Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review – This R41,000 foldable is Samsung’s best to date

Perhaps even Samsung didn’t expect that its (technically) less impressive smartphone would prove to be the better one this year. The Galaxy Fold 8, for us, is the more exciting of the two. The Galaxy Fold 8 Ultra is more of a retread, while the new 4:3 aspect ratio found here has us wanting to spend more time with the Fold 8 than we did in previous years.

Samsung has two distinct Fold models available this year. Despite the ‘Ultra’ appended to its sibling, the Galaxy Fold 8 is the one you should be paying for. You’ll pay R41,000 (give or take some trade-in value) to stick one in your pocket, but the cash will be well worth it… until next year.

It’s not because Samsung has done anything truly impressive with the hardware this year. Instead, the broader screen is the drawcard. You wouldn’t think it would matter much, but that changes when you open the Fold 8 for the first time. Immediately, we wondered why nobody had done this sooner. Well, Samsung has.

Samsung’s Fold 8 Ultra is the direct successor to last year’s Galaxy Fold 7. Same shape, similar specs, and the usual incremental problems we’ve seen from the Fold lineup. This phone is something a little different. It feels entirely fresher, thanks entirely to the changes Samsung made to the internal display. Otherwise? It’s definitely a Samsung device. Compare the Fold 8 to anything the South Korean company has launched in the last four years, and you’ll see all the bits in the same place. Ports, buttons, camera placement — it’s all very familiar. The proportions, though…

Samsung’s Ultra features an 8in internal display. The stock 8 has a 7.6in panel. The 4:3 ratio found here makes the smaller screen look and feel like the larger one. That’s incredibly attractive, visually. It doesn’t hurt that Samsung has taken its typical care with the 2,448 x 1,848 flexible OLED. The colours are bright enough (up to 3,000 nits), and visuals are as clear as ever. There is one thing you should be aware of, though.

The Galaxy Fold 8 wants to be either open or closed. The hinge remains stable anywhere up to about a 90° bend. Hit perpendicular, and you’ll see the phone shoot all the way open. That means no using the phone like a tiny little laptop. That’s a pity, but it does mean you’re more likely to treat it like the pocketable folding tablet it actually is.

Performance-wise, you’ll lose almost nothing opting for the Galaxy Fold 8 over the Ultra. The phones include the same Snapdragon Elite 8 Gen 5 chipsets and, in the 256GB and 512GB configurations, 12GB of RAM. If you’re keen to hand Samsung R56,000, you can snag the Ultra with a terabyte of storage and 16GB of RAM. That’s about the only way to beat what the Fold 8 offers.

There’s almost nothing you can throw at this foldable that will slow it down. The most demanding apps will merrily plug along, even if you’re running a handful of others in the background. Swapping between them is similarly breezy, with nary a stutter in sight. The only place you might encounter weirdness will be using apps that aren’t optimised for the folding screen, but that’s hardly the phone’s (or Samsung’s) fault.

The 4,800mAh battery Samsung has loaded in here doesn’t actually seem like it can handle the hardware… at first. But part of the company’s artificial intelligence drive, not that it didn’t exist before, is computer-assisted usage detection. After a few days with the Fold 8 in hand, you’ll find the battery lasting longer. The device throttled back when it knows (or thinks) you won’t need the performance bump. Just as well — while the Fold 8 charges appreciably well with its mere 45W speed, it does get a little warm. It’ll do the same thing under load. It only measures 4.5mm when open, and that heat has to go somewhere.

There’s only really one reason why the Fold 8 Ultra is marked ‘Ultra’. Samsung’s camera layout takes a step back here, with a rear pair of 50MP sensors to play with. The big boy gets a 200MP main and a 10MP telephoto to play with, which are absent here. If you’re not social-media mad, that’s not a problem. If you’re only a moderate photographer, you won’t have cause for complaint. Unless you demand brand new hardware.

The 50MP f/1.8 main is a sequel, having appeared in the Galaxy Flip 7. The 50MP f/1.9 ultrawide was last seen in Samsung’s Galaxy S26 lineup. There’s a fair pedigree, bolstered by Samsung’s always-good software assistance. Images captured will run from fair to excellent. Performance is typical of Samsung phones in good light, and even low-light shots will impress most of the time. But if the camera is your primary requirement, you’d do well to look somewhere else.

It’s not that the Fold 8’s camera is poor. For a dual-lens setup (we’re not counting the two 10MP front-facing lenses), it’s rather good. But you can have better performance elsewhere, either from the Fold 8 Ultra or from something that doesn’t have a hinge in its centre. In the latter case, it’ll even cost less.

If you’re looking for something fresh from a foldable, this is it. And the change isn’t even a serious one. The different aspect ratio doesn’t alter the Fold 8’s performance compared to previous devices. It barely dings the software experience. But the way it looks practically screams ‘spend more time with this screen’. You’ll likely do that on various social feeds, but the Fold 8 is begging for video playback as its primary use case. The cameras will serve, and if you’re a fan of AI, Samsung’s phone will oblige with the same stuff we all saw from the Galaxy S26 lineup. The major obstacle to enjoying this folding phone has nothing to do with the hardware itself. It’s whether you can afford a shade more than R40,000.

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