Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold8 introduces a wider cover display and an improved main screen, alongside a smoother hinge and powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 processor. While its dual 50MP cameras offer satisfactory performance without a telephoto lens, and some app compatibility challenges exist, the foldable delivers exceptional speed, a full-day battery, and a revamped, user-friendly design, making it a notable advancement in the foldable smartphone market.

Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold8 introduces a wider cover display and an improved main screen, alongside a smoother hinge and powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 processor. While its dual 50MP cameras offer satisfactory performance without a telephoto lens, and some app compatibility challenges exist, the foldable delivers exceptional speed, a full-day battery, and a revamped, user-friendly design, making it a notable advancement in the foldable smartphone market.

Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold8 introduces a wider cover display and an improved main screen, alongside a smoother hinge and powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 processor. While its dual 50MP cameras offer satisfactory performance without a telephoto lens, and some app compatibility challenges exist, the foldable delivers exceptional speed, a full-day battery, and a revamped, user-friendly design, making it a notable advancement in the foldable smartphone market.

Samsung's Galaxy Note8 is one of the more interesting and unique smartphones I have used in recent years, without a doubt. The newest foldable from Samsung, the Galaxy Z Fold8, not only takes on a new form factor but also tweaks some of the existing stuff about the Fold.

You get a wider, much wider, 5.5-inch OLED cover display with an aspect ratio of 16:10 this time with an aspect ratio of and slightly sleeker phone, too. The inner display is now a 7.6-inch OLED with a 4:3 aspect ratio (2448x1848 resolution), which is really nice to read in landscape orientation or browse PDFs in portrait orientation.

This is new from the Samsung house, though we have seen some bits of this wider foldable from the likes of OPPO. Having said that, some apps don't always behave well with the new aspect ratio; for example, Twitter can be janky to use and stops showing some UI elements when switching from one display to another.

Samsung has confirmed that they have been working with major developers for better adoption. For stuff like reels and YT shorts, the slightly shorter form factor on the cover display feels nice, although it's cut short, so you may want to switch to the main display every now and then.

Talking about the hinge, it feels a bit smoother and just more convenient to open and close it. Though there's no flex mode now, so it can't be stopped at any angle for the main display to be half open-half close, like you can do on the Flip8. The crease was visible at angles, but I barely noticed it while watching something or reading text, so that was good.

The rear features a dual camera system—a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera and a 50MP (f/1.9) ultra-wide camera. No telephoto lens here. The camera performance here is satisfactory.

It takes well-stitched shots, with decent detail and colour retention and dynamic range as long as you don't zoom in more than 2x, which is where you really lose out on details. The camera app is quick and feature-rich, not so much that it throws everything at your face. The main front -facing 10MP (f/2.2) camera does a good job of handling video calls and selfies in most situations.

The secondary 10MP front-facing camera, which has a more prominent presence on the main display this time, is okay but the least capable of the lot and also least used in my experience.

Weighing 201grams, the phone is IP48 rated and comes with dual stereo speakers which are sufficiently loud, but the issue is that when you have the main display open, the speakers go to one side, so the audio comes from one side of the phone instead of both.

Running on Android 17-based One UI 9.0, the phone is equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 for Galaxy chipset (up to 4.7Ghz Octa core processor, Adreno 840 GPU) with 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS 4.1 internal storage on the base model that's priced at Rs. 1,79,999. The phone is really smooth and responsive since I have been using it. Whether for Google Maps while having messaging apps side by side, YouTube playback, scrolling inside social media apps, and so on. You can expect to play graphic-intensive games such as BGMI and Wuthering Waves at higher refresh rates at the highest settings with very little heat seen in an hour or so.

The 4,800mAh battery unit lasted me a whole day quite regularly, and it charges at 45 watts, now taking a little under 1.5 hours to charge from 1% to full. I used the main display for around 45 minutes on average per day, and the rest mainly on the cover display. Call quality and GPS performance of the phone didn't show any trouble, while 5G performance for working on the go was also top-notch.

In brief, Samsung's newest take on the foldable smartphone form factor seems like a welcome change. I really like the wider displays themselves, including the cover display, while the camera performance does leave some room for improvement considering the price tag. It does offer smooth performance, a tweaked hinge and magnets and is comfortable to carry with its revamped handy design, making it a unique smartphone as of now.

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