The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra Is Samsung's Patience With Foldables Finally Paying Off

Samsung showed off its first foldable in 2019 and left a lot of people in awe, myself included. I spent the next three years waiting for a turn with one, and finally got it with the Galaxy Z Fold4 in 2022. It still felt like something out of this world, but you could see exactly where it needed work. The Fold5 and the Fold6 chipped away at that, and each was a better phone than the one before it, yet neither quite closed the gap between what the foldable was and what it obviously wanted to be.

The Fold7 came closest. By then, Samsung had more or less solved the outside of the phone, the thinness, the weight, the way it disappeared into a pocket, and what was left was everything it had been quietly ignoring on the inside for four straight generations. The Fold8 Ultra is the first one to go after that, and that is really the point. Eight generations in, Samsung has worked its way down to the complaints I have been repeating since the Fold4, which only happens if you keep making the phone. This is not a perfect phone. It is just the first foldable I have used where the compromises are not the first thing I want to tell you about.

Samsung Finally Gave In on Silicon Carbon Batteries

From the Fold4 I got in 2022 through to the Fold7, Samsung shipped the same 4400mAh cell at the same 25W charging, year after year, while making the phone thinner around it. In that same window, the Chinese brands moved to silicon carbon and started fitting 6000mAh batteries into bodies no thicker than Samsung's, and Samsung's answer at every launch was essentially a polite nod and that they needed more time for R&D.

The Fold8 Ultra and the Fold8 are the first Samsung phones to use silicon carbon cells, and that switch is the entire reason this phone carries 5000mAh instead of 4400mAh without putting on a millimeter. Charging has finally moved as well, from 25W to 45W wired, which Samsung rates at 67 percent in half an hour against the 50 percent the Fold7 managed on a smaller battery. And wireless charging gets a small bump, going from 15W to 20W.

The bigger deal is what this signals for everything else Samsung makes. If the company is willing to put silicon carbon into its thinnest, most space-starved, most fragile phone, there is no argument left for keeping it out of the S series, which is where the actual volume sits. The Fold8 Ultra is the test case, and the S27 series is the phone that should benefit from it.

None of that makes 5000mAh and 45W big numbers by 2026 standards, and there are foldables shipping with more of both. What has changed is that Samsung has stopped behaving as though the complaint did not exist, and on the phone I carry every day, the battery life, while not dramatically better, comes close enough to keeping the battery anxiety away, especially during the commute.

How the Fold Fits Into an Ordinary Day

The Fold8 Ultra is 4.1mm unfolded; the Fold7 was 4.2mm. Held back to back, I could not tell them apart. What is worth noting is that Samsung got a bigger battery in there without the phone getting any thicker, which is the more interesting bit than the 0.1mm.

The hinge is. It folds tighter and sits flatter this year. That said, it still exists, and that's the nature of foldables. But it is not as intrusive as it used to be compared to older generations of the Fold.

Folded shut, it is a phone, and I use it like one, which mostly means losing an hour to Instagram before I have even noticed. But this is also the reason I keep going back to foldables, because the moment I open it up, there is an 8-inch screen in my hands and I end up reading on it. I would get through articles that I would normally bookmark and forget. And the reason is that the phone can be easily used with a single hand when reading; the screen is big enough to make a long read feel comfortable rather than a chore.

Movies are a different story, and this is where the Fold8 Ultra is not the phone I would pick. That 8-inch panel is close to square at 11:10, so anything widescreen lands with fat black bars above and below it, and after a while the letterboxing eats into the very size you bought the phone for.

This is exactly the gap the regular Fold8 is meant to fill, with its wider 4:3 inner display that fills far more of the screen when you put a film on, sometimes even the way Nolan intended. It is also a genuinely good phone to read on in its own right. We will have our full review of it in the coming week, so keep an eye out for that.

A Better Ultrawide and a Faster Chip

The 200MP main sensor carries over from the Fold7, and so does the 10MP 3x telephoto, so the cameras are largely the same year on year. The one change is the ultrawide, which goes from 12MP to 50MP.

It is not a jump I would tell anyone to upgrade for, but the old 12MP ultrawide was the weakest camera on the phone, and I ran into it often enough. The other change worth knowing is that both the main and ultrawide now record 8K, with support for the APV codec and Cine LUTs.

On the performance side, the Fold8 Ultra runs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the same chip sitting inside just about every flagship launching this year. Honestly, I have never once run into a slowdown on any foldable I have used, and that is because they have all shipped with top-end silicon to begin with. So nothing really changes here. Whether I am juggling three apps on the big screen, jumping between them throughout the day, or cutting a quick reel in Edits, the phone keeps up without me ever having to think about it, which is exactly what I want from something at this price.

Eight Years Later, Samsung Is Still the One to Beat

In India, Samsung does not really have rivals in this space. Counterpoint has it holding around 89 percent of the foldable market here in 2026, which is less of a lead than the entire board, and even Apple's long-awaited foldable iPhone is expected to take under one percent of the segment this year because it arrives so late. So the global shake-up is still years away from touching an Indian buyer, and Samsung knows it.

That comfort is exactly why the Fold8 Ultra can get away with being very good rather than flawless. It still has room to grow, and the two areas that need it most are the battery and the cameras, the same two I have spent much of this piece on. OPPO is already doing both better with the Find N6, pairing a bigger silicon carbon cell with a proper high-resolution telephoto, but that phone does not sell here, so for now it is a benchmark I can point at and little else. With nobody forcing its hand in India, Samsung has had little reason to push harder.

And yet the phones are selling. I notice far more Samsung foldables in metros and at airport gates now than I did in 2023. The pitch is clearly landing, which is the real reason Samsung can keep taking its time.

As for whether it is worth buying, that really depends on where you are coming from. At ₹1,99,999, I would not move to it from an ordinary flagship, because the S26 Ultra and other excellent flagship phones like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, OPPO Find X9 Ultra, and Vivo X300 Ultra cover most of the same ground for a lot less. But if you are already living with a foldable and it is a Fold6 or something older, this is a sensible time to step up, and the jump in battery life and day-to-day usability is real enough that you will feel it almost immediately.

Samsung was never really right about foldables back in 2019; it was just too stubborn to drop them, and after eight years of quietly refusing to quit, that stubbornness has ended up looking a lot like having been right all along.