Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 vs Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra: hands-on comparison
Samsung was the first major smartphone maker to commit to foldables with the Galaxy Fold in 2019. Since then, it has introduced the Z Flip and now a third form factor enters the race. No, Samsung isn’t the first maker to build a wide foldable, but it is certainly the company with the widest reach that can popularize the form factor.
We got some hands-on time with both the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8, which is what the wide foldable is called, and the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra – this is the new name for the large book-style foldable and it is the successor to the Galaxy Z Fold7 (we know, we know, the naming scheme is confusing).
But before we dig into the details, here is an illustration of what these two are about.
The Z Fold8 has a 5.5” 16:10 cover display. As you can see, it is shorter but wider than the 21:9 6.5” cover display on the Ultra. This aspect ratio is very close to the 16:9 format that a lot of online videos use and it is great for gaming too.
The main displays are also quite different. The Z Fold8 display is a 7.6” 4:3 panel. This makes it better for text-oriented uses – be it documents, websites or books. Photos default to 4:3 too, a perfect match.
Meanwhile, the 8.0” 11:10 display on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is built for multitasking. You can split it between several apps and each will get a lot of usable space. The square-ish aspect ratio is also great for documents and other text-based content. For videos, you can use the cover display as this one (while technically showing you a bigger picture) suffers from a lot of letterboxing.
We’ve calculated the surface area of each display as a whole and when showing a 16:9 video (i.e. how much is left after the letterboxing). Note that all four displays are LTPO OLED panels with 1-120Hz refresh rate.
| Galaxy Z Fold8 | Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra | |
|---|---|---|
| Cover display | 5.5″ 88.2cm² | 6.5″ 98.7cm² |
| Cover display (16:9 video) | 78.4cm² | 75.2cm² |
| Cover display resolution | 1,248 x 1,972px 428ppi |
1,080 x 2,520px 422ppi |
| Main display | 7.6″ 179.2cm² | 8.0″ 205.3cm² |
| Main display (16:9 video) | 133.6cm² | 128.2cm² |
| Main display resolution | 1,848 x 2,448px 403ppi |
2,504 x 2,256px 422ppi |
Here is what watching videos on the main displays looks like:
Watching videos on the main displays of the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Z Fold8 Ultra
Going back to the cover displays, the Z Fold8 is tangibly wider than its Ultra sibling. It measures 81.9mm wide, which means that one-hand typing isn’t the easiest, but two-hand typing is quite good. For reference, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is 78.1mm wide.
Cover screen size comparison: Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra (left) and Galaxy Z Fold8 (right)
Speaking of dimensions, the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is the sleeker of the two with its narrower body (72.8mm vs. 81.9mm). The difference in thickness helps quite a bit too (8.9mm vs. 9.7mm). When closed, the Ultra is about as wide as the small Galaxy S26 (71.7mm).
The Z Fold8 measures 9.7mm thick, the Z Fold8 Ultra is slimmer at 8.9mm
The Ultra is 158.4mm tall – that’s the exact measurement of the Galaxy S26+. The slab phone is wider (75.8mm vs. 72.8mm) and thinner (7.3mm vs. 8.9mm), but Samsung has done an excellent job of making the book-style foldable feel like an ordinary phone when closed. It weighs 215g, which is only a gram heavier than the S26 Ultra.
The Z Fold8 is 123.9mm tall. This makes it the shortest smartphone that we’ve handled in a long while – though as noted above, it’s quite wide. There is a reason phones moved away from 16:9 screens (this one is very close at 16:10), you know. Still, you can hold it and pretend it’s a mini phone.
The only hurdle to doing so is that the 201g of weight makes the wide foldable pretty heavy for a mini phone – for example, the S26+ is 190g and the vanilla S26 is 167g. A more favorable comparison for the Z Fold8 is the iPhone 17 Pro, which weighs 206g and is 8.8mm thick (vs. 9.7mm for the Galaxy).
Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra in the hand
Samsung finally adopted a Silicon-Carbon battery, which is what enabled the major battery upgrade on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra. At 5,000mAh, it’s not the largest around, but it is a solid increase over the 4,400mAh battery of the Galaxy Z Fold7 (which despite the naming is the Ultra’s predecessor).
Samsung finally enabled faster charging too – with 45W wired support, the phone can get to 67% in half an hour. The Z Fold7 only supported 25W wired charging and by official numbers it could reach 50% charge in half an hour, despite having a smaller battery. The Ultra has faster wireless charging too, 20W vs. 15W on its predecessor, and supports reverse wireless charging.
Even the smaller Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 has a bigger battery than the Z Fold7. It has 4,800mAh capacity, nearly matching the Ultra. It has 45W wired charging too, though here it works a tad slower – it only gets to 63% in half an hour. We wonder whether the Ultra’s “new dual-path charging architecture” has something to do with it. Anyway, the Z Fold8 has the same 20W wireless charging.
Both phones are powered by the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset. We saw it in the global Galaxy S26 Ultra and in the S26 and S26+ in select regions. There are no Exynos variants of the Folds.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 (left) and Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra
Both phones get 12GB of RAM if you pick the versions with 256GB or 512GB storage. There are also top-shelf versions with 1TB storage – these get 16GB of RAM. The Ultra model has a bigger graphite sheet to help spread out the heat, so maybe it will have better sustained performance (this is something that we’ll test in our review), but burst performance should be identical.
The two Z Folds launch with the new One UI 9, which is based on Android 17. They will receive OS updates and security patches for 7 years.
The final point of comparison we want to make here focuses on the cameras – the Ultra has a clear advantage. Just to get them out of the way, we will start with the selfie cameras since they are identical between the two models. Both phones have a pair of 10MP modules – cameras on the cover displays have 85° lenses, while the ones on the inner displays have wider 100° lenses.
Triple camera for the Z Fold8 Ultra vs. dual camera for the Z Fold8
The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra has a 200MP main camera with enhanced HDR. It can record 8K video using the APV codec and supports Cine LUTs. The Galaxy Z Fold8 has a 50MP camera instead, which is also tasked with zooming duties – it supports 2x in-sensor zoom. The 200MP module on the Ultra also does 2x, but the Ultra phone can go further with its dedicated 3x 10MP camera (the wide foldable lacks a telephoto module). Both phones feature 50MP ultra-wide cameras.
Stay tuned for more reports from the Galaxy Unpacked event.
