The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra might not be getting the attention that the smaller Z Fold8 is, but if you’re after a large-screen foldable and can stomach the asking price, it’s a superlative phone.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Gloriously thin and nicely built | It costs… how much? |
| Excellent camera quality | Lack of S-Pen support is still baffling |
| Great battery life | Magnetic Qi2 is a thing that exists, Samsung. Get with the times. |
Score: 4/5
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In this review
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Specifications
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Design
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Camera
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Performance
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Battery
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
Samsung Australia has loaned me the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra used in this review, and it will return to them once I’m done with it. This gets it no special favours, but then again, neither would a phone that wasn’t going back.
If you’re new around here, I’ve been a tech journo for more than a quarter of a century, and I’m not throwing that away for influencer “freebies”… and that’s absolute.
I call them as I see them, come what may.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
Samsung’s been in the foldables game a long time now – longer than anyone else by definition, because the original Galaxy Z Fold essentially defined the whole class of devices – and this year it’s fair to say that while the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is Samsung’s priciest foldable, it’s not really the star of the show.
That plaudit belongs to the Galaxy Z Fold8 and its “new” slightly smaller form factor. I’m not reviewing that one this time around, but if you do want a good review of Samsung’s smaller foldable, Leigh Stark over at Pickr has you nicely covered.
The thing is… for the longest time, I’ve described myself as someone who favours a foldable that expands out into something much bigger, and the regular Galaxy Z Fold8 isn’t quite that when the Ultra also exists.
It’s clearly the evolution of the form that Samsung been evolving over the past eight years, so in one sense there aren’t too many surprises at play here.
We’re still talking a small tablet with an 8 inch display that folds down into a vertically tall 6.5 inch phone, all built around Samsung’s Dynamic AMOLED 2X technology. I don’t have one to hand, but put the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra next to the Galaxy Z Fold7 and I reckon most people would struggle to tell the two apart.
Technically, as per Samsung, the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is a whole 0.1mm thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold7, a phone I really rather appreciated for its ultra-thin style.
Can you tell 0.1mm of difference in your bare hand?
No, I don’t think you can, though I will give Samsung plaudits for the general quality of engineering in this handset. This is a phone that even when folded up feels premium, and that’s an experience that extends to when it opens up and even when you’re closing it again.
I remember when I first had a hands-on with the OG Galaxy Fold at IFA in Berlin eight years ago – sadly that written and video report is no more thanks to a prior employer, sigh – and one of the details that really impressed me for the most unusual reason was that it made a satisfying “thunk” noise when closed.
Eight years later, the thunk is back, and I still like it a lot. Do I need the thunk? I do not, but I like that it reminds you audibly that you’ve closed a solid object every time I do so.
Also read:
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 review
Opening up the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra reveals its 8 inch tablet form, and again while it’s only been an incremental improvement, we really are at the point where I need to stop pointing out the crease in the middle of the display.
Why? Because the vast majority of the time the only way you’ll notice it is when your finger slides across it, and not so much when you’re actually using it or looking at anything on its display.
While I will always advocate for cases, they’re tricky beasts for folding phones like this, and in the bare hand the opened Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra really is an enjoyable phone to use.
That’s also true when closed, though I can’t ignore the fact that this is a tall phone, which could be trickier for those with shorter fingers to handle. I guess that’s what the Galaxy Z Fold8 is for, no?
One interesting exclusion here, given it was such a strong pitch point for the Galaxy S26 Ultra is the “privacy screen” filter isn’t present on either internal or cover displays.
While there may be technological reasons why the flexible display on the internal screen couldn’t handle it, it feels like a missed opportunity for the front cover display, though no doubt you’ll be able to buy diffracting protective glass screen protectors for it if that’s important to you.
In terms of colour choices, you get your pick of Violet Shadow, Graphite, Cream or Green Shadow in the Australian market. The model Samsung loaned me was the Violet Shadow variant, a very dark, slightly purple model.
Camera
The problem that I’ve long noticed on Samsung’s foldables is that you pay the highest prices for any Samsung phone in the year that they debut, but you don’t get Samsung’s best cameras.
The only prior time that was technically true was the very first generation; when Samsung first announced the Galaxy Fold it had camera specs that were its very best, though the extensive delays it experienced coming to market meant that this was no longer actually true by the time you could buy one… but I digress.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra… doesn’t really change this, though it is the undisputed variety king of this year’s foldable crop, with a primary 200MP F1.7 wide sensor, 50MP Ultra-Wide sensor and 10MP 3x Optical Telephoto sensor on the “back” of the phone, while selfies can be taken either with the front display-facing 10MP sensor or the full display 10MP sensor as best suits your needs.
That’s a big step up from the dual 50MP approach of the Galaxy Z Fold8, and it brings with it a whole host of camera flexibility, which I always appreciate when shooting.
Sure, you can sometimes move closer to your subjects to get past the lack of a zoom, but it’s always nice to actually have one.
The 10MP 3x optical zoom sensor on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra can be digitally boosted up to 30x if you really must, though predictably your shots will suffer from a drop in quality the more you push it.
I’m a fair way from the clock at Central Station, though the ultra-wide does rather accentuate this.
