It seems like foldable phones are having a moment. Social media is bombarding us with ads and videos for not just the phone in question, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, but also the upcoming (a very badly-kept secret) Apple foldable phone. Google also released a slew of new smartphones, including a new version of its foldable Pixel.

PHOTO BY Carlo Chungunco

While the Apple foldable is hyped up with 3D prints and various rumors, the ‘new’ Pixels are what we in the automotive industry call a ‘minor change.’ That leaves only the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 as a genuinely intriguing product that you can actually buy, hold, and use. So that’s exactly what I did.

We have one, have been using it, and can now look past the hype. Does this count as a preemptive strike against the upcoming Apple foldable? Or are you better off waiting for the Cupertino version?

Foldables in 2026

PHOTO BY Carlo Chungunco

This isn’t my first Samsung foldable. Before hopping to iOS, I was an Android user through-and-through. My last Android before this one was, fittingly, a Fold 4. It has been a few years since then, but foldables as a whole have made phones much more exciting as of late. While Apple was happy putting out candy bar after candy bar, Samsung foldables walked so the likes of Honor and Google could run.

What makes the Fold 8 more interesting even in this field of already interesting phones is the short and squat form factor. Coming from a taller-style foldable, this passport-sized phone is extremely unique, and has offered a third, and some would say more ideal option, to the usual flip and fold choices. In fact, Apple’s rumored foldable will launch in this style.

So, what are the advantages this passport format? First, it fits in your pocket much better than the rather tall and lanky folds of the past. Second, whether folded or unfolded, the screen real estate is much larger and more usable. Folded, it feels like what a Blackberry used to feel like; unfolded, it has almost the same screen real estate compared to the Fold 8 Ultra, which kept the taller form factor.

As a foldable product, the Fold 8 and its dimensions is definitely unique and is one of the most comfortable and practical foldable layouts today.

Samsung hardware

PHOTO BY Carlo Chungunco

Samsung has hit this out of the park. The Fold 8 is almost impossibly thin. At 9.7mm folded, it is about the thickness of an iPhone, but unfold the phone and you get an amazingly slim hand feel that makes it one of the thinnest gadgets can you hold today at just 4.5mm thick (minus the camera bump). You almost wonder how they got a relatively massive 4,800mAh battery in it, but this is probably why Samsung used a silicon carbon battery for the Fold series this year.

The 4,800mAh battery is definitely a lot for something this slim. It allows the Fold 8 to generally last a day with some battery to spare. In our use, however, the initialization of Android really did a number on the battery life for the first week or so, with it only regularizing in the past few days. Charging the Fold 8 is also much faster, as Samsung equipped this with up to 45W wired and 20W wireless charging. This can bring the battery from dead to about 60% in under 30 minutes. A far cry from some Chinese Androids, but definitely a welcome change to the notoriously battery-conservative Samsung.

Samsung’s screens are some of the best in the business, and this generation might be their best ones yet. The displays have resolutions of 1248x1972 and 1848x2448 for the outer and inner displays, respectively. More than that, both are LTPO AMOLEDs with an eye-searing 3,000 nits peak brightness, making these the most usable screens on a foldable to date. There is an anti-reflective coating, which definitely helps outdoors, as well as what Samsung calls “Flex Titanium” technology, which is basically what gives the inner screen better durability.

Samsung removed ‘flex mode’ from the Fold 8. Flex mode was the feature that allowed almost infinite adjustability for the hinge, allowing you to use it at almost any angle—handy for when you want to use it as a framing device for taking photos. In its place is a magnetic hinge that snaps into position with a positive and tactile thunk. While I would personally have preferred the ahem, flexibility, of flex mode, this more tactile experience makes it more fun to unfold the phone as it snaps open with authority.

Lastly, there are still no magnets in the Fold 8, which means while it can wirelessly charge, if you want the convenience of MagSafe, you need to buy a case with magnets built in, which Samsung is all too happy to sell you.

Yes, the inner screen still has a plastic layer and a crease, but the crease itself is almost unnoticeable to the touch and is quite hard to see unless you really look for it. All-in-all, this is one of the best foldable phones in terms of hardware you can get in 2026.

Samsung software

PHOTO BY Carlo Chungunco

One of the reasons I had some trepidation to switching to the Fold 8 was the software. Based on the last time I used Samsung’s OneUI, I can’t say I was the biggest fan of its interface. It just seemed so much more cluttered and inconsistent than its iOS counterpart. But it is in that inconsistency that also showcases its biggest strength: customizability.

Download Good Lock, a Samsung utility, and through it and the various plug-ins you can install, you can customize the look and feel of your Samsung device in any which way your heart desires. It really does become an issue of analysis paralysis as it took me more than a week just to fiddle with and fix up the cover screen and inner screens to make them more comfortable to look at and to use. Yes, it is an insane hassle and it takes a lot of time. But invest in it and after a week or so, you will find that everything you wanted to fix in terms of UI, you can find a workaround for. In the end, your being overwhelmed comes with the tradeoff of being able to do whatever you want to do to your own phone.

There are some Android bugs and quirks that still raise their ugly head as you use the Fold, but at the very least everything is extremely snappy thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy (what a mouthful) and up to 16GB of RAM in the 1TB variant.

It seems that Samsung’s software is the absolute best for foldables these days. It allows for easy and seamless multi-tasking, as well as snappy and sensible shortcuts to help you make the most of the large landscape screen. That being said, a lot of apps are definitely not optimized to this unique aspect ratio, which leads to some apps like Lazada and Facebook being almost impossible to use unless you completely tweak your zoom settings on an app-by-app basis (for Lazada), or you rotate the unfolded phone vertically (for the likes of Facebook).

Finally, Samsung now supports AirDrop with Apple devices, definitely one of the reasons I decided it would be good to give Android a try once again, as we are entirely dependent on AirDrop at work.

We find that things will eventually become easier as apps adapt to Apple’s passport form factor, but until then, at least Samsung allows you (through the labs portion of the settings) to force aspect ratios on apps that refuse to play ball (with mixed results). This is why I didn’t wait for the Apple foldable as I am sure, they will have to contend with the same challenges and bugs that Samsung has slowly fixed over the past decade or so.

Camera of the Samsung Fold 8

PHOTO BY Carlo Chungunco

The cameras, on paper, definitely have the specs. There’s a wide camera with a 23mm equivalent lens and an ultrawide with a 13mm equivalent lens. Both are 50-megapixel units for photos, and the Fold can take up to 8K, 30fps video, and 4K up to 120fps. There are also a pair of 10-megapixel selfie shooters on the cover screen as well as the interior screen. Other than the lack of a telephoto lens, this should be a decent shooter.

Unfortunately, specs only tell half the story. Apple still has the leg up when it comes to photo and video quality. For some reason, photos still come out a bit mushy, especially when it comes to low light situations, and videos leave a lot to...

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