Time to Fold
Yesterday Samsung unveiled officially the Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra. Yes that's right, there is now 3 members of the Z family.
The Z flip is almost entirely unchanged from last year, essentially its a Z Flip 7S model just a chip bump and frustratingly Samsung is still up to their shenanigans of giving certain markets like the UK an Exynos version rather than a Snapdragon like the US gets.
The traditional Z Fold slim baton style has now been promoted to become the Z Fold 8 Ultra. Again compared to last year there is only a few upgrades, new chip, tweaked cameras, the main upgrade is the move to a Silicon Carbon battery with a larger capacity combined with 45W charging.
Then we come to the new guy on the block. The Z Fold 8, This guy is basically my dream foldable, I had a Original Pixel Fold and really liked it but at that time in foldables, the devises where still fairly chunky and heavy, but they have come on a lot since then. The Z Fold 8 is only 4.5mm when open, so folded up its about the same thickness now as an iPhone 17 pro meaning it shouldn't feel chunky in the hand (I assume I have only held a 3D printed mockup so far) but the main thing is that the phone does not fold out to be a perfect square like the ultra instead it folds out to be a 4:3 aspect ratio with a similar size to an iPad Mini See below the comparison between an S26 Ultra, Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra from a user on Reddit.
Credit: u/FragmentedChicken - Reddit
As you can see this means that videos fill more of the usable screen space when in the default orientation and something I have seen not mentioned much online the other key benefit here is that keeping you in that default orientation means that the crease remains vertical through the content where it is less noticeable and it also stops the internal hole punch camera from bleeding into most content, unless your watching an old t. You can make the actual content the same size on a Z Fold 8 Ultra but in order to do so you must rotate the phone and put the crease right along the content which even with the new titanium layers to the display it will still be more noticeable.
So if watching youtube, movies ect on the inside screen is your goal then defiantly the better suited device. It seems like Samsung are leaning into this for their marketing, Z8U is being marketed as a device for people who need to get shit done where as the Z8 is being marketed as the phone for social media and watching video.
So I went ahead and ordered one to try it out and confirm my suspicions to see if I will like the device. Given my suspicions about the pixel fold I think I will like it but only time Will tell. And of course I will be sharing my thoughts on here once I have the device in hand.
Last Edited: 3 days, 22 hours ago.