Both large and small

Review: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 - Compact and easy to use one-handed foldable

Thinner when folded and more apps on the outer screen make the Galaxy Z Flip 8 even more convenient to use.

Published 24 September 2026 - 14:22 Modified 24 September 2026 - 14:25

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 was the phone that made me start to like flip-style foldable phones. Compared with its predecessor, it was significantly thinner but larger in surface area. This made it a phone that was comfortable to keep folded in a pocket, with a large display when unfolded, while also offering a compact format with an outer screen that was useful for at least some of what you need a phone for. With the Galaxy Z Flip 8, Samsung has built on those strengths.

The screens are identical to those of their predecessors. There is a 6.9-inch foldable inner screen in a 21:9 format with relatively high peak brightness, and an almost square outer screen that covers virtually the entire front and wraps around the cameras when the phone is folded. In practice, the section level with the cameras cannot be used by apps, but at least the menu buttons fit there.

Better screens

Samsung has improved the folding mechanism so that the inner screen has less of a crease. It is not as uneven, but the crease is still clearly visible. The screen protector attracts fingerprints and pocket lint, and you get more distracting reflections than from a regular phone screen.

The outer screen was previously limited by default to widgets and a small number of apps adapted to the format. That number of apps has increased considerably, and I can now run a total of 16 apps on the outer screen.

You can actually unlock the ability to run apps on the outer screen by installing the Good Lock app from the Galaxy Store and downloading the Multistar module. This makes the phone even more flexible as a compact folded one-handed device, but I can understand why Samsung has chosen to limit apps' access to the outer screen. Many apps do not work particularly well in the almost square format, with buttons or text ending up outside the screen. Others interpret it as the screen being in landscape mode and display everything very small. However, quite a few of my everyday apps still work perfectly well on the outer screen, not just those approved by Samsung.

More pocket-friendly

Compared with its predecessor, the Galaxy Z Flip 8 is 0.6 mm thinner when folded. Not a dramatic difference, but compared with two years ago it is almost two millimetres. The result is a phone that fits much better in a trouser pocket when folded.

The folding mechanism has been improved and the phone clicks more distinctly into place when unfolded. This makes it feel slightly less fiddly every time you need to unfold the phone to use it, which is most of the time after all. However, you cannot easily unfold it with one hand.

The cameras are unchanged this generation, which means a main camera roughly comparable to the one in the Galaxy S26, accompanied by an ultra-wide camera with a fairly small sensor. Image results from the main camera are perfectly fine without standing out, making it a good all-round camera even in poorer light. You can take photos at 2x zoom with better sharpness thanks to pixel binning, but there is no further zoom beyond that. The ultra-wide camera, meanwhile, provides a slightly wider field of view, but not much detail in the images.

Resistance to use

One advantage of the folding format is that you can take photos with the phone folded and therefore take better selfies using the main camera. The disadvantage, of course, is that for all other photos you have to unfold the phone, making it harder to capture the moment. The fact that there is an extra layer of literal friction when using the phone because you have to open it can otherwise be seen as just as much an advantage as a disadvantage: social media and other addictive content are not quite as immediately available, but for photography specifically it is more of a genuine obstacle.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 uses Samsung's own Exynos 2600 chipset, manufactured using the world's first 2-nanometre process. Despite this, it cannot compete with the Snapdragon 8 Elite found in the Galaxy S26 series, and in performance tests the phone is even slower than last year's Galaxy S25. This does not matter very much, as the phone feels as fast as it needs to be, and I cannot find any AI feature or similar that the phone misses out on because of its slightly weaker performance.

The phone runs Android 17 with Samsung's One UI 9 interface. There are extremely few new features in One UI 9; the bigger news arrived in One UI 8.5, which launched with the Galaxy S25 series, when the phones gained, among other things, a built-in answering machine. Samsung already has many useful and partly AI-based features, such as built-in call recording, which also transcribes the call into text.

Same battery, but better endurance

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 has been given a battery with added silicon, providing higher energy density, but the battery capacity is the same as last year, so it has instead been used to make the phone thinner. Even so, I get a really good result in the screen-on time test, one hour more than I got with last year's model. I never feel that the phone has worse battery life because of its slim format. Being able to access some functions directly from the outer screen, which presumably uses less power, may also mean that everyday use of the phone consumes less power.

Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip phones have found their niche, and the Galaxy Z Flip 8 builds on that. If you want a phone with both a large and a small screen, or perhaps are drawn to the folded format when the phone is in your pocket, the Galaxy Z Flip 8 is the best version yet.

Questions and answers

How is the speaker sound? Broad and fairly well balanced, but naturally without much low-frequency sound.

How quickly does the phone charge? The maximum charging speed is 25 watts, or 15 watts wirelessly. According to Samsung, it should charge to 55 per cent in 30 minutes.

How does the fingerprint reader work? It is located in the power button on the side and can be used both when the phone is folded and unfolded.