Have your cake and eat it

Review: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra - Thin and powerful foldable

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra comes very close to the ideal of a mobile and tablet in one. But is it worth it?

Published 24 September 2026 - 14:29

This year's Galaxy Z Fold has been upgraded with an Ultra in its name. Samsung says this is because it has been given Ultra cameras, but the camera setup has only been modestly updated since last year's model, and the same applies to the phone as a whole. The real reason is that Samsung wanted to beat Apple to a foldable phone in a 4:3 format, and that phone took the Galaxy Z Fold 8 name. The phone in the traditional Z Fold format therefore had to become the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra.

If any phone in the series deserved the honorary Ultra title, it was last year's Z Fold 7. For the first time, a phone in the Z Fold series was so thin when folded and so light that you could actually convince yourself you were dealing with an ordinary phone. The Z Fold 8 Ultra has virtually identical dimensions and weight to last year's model.

You can hardly ask for more either. At 4.1 mm thick when unfolded, it is just thick enough to accommodate the USB-C charging port. The phone being thin when unfolded is less important than its thickness when folded. At 8.9 mm, it is only one millimetre thicker than the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and weighs one gram more. It is therefore fair to say that the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra is like an ordinary phone when folded. Its tall, narrow outer display even makes it somewhat suitable for one-handed use, at least as long as you do not need to reach the top of the screen with your thumb.

Ridiculously expensive

The most obvious drawback of the Galaxy Z Fold Ultra is the price tag. Priced at a minimum of SEK 24,000 and a maximum of SEK 31,000, it is an insanely expensive phone – so expensive that it is questionable whether a purchase can be justified at all. Especially for a phone that is, in many ways, more fragile than a conventional phone. In any case, you must want more than a phone that can be used as an ordinary phone when folded.

A clear difference between the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and its predecessors is the feel when you unfold it. The phone has been given chamfered edges, giving you a firm grip when you begin to open it, and the feel as you unfold the phone is different, with slightly smoother movement and a solid snap in the unfolded position. It feels slightly less cumbersome to unfold the phone, but at the same time somewhat more difficult to use it in a partially unfolded position, which you may want to do with certain functions.

Samsung has redesigned the screen structure so that the crease in the middle has become smaller, but although it is shallower, it is still just as visible. My fingerprints are visible too, because the plastic film protecting the screen is nowhere near as grease-resistant as the glass on the outer display, and I also get distracting reflections more easily. Both the inner and outer displays otherwise have excellent brightness for use in sunlight.

When unfolded, the screen format is roughly the same as on most Fold phones (though not the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8), meaning almost square. It is not a particularly natural format for a screen, and despite seven years having passed since the first Galaxy Z Fold, I am still searching for suitable uses for the large display. Films vary in how widescreen they are, and I do not get a much larger image on the inner screen than on the outer one when streaming films. E-books either have uncomfortably long lines of text or, if I read in two columns, offer no improvement over the outer screen. Some apps and games actually become less clear on the large screen.

Best for multitasking

In my view, the best use is instead having several apps open at once. Samsung has gradually expanded the shortcuts for creating app pairs on the screen or keeping an app in a floating bubble. More than two apps at once is not recommended, and ideally you do not want to enter text too often, because when the on-screen keyboard appears, much of the display area disappears, again due to the square format. So far from all combinations of open app windows are useful.

You can continue using an app without closing it when you fold the phone by running it on the outer screen. Here, you can choose whether an app should never continue, continue automatically, or continue if you swipe upwards on the screen immediately after folding the phone. The latter is an elegant solution that means I do not have to decide whether I would prefer apps to keep running or close when I fold the phone.

Performance is impeccable, with Qualcomm's fastest chipset as its engine and generous amounts of RAM. Naturally, there is no major difference in the interface compared with its predecessors, but if you want to run two or three apps in parallel, you may need the extra processing power. Samsung has not introduced any major new AI features beyond those that arrived with One UI 8.5, including a built-in answering machine that transcribes the recorded message.

The slim design means that the camera island protrudes considerably from the back of the phone. This also means that, whether folded or unfolded, the phone cannot lie flat and stable on a table surface.

Ultra cameras without that little extra

The camera setup can be said to be the same as that of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, minus the periscope zoom camera that provides proper telephoto photography. The telephoto camera that is included has 10 megapixels and three times optical zoom, and that is also roughly the furthest you can go while still getting sharp images. The main camera has 200 megapixels with a 1/1.3-inch sensor, and finally there is an ultra-wide camera with a 1/2.5-inch sensor. I compared the camera with the Samsung Galaxy S26, which has a simpler main camera, and the results are better for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, but only marginally, whether shooting in light or darkness, while telephoto photography is about equally good. Samsung lacks the iPhone's mode for photos with slightly higher resolution and sharpness. Overall, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 takes good pictures, but I do not feel that it quite lives up to Samsung's description of ultra cameras.

Samsung has finally joined the trend of adding silicon to batteries to increase capacity, and the Z Flip 8 Ultra has slightly greater battery capacity than last year's model. I think the battery life is perfectly okay, both when I use the large screen and the small one, except when I run apps that consume a lot of battery, such as the bird identification app Merlin.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra is a phone with few compromises: you get both a small, one-handed-friendly screen and a large screen, albeit in unusual formats, high performance and good cameras, apart from the telephoto cameras. The price is simply the price; it is difficult to justify paying that much for a mobile when you can get an equally good phone and a tablet as well for only a little more than half of what the Galaxy Z Flip 8 Ultra costs.

Questions and answers

How do the speakers sound? Fairly loud and balanced, but without depth. Hardly surprising when the phone is 4 mm thick.

Wireless charging? Fingerprint reader, contactless payments? Have they compromised on anything there? No, apart from the fingerprint reader being in the power button on the side rather than in the screen, but that is also reasonable when you have two screens.

Does the phone support Samsung's S Pen? No, that disappeared with the previous model. Compact dimensions are now prioritised.

An alternative

If you struggle to see how the square screen solves any problems, you should look at the Galaxy Z Fold 8 with its unfolded 4:3 display. It is considerably more useful. Here, it is instead the folded format that may feel awkward.