Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 Review: The Best Flip Yet, But Plays a Safe Game

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 is a familiar phone wearing a slightly better fit. It's thinner and lighter than the Flip7, the crease starts off barely visible before creeping back within a couple of days, and the 6.9-inch display now peaks at 3,000 nits without any other real changes. The Exynos 2600 handles daily use with ease and posts a clear generational jump over the Flip7 on benchmarks, though it still trails the wider Android field, and sustained tasks like gaming or 4K recording push the phone noticeably warm.

The cameras are the same 50MP-and-12MP setup Samsung has used since the Z Flip6, and while the software keeps extracting more out of it - especially in portraits and daylight shots - buying this one for the camera alone doesn't make much sense. The silicon-carbon battery is a genuine spec upgrade, but the 25W charging speed hasn't moved, and that gap is starting to feel like the one area Samsung needs to actually address.

None of this makes the Z Flip8 a bad phone. It's Samsung playing it safe again, refining what already worked rather than reinventing it. Whether that's enough depends entirely on what you're upgrading from.

The physical changes are small on paper but noticeable the moment you pick it up. At 6.1mm unfolded and 180 grams, this is Samsung's thinnest and lightest Flip yet, shaving a bit off the Flip7's 6.5mm and 188g, and the difference is genuinely felt-it's more comfortable to hold for longer stretches than its predecessor. In the same scenarios as its predecessors, the phone feels really slick to hold; for my average-sized hands, it didn't inspire much confidence, so a phone case after purchasing it should be a priority for you.

Now, if I compare it to Motorola's offering of the Razr 60 Ultra, the Z Flip8 does inspire more confidence to hold, but it also made it very clear that I shouldn't drop it at all. This instinct comes from my personal experience of using phones without any cover or case, unless it was provided with the unit in question. I had dropped my Razr 60 Ultra too many times to count, not because of the phone itself; it's just that I was really clumsy with it, and at the end of the 4 months it still survived, with barely a scratch. The Z Flip 8, on the other hand, feels sturdy and really good to hold, even with the tad bit sharper edges than the Razr 60 Ultra, but that also makes it feel malleable; if I were to drop the phone, depending on how it fell, I would need to be mentally prepared for a dent on the edges of the aluminum frame.

The colour variant I had for the Galaxy Z Flip 8 was Pink, and I'm going to go ahead and say it's one of the weakest color choices Samsung has made this year. It's subtle and looks really pink in indoor lighting, but it shines white when under the sun.

The 6.9-inch main display is sharp at 400 PPI, smooth at 120Hz, and peaks at up to 3000 nits. It's the same display as the Z Flip 7 but now with 400 more nits of brightness. So, there were no problems with legibility in outdoor conditions, even under direct sunlight. Watching movies or TV shows on this display was great. The panel offers vibrant colours that pop without coming across as oversaturated. This is typical of Samsung displays. The display was legible. Viewing angles are solid too; the picture holds up whether you're watching straight on or at an angle.

The crease was barely noticeable when I first unboxed the phone, but by around day two it had started becoming progressively more visible and easier to feel under my thumb while swiping. And that matters more on a Flip than on most folding phones since the crease sits exactly where your hand naturally rests.

As for the cover screen, this is where I have mixed feelings. The 4.1-inch Super AMOLED panel with its 120Hz refresh rate can now work much more like a real secondary display, and over the past few days I've leaned on it for the app drawer, quick notification checks, and Google Maps navigation without ever needing to unfold the phone.

It doubles as a viewfinder for the rear cameras too, which made it easy to use as my main camera while shooting a long-form video for our YouTube channel. That said, getting full third-party app support onto the cover screen still isn't native. It currently means installing an unofficial tool, which really shouldn't be necessary on a phone at this price.

Worth noting for anyone comparing notes across regions is that Samsung is again splitting chipsets this generation, with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 going to markets like the US, China, and Japan, while the Exynos 2600 ships in Europe, India, and South Korea. So, naturally, the Z Flip 8 I have been using runs the Exynos version. The phone ships with 12GB of RAM and a base 256GB storage, and in day-to-day use, it is genuinely excellent.

