GoKawiilWhen a company teases its upcoming products so heavily — the Galaxy Z Fold 8 was the star of a Spider-Man: Brand New Day commercial a full week before today’s Samsung Unpacked, for heaven’s sake — it can feel underwhelming when it’s actually revealed.
But knowing that Samsung was going to announce a trio of new foldable phones and a pair of updated watches isn’t the same as discovering interesting details about them. Now that the products are officially official, here’s what stands out to me.
Another aspect (ratio) on foldables: The Z Fold 8 ‘Wide’
Squint just a bit and most phones look like interchangeable rectangular slabs. Nearly every mobile phone is modeled after handsets that needed to position the speaker at your ear and the microphone at your mouth. Companies have stuck with the same basic design because that’s what people are familiar with.
The Z Fold 8 has a 4:3 aspect ratio. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
The Z Fold 8, with its squat folded size and 4:3 aspect ratio when opened, invites you to think about using a phone from another angle. The traditional tall screen of most slab designs has locked us into an infinite-scroll, squeezed-video existence that crushes us from both sides.
OK, that was too dramatic. A narrow phone fits well in your hand.
But there’s room for more phone variety. As CNET Senior Technology Reporter Abrar Al-Heeti wrote in her hands-on article, “the Z Fold 8 feels equally optimized for watching horizontal videos or multitasking in landscape mode, and browsing vertically oriented apps in portrait mode.”
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 takes up less space when closed than many other phones. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
To be fair, taking on a predominantly wide orientation invites risk… think back to the Planet Computers Gemini PDA built wide to accommodate a physical keyboard, or the quirky LG Wing. But bending the design into a foldable phone hopefully gives the best of both orientations.
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