If it means a narrow cover screen, I hope Galaxy Z Fold series never gets an S Pen slot

Samsung has been selling foldables for four years at this point, and it took the company just two years to bring S Pen support to its foldable phones. Both the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Galaxy Z Fold 4 support stylus input (although this stylus is different than the one you find on Samsung’s non-folding devices).

You can’t actually insert the S Pen into those phones and instead have to carry (and buy) the stylus separately. But we all know that eventually Samsung will find a way to make the S Pen a part of its Galaxy Z Fold phones. The latest report on these foldables says that’s one of Samsung’s goals, and having the S Pen slot right into the device would certainly be convenient for customers.

But it could also mean that Samsung may take up some of the space that’s used by the cover display on its Galaxy Z Fold smartphones to make the S Pen fit. Or the company will expand the overall width of the device. Either way, it’s a bad idea in my opinion, because it might mean the cover screen on the Z Fold series could continue to be inconveniently narrow.

Galaxy Z Fold series has a disadvantage that needs to be addressed before anything else

The narrow cover screen is the biggest reason that keeps me away from Samsung’s Z Fold lineup. It’s a compromise that requires you to unfold the main display to get any proper work done. The latter is not always feasible, though, especially if you’re using one hand to operate the device, and it’s been a major complaint for many Galaxy Z Fold customers over the past four models.

I’m not a paying customer as I get to use these devices for free as part of my job, but the narrow outer display is such a compromise that I didn’t even bother using the Galaxy Z Fold 4 unit that Samsung sent me. I decided to try out the Galaxy Z Flip 4 instead. Yes, the Z Flip 4 also needs to be unfolded to get proper work done, but with a Z Flip device the entire philosophy is different.

In any case, the gist of my opinion here is that Samsung first needs to fix the unintuitively thin cover display before moving on to fixing other issues, such as the crease on the foldable display. Other manufacturers have already made foldables with proper smartphone-sized cover displays, and there’s no reason Samsung can’t do it.

Of course, it could be the company doesn’t want to do it because its internal polling shows customers don’t care about the current dimensions of the outer screen, and the thickness and weight of the device can be a problem with a smartphone-sized outer screen. If that is the case, then, well, I guess I’ll be sticking to candybar smartphones for the foreseeable future, and probably so will many other customers.

What’s your opinion? Do you think a wider outer screen is more important, or an S Pen slot? Should Samsung be looking at including both of those in future foldables? Let me know down in the comments!