Samsung offered a more detailed explanation of why the Galaxy Z Flip 5 doesn't support DeX. The company clarified that the foldable flip phone lacks DeX on Monitor, DeX on PC, and Wireless DeX support for one reason: It couldn't implement DeX because of insufficient “heatproof performance in the structure.”
The company experimented with the concept, it sounds like, but couldn't get the Galaxy Z Flip 5 to run DeX within acceptable parameters due to overheating. It's important to underline that this doesn't imply the Galaxy Z Flip 5 has an overheating issue outside of DeX. Samsung DeX is heavy on system resources across the board. And compared to mobile games, which rely more on GPU performance, DeX can't be tuned on the fly through Game Booster, Game Optimizing Service (GOS), undersampling, lower texture resolutions, and so on.
Original story follows
The Galaxy Z Flip 5 is now official. Samsung's newest flip phone brings a considerably larger cover screen, gets an upgraded hinge design that eliminates the gap between the two halves of the screen, has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 ‘For Galaxy' chip under the hood, and comes with Android 13 and a newer version of One UI (5.1.1) out of the box.
Those are pretty much the only notable upgrades that you get over the Galaxy Z Flip 4, so the Galaxy Flip 5 isn't as exciting as we would have liked (though it's certainly more exciting than the Fold 5). And it turns out that the Z Flip 5 also misses out on Samsung DeX support, as we have learned at the Unpacked event in Korea.
Back in May, we had exclusively revealed that the Z Flip 5 would be the first device in the lineup to support Samsung DeX. But we couldn't find it anywhere on the phone that we got to play around with, and according to our sources, it's not because Galaxy Z Flip 5 units are currently running non-final firmware.
Galaxy Z Flip 5 doesn't feature Samsung DeX
We're told Samsung simply decided to cancel plans to add DeX support to the Galaxy Z Flip 5 without providing any reason. Could Samsung change its mind later and add the feature with a software update? It's possible, but right now, those who buy a Galaxy Z Flip 5 will want to keep in mind that it won't have DeX support and there is no word on whether will change in the future.
It's disappointing that in the three years since the first Flip was launched, Samsung DeX is still not available on the lineup. And it's not like the Galaxy Z Flip smartphones are incapable of running DeX. Each model was powered by the latest Snapdragon chip at the time and that's true for the Galaxy Z Flip 5 as well, but Samsung continues to artificially limit the capabilities of the software on them.
Perhaps Samsung doesn't think the Galaxy Z Flip series phones can handle the heat that is generated by the use of DeX because of their compact designs, or the company wants people to buy the considerably pricier Galaxy Z Folds for the full-fledged software experience. Perhaps Samsung is saving DeX for the Galaxy Z Flip 6 to pad the next model's list of new features. Whatever the reasons may be, here's hoping Samsung reconsiders its decision.
