Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked Event Returns July 22 in London

Samsung will announce its next generation of Galaxy devices on July 22, 2026, in London, according to an invitation confirmed by Engadget. The company has positioned the event around its work in foldable phones — its devices that fold open like a book.

The company is already taking reservations for the unannounced devices, offering a $30 credit to anyone who pre-orders early. This is a standard Samsung move: it helps measure early interest and secure purchase commitments before the company reveals final pricing or detailed specifications. The livestream will be available on Samsung.com and YouTube, the same distribution method Samsung has used for previous Unpacked events.

Samsung hasn't listed which devices will appear on July 22. But given the timing and the company's focus on foldables, the event will almost certainly showcase the successors to the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip — the two foldable lines Samsung has featured at its summer events for several years. Archived coverage from Samsung's newsroom includes an unboxing for the Galaxy Z Fold7, which the company called its thinnest and lightest Z Fold yet. That positioning suggests the next generation will continue the same direction: slimmer hinges and lighter overall weight, without any major shift to the form factor itself.

London is a deliberate choice for the venue. Samsung has held Unpacked events in San Francisco, New York, Seoul, Paris, and Barcelona in recent years. A London location puts the launch squarely in Europe, where foldable phones have gained adoption faster than in the United States, even though they remain a small slice of the total smartphone market. The UK is also where Samsung has tested partnership strategies with carriers and retailers — the financing and trade-in offers that typically come with these launches.

The real question for this cycle isn't the hardware itself but what Samsung does with the software layer on top of it. Samsung's recent Unpacked events have heavily featured Galaxy AI — AI features built into the phone and developed with Google. Foldables, with their larger inner screens and better support for running multiple apps at once, are the ideal stage to show off these kinds of features. It remains unclear whether Samsung will pair the new phones with genuinely new AI capabilities or simply extend the existing Galaxy AI tools to the updated hardware.

Looking at the bigger picture, foldables have moved from experimental gadgets to a real but still premium product category over the past seven years. Samsung's repeated focus on making them thinner and lighter suggests the engineering challenges — keeping the hinge durable, reducing the visible crease where the screen folds, fitting a large battery into a folding body — are still the main obstacles. In this author's view, the more important question for Samsung's long-term success isn't this specific launch but whether the company can eventually bring foldable technology to a mainstream price point and durability level. Right now, foldables are still a premium tier that refreshes each year without drawing significantly more buyers into the category.

Samsung has not disclosed pricing, a full device list, or which regions will get these phones. Those details should emerge over the coming weeks as pre-order reservations continue and the July 22 event draws closer.