Samsung confirms it is not killing the S Pen, shares plans for the future

Almost half a decade after Samsung axed the iconic Galaxy Note series in favor of foldables, the S Pen, one of its defining features, continues to live in the Galaxy S series. And despite Samsung’s act of repeatedly reducing features on the S Pen, or limited attention while upgrading the Galaxy S26 Ultra, it is not going anywhere, at least not soon.

That’s what Won-Joon Choi, COO at Samsung’s Mobile Experience (MX) division, has assured in a recent interview with Bloomberg. Choi informed the publication that Samsung does not plan to abandon the S Pen.

Choi said that Samsung is, in fact, working on new technology to keep it useful. Without revealing much about the development, the executive suggested the company is working on a new display technology to address challenges with retaining the S Pen.

We’re working on a more advanced technology within S Pen to come up with a new structure of display, so the penalty of having S Pen is diminished.

S-Pen will continue to be one of the core technologies.

While it’s difficult to determine which technology the executive is referring to, we suspect it may involve building a touchscreen without a digitizer layer, which is currently required to detect stylus interactions and differentiate them from finger taps.

Notably, Samsung removed the digitizer layer from the Galaxy Z Fold 7 last year to make it extremely thin, which in turn resulted in S Pen support being dropped for the foldable. However, the feature is rumored to return with the Galaxy Z “Wide” Fold this year, and we can expect Samsung to also apply a similar technology to the Galaxy S Ultra phones if it proves to be viable. However, we have yet to learn more details about this upgraded display from credible sources.