Samsung's gorgeous retro flip phone is coming to the UK

It's 20 years since Samsung launched its groundbreaking SGH-E700 flip phone, the first Samsung to have a built-in antenna. And to mark the anniversary Samsung has released a special version of the Galaxy Z Flip 5, which it calls the Galaxy Z Flip 5 Retro. It'll be available from 1 November in the UK, Germany, Spain and Australia and from 2 November in France, but so far there are no plans to sell it elsewhere.

At heart the Retro is a standard Galaxy Z Flip 5, one of the best folding phones you can buy. But Samsung has added a few tweaks that hark back to its folding predecessor.

What's different in the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 Retro?

The most obvious difference is the colours: the new Samsung, like its ancestor, mixes silver and indigo blue colours in its casing. There's also a new animation on the Flex window as shown in the illustration above, and a user interface that has fun with pixel graphics-style design. 

The package also includes three Flipsuit cards featuring different versions of the Samsung logo, a Flipsuit case and a collector card that's engraved with the phone's unique serial number.

This is a limited edition release and, at the risk of sounding like a QVC presenter, you won't find this one in the high street: it's exclusively available on the Samsung website. Prices haven't been announced just yet but the normal price of the Z Flip 5 starts at £1,049.

If you're wondering what's so special about the SGH-E700, while it doesn't have the fan club of, say, the Motorola Razrs of old it was a huge hit for Samsung back in the day: it sold over 10 million units. And this isn't the first time Samsung has celebrated its birthday either. It did it in 2007, just four years after the original phone shipped, in the form of the S480 range. As with the Z Flip 5 Retro that used the more up-to-date tech of the anniversary, in that particular case second-generation 2G and 1.3 megapixel cameras compared to the GSM and VGA of the original.