Samsung's First Foldable With the Ultra Name Isn't a Souped-up Version of the Regular Fold 8, As You Might Expect

The Z Fold 8 Ultra retains the boxy shape of Samsung’s previous foldables. What makes the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra so Ultra? Samsung's first foldable with the Ultra name isn't a souped-up version of the regular Fold 8, as you might expect.

Where the Z Fold 8 is squat and wide, the Fold 8 Ultra retains the thin outer screen and square inner panel of the previous Folds. It does have a substantially better triple rear camera system and a slightly larger battery. But with no support for the S Pen stylus and no Privacy Display, it's not Ultra in the same way as the Galaxy S26 Ultra.

But compare it to last year's Z Fold 7 and the upgrades look more substantial. Samsung has improved the displays, battery, charging, … It doesn’t quite feel ‘Ultra,’ but it’s a comprehensive improvement on last year’s phone. See our ethics statement.

Samsung has improved the displays, battery, charging, cameras, chipset, and crease. Most of these are only iterative, but taken together the package is impressive. Does that make it Ultra?

I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. This is a meaningfully more capable phone than last year’s, albeit for $100 more, and it offers something different than its wider new sibling. Samsung will have to hope that’s enough to hold up against whatever Apple has coming with its expected foldable iPhone next month.

Good triple rear camera. Only IP48 dust- and water-resistance. I prefer Samsung’s other foldable form factors.

$2,100 is a whole lot of money. Closed, the Z Fold 8 Ultra has a 6.5-inch cover screen that’s taller than most phones but skinnier too; open, there’s an 8-inch flexible display that’s almost square in its aspect ratio. At a glance, you’d struggle to tell it apart from last year’s Z Fold 7. It’s the same size, shape, and weight, apart from being fractionally thinner at 4.1mm thick when open.

The cameras are in the same spot and look just about identical. In fact, the new set of colors — dark grey, cream, purple, and green — is really the only way to differentiate the two generations by sight. Both displays are brighter than before, now with a peak brightness of 3,000 nits, making them easier to use outside.

The inner screen benefits further from a new anti-reflective coating and a small resolution bump to 2256 x 2504. Just as importantly, Samsung has reworked the main screen’s innards, incorporating a new titanium alloy film and a flexible titanium plate. These make the foldable screen thinner and more durable — and combined with the anti-reflective coating, they also make the crease harder to see and feel. Head-on, it’s now almost invisible, though still relatively clear when the light catches it at an off angle.

Oppo’s solution in the Find N6, which involves using 3D printing to fill surface-level gaps in the hinge, seems more effective at eliminating the crease, but it’s hard to imagine anyone finding this version especially bothersome. The biggest year-over-year upgrade is the battery. For the first time, Samsung has adopted silicon-carbon battery chemistry, which makes it possible to fit higher-capacity batteries into the same-size space.