There is no getting around it. The Galaxy Z Fold8 is an odd-looking phone at first glance. It’s shorter than almost anything else on the shelf, wider than it has any right to be, and it brings BlackBerry nostalgia to a smartphone market long dominated by slender, stretched-out screens. But once you pick it up, the oddness evaporates. Somewhere between the width, the weight, and the way it settles into a palm, the Galaxy Z Fold8 just feels right.
If anything, the new wider Fold form factor has proven popular. The lineup, three foldables for the first time, smashed through Samsung’s pre-order records across many markets. Foldables are no longer niche, and even at prices north of Dh7,000, users are lining up to get the device, pushing delivery dates into September in some markets. Yet the Fold8 invites one unavoidable question: can it hold its ground once the long-awaited iPhone Fold arrives?
Stay up to date with the latest news. Follow KT on WhatsApp Channels.
The Good
•An inner screen that finally suits video and reading
•The best cover screen on any foldable
•Lightest Fold yet, barely thicker than a bar-shaped phone
The Bad
•Painfully expensive at Dh7,199 starting price
•Downgraded main camera and no telephoto camera
•Black bars are still unavoidable on both screens
The odd shape is the point
On the outside, the cover screen is 5.5 inches at a 10:16 ratio, so it’s smaller than most current smartphones but more usable. You can easily type on it with both thumbs, and get through a morning of navigation, messages and email without ever opening the device. Due to the screen ratio, it’s perfect for one-handed use, and unlike older Folds, you can reach every corner of the screen with relative ease. At 201g it’s also the lightest Fold yet, and at 9.7mm folded it’s barely a millimetre thicker in the pocket than an ordinary phone.
Open it up and you get 7.6 inches at roughly 4:3, which fixes the Fold line’s longest-running flaw. The old Folds opened into something close to a square, and that sounds harmless until you play 16:9 content and find it running at roughly the size it would be on a bar phone. The Fold8 doesn’t solve that completely, but it handles content far better. Social media, YouTube, films and TV shows all gain from the extra width.
Another advantage of the new Fold is how well it lends itself to reading. Opened and turned 90 degrees, it sits at roughly the proportions of a book page. It won’t replace a Kindle, since this is an OLED panel rather than e-Ink and your eyes will know the difference on a long session. For casual reading, though, it’s the most comfortable phone Samsung has made.
Looking under the hood, the Fold8 stays impressive. It runs the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 that powers the Galaxy S26 Ultra, with 12GB of RAM on the base model. Battery life was a weak point on early Folds, and the 4,800mAh cell here is more than enough for a day of work. It’s also a silicon-carbon battery, which is worth noting, as Samsung was one of the last holdouts against the technology.
Not everything folds neatly
That said, the new ratios come with their own compromises. Vertical video is the obvious one. Reels and TikToks don’t quite fill the 10:16 cover screen, so you get bars down either side of the clip. Open the phone and the problem flips, with 16:9 films and shows still sitting between black bars on the 4:3 inner display, just thinner ones than before. No screen shape suits everything, and the Fold8 has simply picked which battles to win.
The camera is harder to forgive. The Fold8 drops to a 50MP main sensor, down from the 200MP unit in last year’s Fold7, with the 200MP now reserved for the Ultra. Losing the telephoto is defensible on a phone this size, but paying Dh7,199 for a downgraded main camera is a tough sell. The vertical camera island doesn’t help either. It makes the phone rock when you use it flat on a desk, and with no magnets built into the back, you’ll need a compatible case before any MagSafe-style stand or wallet will stick to it. None of this is a deal breaker, but fixing any of it would have taken the Fold8 from very good to untouchable.
Eight generations, and the iPhone Fold
None of this happened overnight. The first Galaxy Fold stumbled badly in 2019, with review units failing within days and Samsung pulling the launch for five months to fix them. What followed was seven generations of steady improvements: a sturdier hinge, water resistance, a flat-closing screen, and a thickness that kept shrinking until the Fold7 was hard to tell from an ordinary phone. Eight attempts in, the Fold8 is what that patience buys.
Which brings us to Apple. Its next event is expected in mid-September, and the headline device is the company’s first foldable, rumoured to be sold as the iPhone Ultra rather than the iPhone Fold. The leaked specs suggest an Apple take on the Fold8: a 7.8-inch inner screen, a 5.5-inch cover screen, and roughly the same proportions Samsung has just moved to. Apple loyalists will understandably wait and see. But at a rumoured price north of Dh9,000, with the first wave possibly limited to the US, the Fold8 remains the better buy for long-time Android users, especially anyone already on a Fold.
The verdict
Foldables have come a long way, but they still ask for a little care. The Fold8 carries an IP48 rating, which covers a drop in water but not fine particles, so a day at the beach is still a bad idea, and the inner screen wants gentler handling than a slab of glass. Live with that and this is the easiest foldable Samsung has ever made to recommend.
If you’re on Android and your current phone is two or more years old, the Fold8 is the most convincing foldable on the market, and the closest the category has come to a phone you don’t have to make excuses for. Waiting makes sense only if you’re committed to Apple, and even then the iPhone Ultra is a first attempt, rumoured at around Dh2,000 more, with no guarantee it lands in the UAE this year. Strange shape and all, the Fold8 is the one to beat.
The Galaxy Z Fold8 is on sale in the UAE now, from Dh7,199 for 256GB, Dh7,999 for 512GB and Dh9,599 for 1TB. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra starts at Dh7,999 and the Galaxy Z Flip8 at Dh4,699.
Source: Khaleej Times