Pocketnow Daily: Samsung CHANGING the Galaxy Z Fold & Z Flip… Sort of… & more! (video)

The official news today begin with Sony and PlayStation. As yes, after months of leaks, the company officially announced that they will be revamping PlayStation Plus to take on Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass. The way this would work is they’d be splitting it into three tiers, that being Essential, Extra and Premium which each bringing their own perks. Essential is pretty much the same Play Station Plus service you get right now, with two monthly downloadable games, discounts and more with the pricing remaining the same. The Extra tier brings a catalog of up to 400 games including titles like God of War and the latest Spider-Mans, which can be downloaded for free, starting at 15 dollars a month, and 99 dollars a year. Finally, the Premium tier offers all of the benefits mentioned before, but includes over 740 games, including games from the PSP and back to the PS2 which sounds amazing. This one starts at 18 bucks a month, and 120 if you go for the full year. And users would be able to stream games on PS4, PS5 and even on PC. Apparently these would start rolling out in June, starting in Asia and then moving on to North America, Europe and the rest of the world. Hey, I think this is a win-win for all of us, you know. The consumer.

Let’s switch on to foldables for the first time today, starting with [Vivo](This is the vivo X Fold which will be announced on April 11 (video)). We’ve seen a lot of leaks for the vivo F Fold over the past few weeks but now we have an official video. This phone features an in-ward folding design that resembles Samsung’s Z Fold, and it would bring a 2K+ display running at 120Hz. It also has a similar outer display but, when you turn it around you get a quad camera array with a Zeiss branding which we’re assuming will make this device pretty thick considering the placement of these cameras. From the video we can see the main sensor, a wide, a periscopic telephoto, and we’ll assume the fourth sensor is a regular telephoto.. On the positive side of it being thicker, rumors point to it bring a 4600 mAh battery that would support 80W fast charging. This phone will also be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC which has been confirmed previously. So yeah, this phone will be announced on April 11th and let’s see what that does to the market now that we got more foldables out. More on that soon.

Let’s move on to Apple and new iPad Pros. Recently we got the M1 iPad Air even when we thought the M Series would be exclusive to the Pros but, now we’re waiting on the next generation. We have a new report from Mark Gurman where he claims that the new generation of iPad Pros will be coming in the fall, sometime between September and November, and he goes as far as to say this would be the “wildest array of new hardware products In its history”. He claims that these new models will feature Apple’s M2 chip and MagSafe connectivity. When it comes to the chip, these are expected to bring the same 8-core CPU we get on the M1 but with 9 and 10-core GPU options, and it would also be built on TSMC’s 3 nano-meter process. Usually, Cupertino takes between 13 to 16 months to refresh the iPad Pro models so it’s kinda safe to say we could see them arrive with the iPhone 14 Series in September. Also, notice how those rumors of wireless charging have been slowly fading away.. Anyways, let’s see what we get.

Finally, for the hottest news today, let’s move on to Samsung and their foldables. If you remember, we were very confused when the company added the Z branding to Z Fold and Flip after the original model was simply dubbed the Galaxy Fold. Now, we have a new tweet from TechAltar, noting that Samsung has removed the Z branding from both of these phones in certain countries in Europe. And the report mentions that at the moment, it can be confirmed that the letter no longer exists in at least 3 countries and that Samsung will continue to do so across all of their European pages in the coming days as well. The thing about it is, it appears to be something related to what’s currently going on in the Ukraine as Russia has been using a Z symbol on their equipment since the start of the invasion. Honestly, I appreciate the reason why they’re doing it and I hope that it translates to the rest of the world because I don’t even know why they added the Z in the first place. On another note, a new tweet from Ice Universe claims that the Fold 4 won’t be getting much of a redesign to keep costs at a minimum unless they feel their market share is threatened.