The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G has been the subject of a large specs leak, thanks to the compulsory certification process that phones have to go through before hitting store shelves.
The certification comes from Chinese agency TENAA (via TechRadar), which was recently discovered to have a phone that looks an awful lot like the Z Flip 5G within its listings. And what this information shows is a phone that is pretty similar to the original Galaxy Z Flip that came out in February this year, but with a few welcome changes.
- Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G release date, specs, price and rumors
- Check out our Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus review
- 4th of July sales: The best deals right now
Newly leaked images reveal a phone that looks very similar to the original Z Flip, but with a fresh gray color. It looks a lot like the Cosmic Gray option on the Galaxy S20 Plus and Galaxy S20 Ultra, which would be a good third option to have alongside the Mirror Black and Mirror Purple options available on the original Z Flip.
We may be seeing some camera changes to the Z Flip 5G too, but we have our doubts. The certification listing states that there is a single 12MP camera and a 12MP and 10MP dual camera on the phone. This could be interpreted as Samsung increasing the resolution of the internal selfie camera at the expense of one of the external sensors.
However, we can't help but think that this could be just a strange way of expressing the same camera set-up as the original, with two 12MP cameras (main and ultra-wide) on the outside and a single 10MP camera on the inside.
A less welcomed change is the phone's battery, which appears to be slightly smaller. TENAA lists two separate cells in the Z Flip 5G — one 2,500 mAh and the other 704 mAh. That makes a total of 3,204 mAh, which is 96 mAh less than the 3,300 mAh total of the Z Flip's batteries.
It's not a big drop, but a drop all the same. Samsung may have done this to make room for a 5G antenna, so hopefully it's made some battery management improvements at the same time. The Z Flip lasted 8 hours and 16 minutes on our custom Tom's Guide battery test during our review, which was better than the similarly-built Motorola Razr (2020), but still below the average 10 hour mark. So the 5G version can't drop much running time from the original version without it become a major problem for daily usage.
The certification listing also seems to confirm the presence of the previously rumored Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset, based on the 3.09 Ghz frequency recorded in the table. The Snapdragon 855 Plus has a frequency of 2.95 GHz, so it's likely that this phone is using Qualcomm's as-yet unannounced revision of its 2020 flagship chipset.
Finally there's confirmation of all the things that aren't changing, which includes the phone's size, weight, storage capacity and RAM. While it would have been nice to get more than 8GB RAM, or a slight decrease in weight, those specs didn't stop us from liking the original. So combined with the other changes outlined above, we expect the Z Flip 5G to be a solid improvement on an already impressive phone.
We'd expect the Z Flip 5G to make its first appearance at some time between August and October. Those three months will see the launch of the Galaxy Note 20, Galaxy Fold 2 and Galaxy S20 Fan Edition, so it would make sense for Samsung to introduce the revised Z Flip alongside one of these big announcements. Our money would be on the Fold 2 sharing its slot, since that will be Samsung's other major foldable release.
