GoKawiilis a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.
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What makes the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra so Ultra? Samsung’s first foldable with the Ultra name isn’t a souped-up version of the regular Fold 8, as you might expect. Where the Z Fold 8 is squat and wide, the Fold 8 Ultra retains the thin outer screen and square inner panel of the previous Folds. It does have a substantially better triple rear camera system and a slightly larger battery. But with no support for the S Pen stylus and no Privacy Display, it’s not Ultra in the same way as the Galaxy S26 Ultra.
But compare it to last year’s Z Fold 7 and the upgrades look more substantial. Samsung has improved the displays, battery, charging, cameras, chipset, and crease. Most of these are only iterative, but taken together the package is impressive.
Does that make it Ultra? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. This is a meaningfully more capable phone than last year’s, albeit for $100 more, and it offers something different than its wider new sibling. Samsung will have to hope that’s enough to hold up against whatever Apple has coming with its expected foldable iPhone next month.
Closed, the Z Fold 8 Ultra has a 6.5-inch cover screen that’s taller than most phones but skinnier too; open, there’s an 8-inch flexible display that’s almost square in its aspect ratio.
At a glance, you’d struggle to tell it apart from last year’s Z Fold 7. It’s the same size, shape, and weight, apart from being fractionally thinner at 4.1mm thick when open. The cameras are in the same spot and look just about identical. In fact, the new set of colors — dark grey, cream, purple, and green — is really the only way to differentiate the two generations by sight.
Closed, it feels unusually thin and tall. Open, it’s good for split-screen work but less well-suited to video.
Samsung argues that while the new Z Fold 8 is designed for content consumption, the taller Ultra is more useful for productivity. The extra vertical space helps if you’re trying to cross-reference documents or navigate multiple inboxes. Personally, I’m more likely to use the larger inner screen for watching video, so I would take the Z Fold 8 over this, but I do see the benefits of the larger space. I wrote two whole articles for my food newsletter across a couple of flights using the Z Fold 8 Ultra’s on-screen keyboard, something I would never consider with a regular phone or even the smaller Z Fold 8.
Both displays are brighter than before, now with a peak brightness of 3,000 nits, making them easier to use outside. The inner screen benefits further from a new anti-reflective coating and a small resolution bump to 2256 x 2504.
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