Samsung’s Apple-Shaped Foldable

When Apple’s long-rumored folding iPhone arrives likely later this year, it will get a lot of credit from its least thoughtful fans for finally cracking the folding-phone format. The brand’s most devoted fans will take to X to say that, though earlier foldables existed, they were flawed, compromised devices, and Apple’s new phone has finally cracked the format.This will be rubbish, conveniently ignoring that Android brands have released similarly capable folding phones for years, reducing the crease in the folding screen, making them thinner, improving the software, and adding water resistance and limited protection from solid particles. No brand deserves more credit for that progress than Samsung, which released the flawed first-generation Galaxy Fold in 2019 and has steadily improved it over the seven years since.Samsung’s traditional Fold phones have been narrow, tall handsets when folded, then essentially small portrait-mode tablets when unfolded. But, as if to take some steam out of Apple’s praise, Samsung is now also selling a shorter folding phone that opens wider, in a shape distinctly similar to the passport-style device that reports suggest Apple will unveil.Alongside the little Galaxy Z Flip8 — which you can read more about in the Galaxy Unpacked summary — Samsung now sells two book-style Folds. The familiar form becomes the more premium Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra; beneath it sits the marginally cheaper, smaller, wider Galaxy Z Fold8.The Ultra has an 8-inch, 2,504-by-2,256-pixel internal folding display, paired with a 6.5-inch, 1,080-by-2,520-pixel cover screen. Both are OLED panels with adaptive refresh rates of 1–120 hertz. Unfolded, the phone is just 0.16 inches thick. Folded, it’s 2.9 by 6.2 by 0.35 inches and 7.6 ounces, not far off Samsung’s nonfolding flagship, the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Internally, it uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset and a 5,000 milliampere-hour battery, which supports up to 45-watt wired charging with a separately sold adapter. On the back, you have a 200-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and a 10-megapixel telephoto camera. The cover and internal selfie cameras are both 10 megapixels.All of this feels like the last three generations of the phone. The battery and ultra-wide camera are real upgrades over the Fold7, but rival foldables charge faster, pack larger batteries, and, in the Honor Magic V6’s case, are thinner. The most notable change is the price, which has risen from the Fold7’s $1,999.99 to $2,099.99 for the base model, with 12 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage. The top-of-the-line version, with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 1 terabyte of storage, costs $2,699.99.The new, wider, shorter Galaxy Z Fold8 takes over the old name, not the old model’s job. It is meaningfully shorter and wider than the previous Fold form factor: Folded, it’s about the size of a passport, with a 5.5-inch cover screen in a 10:16 aspect ratio and a 1,248-by-1,972-pixel resolution; open it, and you get a wide 4:3, 7.6-inch, 1,848-by-2,448-pixel internal display. Compared with the Ultra, the base Fold has much the same chip, memory, and storage options, but a smaller 4,800 milliampere-hour battery and no telephoto camera. It’s also cheaper — but not by much. The 256-gigabyte version starts at $1,899.99, the 512-gigabyte version costs $2,099.99, and the 1-terabyte version rises to $2,499.99; only the last gets 16 gigabytes of RAM. Samsung put both Fold8 models on general sale August 7.It looks pretty cool, and it’s fun to see Samsung do something different. It’s just a shame that this “new,” “different” approach seems taken straight from Apple’s as-yet-unannounced phone.

Samsung’s Apple-Shaped Foldable

Samsung’s Apple-Shaped Foldable

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