10x zoom is pretty nice for getting more of the detail without losing quality.
At 30x zoom… the cracks are showing, and I’m not talking about the clock’s facade!
This still isn’t Samsung’s best camera, and that will never not irk me, but I can accept that for everday usage the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is a nicely capable phone.
Yes, there’s also a raft of Galaxy AI led editing features on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, if you really must. AI is still so variable in terms of the quality of the outputs, so while it can be used to nicely punch up a photo, it’s also still quite capable of producing some truly horrible results; I try to avoid it myself as much as feasible, but your own choices are yours to make.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Sample Photos
Performance
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is built around the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor with 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of internal storage, backed up with either 12GB of RAM or 16GB of RAM.
Here in Australia, you only get 16GB of RAM with the 1TB variant, although it appears Samsung may have a 512GB/16GB RAM variant in some international markets.
I haven’t reviewed the Galaxy S26 family of phones for reasons that are too complex to get into here, so this was my first crack at a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phone.
First stop, benchmark time, via Geekbench 6’s CPU test.
I’ve chosen here to compare against other foldable phones, because the practical reality is that if you just want straight line performance, a more standard premium flagship will give you that for less money.
I also feel like that it’s a useful comparison point for anyone considering an upgrade from an older foldable phone:
The bump up from the Galaxy Z Fold7 isn’t immense, and I’d certainly steer clear of an upgrade there because the differences are likely to be minimal.
There is a bit more of a gulf in performance terms on the GPU level. Here’s how the same crop of phones compare using 3Dmark’s Wild Life Extreme test:
At a software level, the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra ships with Android 17, and it gets Samsung’s usual promise of 7 years of both software upgrades and security updates, though you can expect these to trail behind Google’s Pixel Fold lineup in terms of when you’ll actually get them.
Speaking of the usual, the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra also ships with Samsung’s own take on Android, which works best if you are living in the Samsung ecosystem for other products, because it enables a raft of cross-sharing features, as well as a similar UI experience across each of them.
The one thing you don’t get here – and this was true of the Galaxy Z Fold7 too, and I’m still upset about it – is S-Pen support for the internal tablet.
I truly don’t know why Samsung’s gone down that route, because the S-Pen does make a lot of sense for tablet form factors. Maybe it’s not the best choice for the regular Galaxy Z Fold8 with its slightly smaller screen, but here I could totally see the utility… but it’s not just that it’s not bundled in, but it’s not officially supported at all.
Because I’m me, I dug out an old Galaxy Fold Z3 compliant S-Pen just for the heck of it to see what would happen if I tried… can you guess?
Yeah, that’s right.
Battery
We’ve established by now, I feel, that the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is an evolutionary upgrade from the Galaxy Z Fold7, and that’s true too of its battery capacity.
I will once again give Samsung’s engineering team plaudits, because the smaller Galaxy Z Fold8 packs in a 4,800mAh battery compared to the larger and older Galaxy Z Fold7’s 4400mAh battery, but then both are bested at a numerical level by the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra’s 5,000mAh rating.
Numbers are nice on a spreadsheet, but what really matters is whether or a not a phone can last as long as you might want it to.
That’s always a variable matter depending on your phone use, but it’s also made more complex when you have a phone like the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra that packs in a more capable processor.
I’ve written about how I test phone batteries and the problems with them (before), so if you want to know more about my battery testing regime, click here, or watch the video below:
For foldable phones, I have a lot more figures to play with, because as previously noted, I’ve been following Samsung’s folding phone journey for (gasp) eight years now. My, how time flies.
Using my standard YouTube battery test, here’s how the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra compares:
While it’s not the best performing folding phone I’ve tested to date, what impressed me here is that it outpaced the Galaxy Z Fold7 in the same test over the full 3 hour span.
The Fold6 did a little better in the first hour, but if you’re still rocking one of those, the nature of battery chemistry degredation means that it’s unlikely to perform as well there, and I don’t have the two or three hour figures for that handset.
Rather predictably, there’s no charger in the box with the Galaxy Z Fold7, though it does support both wired and wireless charging.
Rather annoyingly, while the Galaxy Z Fold7 does support Qi2 charging speeds, it doesn’t support Qi2 magnetic attachment, something that Google figured out last year for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold.
Ahem. Dear Samsung, please get with the times.
‘Nuff said.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra: Alex’s Verdict
The biggest problem with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is the price.
Starting at $2,999 (as per RRP, deals may exist, yadda yadda), there’s no getting past the fact that this is an expensive phone.
Some of that might be handwaved away by the fact that storage and RAM are ridiculously expensive right now (thanks AI), something that also affects devices like the recently reviewed MacBook Neo but at the end of the day you’re still going to be down at least three grand for one.
If that’s not a barrier to you, however, I do think that there’s a lot to like here.
The smaller Galaxy Z Fold8 will have its fans no doubt, but when you’re paying north of two grand for a phone, I’d rather get something with a bigger screen, bigger battery and better cameras.
Is that just me?
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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra: Pricing and availability
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra retails in Australia with pricing starting at $2,999 at launch.
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Buy The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra! | Buy On Amazon |
If you buy a product using the link above, ART may earn a small commission.
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