed foldables since they have more internal space for larger sensors.

According to Blackard, the Fold series has so far appealed to techies who are drawn to its advanced multitasking capabilities. “It tends to skew to a little bit older audience and it tends to skew a little bit more male,” he said. Once those people buy in, they stay loyal to the series and upgrade to another Fold more often than not, he said. “The Fold is our highest family repurchase rate of any of our device families,” he added.

The same can’t yet be said of Samsung’s Z Flip series. “I would say there were more trial users who kind of went in and went out,” he said. But just as with the Fold 7, the company has made every effort to stomp out any remaining “tradeoffs” with the $1,1000 Galaxy Z Flip 7.

After several years of cautiously restrained hardware updates for the Flip series, Samsung is taking a bolder approach, more directly confronting the Razr Ultra from Lenovo Group Ltd.’s Motorola unit — its primary competition in this segment. Like that phone, the Flip 7’s outer OLED screen now completely encircles the dual-camera system. Samsung has also shaved down the side bezels, giving the front half of the phone an immersive all-screen look that’s beyond what Motorola has achieved.

Samsung calls this outer display the Flex Window, and it’s now 4.1 inches compared to 3.4 inches on the Flip 6. Aside from being larger, it offers a 120 hertz refresh rate — matching the inner screen — for smoother scrolling and more fluid animations. Here, too, Samsung has stretched the phone’s aspect ratio slightly wider to make it feel more conventional and less narrow.

One key difference between the Fold 7 and Flip 7 is the processor. For the Flip, Samsung is using its own in-house Exynos processor. This marks the first time the company has integrated its own processor into a foldable device. Samsung’s Exynos chip line has struggled with performance, efficiency and thermal issues in recent years compared with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. By deploying the Exynos 2500 in a flagship foldable, Samsung aims to restore confidence in its silicon capabilities while also reducing its reliance on Qualcomm.

The $900 Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE has a design similar to last year’s Flip 6. While it’s Samsung’s cheapest foldable to date, competitors like Motorola already offer folding phones for as little as $700.

Blackard believes that when people get to handle and explore foldables, they’re quickly sold on the concept. To help showcase these thinner, lighter designs, Samsung is rethinking its retail presentation strategy. “We will move to an adhesive security with many of our partners where you can literally just pick it up and it’s just tethered with a thin but secure wire,” he said. The company took a similar approach with its slim, lightweight Galaxy S25 Edge earlier this year. Some salespeople will also have their own units for customers who want to test the devices more freely.

Software demos are likely to revolve around artificial intelligence features. Google’s Gemini AI assistant can run on the Flip 7’s Flex Window without requiring customers to open the device. On the Fold 7, it’s been optimized for the large inner display and supports features like Circle to Search within video games; for example, players can circle a challenging enemy on screen in the middle of a game, and a floating window will appear with tips on how to win the battle.

The company has no plans to charge for Galaxy AI features provided by default, Samsung said. Previously, it had said its first-party AI services would be provided for free until the end of 2025, but now they’ll remain so indefinitely.

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Galaxy Z Flip 7 will be among the premier foldable devices available in the US upon their debut, but they’ll face stiff competition soon. Google is likely this summer to introduce its Pixel 10 Pro Fold, an alternative to Samsung’s Fold 7. And Apple’s in-development folding iPhone will likely draw more buzz than any product in the category so far.

“We’re excited at where we’re at and welcome the competition because it only stands to bring more attention to foldables and we think we’ll have a very strong story to tell in comparison,” Blackard said.

--With assistance from Yoolim Lee.