Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 is the best phone (not just foldable) I’ve ever used for consuming content—watching videos, playing mobile games, reading, and yes, even doomscrolling social media—thanks to its 7.6-inch inner screen.
The book-style foldable phone’s novel shape when closed may look strange at first, but I promise you that its shorter and wider footprint (when closed) quickly feels normal after a few days. The whole point of this form factor is to unfold it for its larger tablet-sized screen, and I can assure you that you’ll be doing that often because the experience encourages it more.
More importantly, the Z Fold 8 has fewer of the compromises that held back Samsung’s previous foldable phones. The device is lighter and easier to unfold, the battery is bigger and lasts all day, and Samsung has greatly reduced the crease on the inner screen.
Some apps still might not display correctly on both screens, but even so, I’m declaring the Z Fold 8 a home run. I can’t stop using it.
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 is Samsung's best version of a book-style foldable phone yet, even with its premium price.
The best size comparisons for the Z Fold 8 are a passport or a B7-sized notebook. The foldable measures 4.88 x 3.24 inches when it’s closed. It’s a few hairs thicker than the Z Fold 8 Ultra, but because of the squatter dimensions and lighter weight, the Z Fold 8 doesn’t feel unwieldy. I’m mostly able to reach corner to corner on the 5.5-inch AMOLED cover screen, something I haven’t been able to do on any “regular” (read: 6 to 6.9-inch) bar-style phone in years.
It also fits in my front pants pockets better than expected; I had concerns that the width might be too wide. I guess if you’re already used to the width of an iPhone 17 Pro Max or a Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Z Fold 8’s only slightly wider.
I’m able to reach the power button/fingerprint reader easily with my right thumb. Lefties might struggle since they can’t use their thumb and will have to register their index finger, which might be a little stretch to press the button, like it is for me. The volume rocker is a little high for me; I prefer its lower position on the Z Fold 7/Z Fold 8 Ultra. Typing with two hands on the cover screen is a much easier affair than on narrower phones; I made fewer typos compared to my iPhone. One-handed typing will depend on whether your hand is large enough and your thumb can stretch across the keyboard.
The 10:16 aspect ratio of the cover screen is also not as cramped as it seems. You lose vertical space compared to most regular phones and taller foldables like the Z Fold 8 Ultra, which means apps will show less and you’ll need to scroll more, but that’s mostly a non-issue if you open the phone and rotate it to vertical orientation. I never found myself bothered that I couldn’t see enough on the cover screen. If anything, I appreciated the shorter screen more because I didn’t feel compelled to pull it out as much unless I wanted to unfold it.
Like on the Z Fold 8 Ultra, you can use the Z Fold 8 in “tent” mode. This is great for propping up the device on a plane tray table or if you’re just too lazy to hold it up while in bed. I fly a lot for work, so tent mode is something I find very useful. A Z Fold 8 Ultra feature that you won’t find on the Z Fold 8 is “Flex mode.” On the Z Fold 8 Ultra, you can snap the screen so that it resembles a baby laptop, and some apps, like YouTube, will display the video above the crease and controls below it. I never found much utility for Flex mode on the previous Z Folds and I don’t miss it on the Z Fold 8. If that’s something you care about, get the Z Fold 8 Ultra instead.
Out of all the book-style foldable phones I’ve tested over the past seven years, the Z Fold 8 is the only one that I have unfolded more times than I have not. With each generation of Z Fold, Samsung made the dimensions more like a regular bar-style phone. I heaped praise on the Z Fold 7 for finally ditching the previous skinny, remote-like shape. And even though I considered the Z Fold 7 my favorite Android phone of 2025, I realized that I only used its inner screen maybe less than 50% of the time I pulled it out. With the cover screen being normal-sized, there just wasn’t as much of a need to unfold it for the 8-inch screen.
That hasn’t been the case with the Z Fold 8. Because of the shorter cover screen, I almost always unfold it to use the larger display. Maybe that’s because the Flex Titanium technology helps the hinge spring open better or the beveled aluminum frame makes it easier to unfold without needing fingernails, or both. Whatever the reasons are, it’s easier to see and feel the benefits of the larger size of the inner screen’s 4:3 aspect ratio for most content than on a more square-ish folding screen like the Z Fold 8 Ultra’s. To get roughly the same diagonal screen for widescreen videos on the Z Fold 8 Ultra, you need to rotate it, which is an extra step. It’s a tiny bit of friction that makes the task of quickly unfolding and getting more screen real estate less convenient. When you’re unfolding the phone dozens of times a day, that one extra step adds up.
After two weeks of using the Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra, I’ve concluded that if you watch more videos and game more than you read, the Z Fold 8 is the better foldable since you won’t need to rotate it so much. If you do more reading and split-screen multitasking, the Z Fold 8 Ultra is more suitable since you’ll get more vertical display on both the cover and inner screens without rotating, and you’ll do less scrolling.
As with the Z Fold 8 Ultra, the Z Fold 8 lets you run three apps in split-screen layouts or four (with a pop-up) on the inner screen. I wouldn’t recommend running more than two apps side by side in landscape orientation. Three apps side by side make each app window very skinny, and one app on one side and two stacked on the other half feel squished. Split-screen apps in vertical orientation just look too long to be useful in most cases. In some split-screen layouts, Samsung’s One UI 9 does let you tap between split-screen apps to have it fill more or most of the screen, but it’s not a function that’s easy to discover.
Performance from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip is snappy and the 12GB of RAM on my 256GB review unit (you’ll get 16GB if you buy the 1TB model) never chugged when I threw Gemini and Galaxy AI tasks at it. The only thing that occasionally bugs me is that the Z Fold 8 gets toasty even when I’m not doing anything power-hungry. I suspect the super-thin design doesn’t leave much room for adequate thermals; there’s no vapor chamber for cooling like there is on the Galaxy S26 Ultra and iPhone 17 Pro.