On benchmarks, it posted an AnTuTu score of 2,202,455 and Geekbench 6 scores of 2,410 single-core / 9,273 multi-core. Here's how it stacks up against some of the other phones for context. More importantly, the table below also has the Samsung Galaxy S26, a phone running the same Exynos 2600 chip.The table tells its own story.

The Exynos 2600 trails every competitor in this comparison. And even last year's Moto Razr 60 Ultra with the Snapdragon 8 Elite is right on the heels of the ZFlip8 in terms of performance. But it is clear as day that there is a significant performance bump over the last generation of the Z Flip.

Switching between apps is seamless, multitasking feels effortless, and the phone never once made me wait. That part of the experience is as polished as you'd expect from a flagship at this price. What I did notice, though, is the phone running noticeably warm during sustained tasks: gaming sessions, GPS navigation on data, extended 4K video recording, large file transfers, and while charging.

The heat doesn't affect the task at hand, and I got through a roughly 40-minute session recording at 4K 60FPS in a room with no air conditioning without any issues, but by the end I was a little concerned about just how hot the phone had gotten. The heat seems to concentrate around the cover screen and the upper half of the inner display. It hasn't caused any actual problems so far, but it's something I'm keeping an eye on.

The 50MP main and 12MP ultra-wide cameras use the same sensors as the Flip7, and that hardware has gone unchanged since the Flip6, making this the third straight generation running the same camera setup. Honestly, I don't mind it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The hardware is solid as it is, and Samsung's software tweaks each generation keep squeezing more out of it rather than leaning on a sensor upgrade to do the work. Image quality has held up well in daylight so far, though sharpness drops off noticeably past 5x zoom.

Portrait shots are where the Z Flip 8 really shines. Skin tones come out natural, edge detection is about as clean as it gets, and subject separation stays reliable shot after shot. The colour processing is restrained too, so the greens and reds in a photo land almost true to life across nearly every lighting scenario.

That said, buying the Z Flip 8 for the camera alone shouldn't really be on the table.

It has its charm and quirkiness, no doubt, but having spent time with non-foldables sitting in roughly the same price range, you're clearly paying a "foldable tax" here.

Shutter speed has been snappy, In daylight, images come out sharp and well-balanced straight out of the camera app. Low-light shots hold up reasonably well too, though you can tell the software is working harder to keep noise in check once the lighting gets really dim. Selfies benefit the most from this setup, since the dual-preview mode lets you frame shots on the cover screen using the higher-quality rear cameras instead of a dedicated front lens. I also shot and edited an entire video using just the Flip8's cameras in a low light scenario, and the footage held up well enough to use without needing to reshoot anything.

It carries the same 4300mAh capacity as the Z Flip 7, but the Z Flip 8 now swaps in a silicon-carbon battery instead. On paper that's the more interesting change, since silicon-carbon cells are supposed to pack more energy into the same physical space, and in a phone this compact every bit of room counts.

In practice, battery life has gotten me through a full day with a little charge to spare, which feels like a modest step up from the Flip7. Even so, the old flip-phone battery anxiety hasn't fully gone away. Any time the phone dipped to around 20% by 5 pm, I found myself glancing around for a charger before heading out for the evening.

This is where my biggest question mark sits. And, that's to do with the archaic charging speeds. Competing phones at this price, and plenty that cost far less, have been pushing 80W, 100W, and beyond for a while now, so seeing Samsung hold the line here feels oddly conservative.

Part of me wonders if the restraint is deliberate, and whether cranking the wattage any higher would just feed into the heating issues I ran into during longer sessions. A faster top-up would go a long way toward killing that anxiety for good, and right now it's the one spec that feels a generation behind the rest of the phone.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 feels like a refined update rather than a revolutionary one- thinner, lighter, with a less visible crease early on and a more capable, if still not fully polished, cover screen. And, going by purely history, that's how Samsung has been treating its flagship phones. Well, of course, barring the fresh Galaxy Z Fold8.

Samsung is playing it safe - same cameras for the third year running, incremental design tweaks, familiar quirks it hasn't quite fixed. So, if you already own a Flip7, I don't see enough here yet to justify upgrading.

Now, if you don't want to spend as much, then a Z Flip7 is the perfect and safe way for you to enter the world of flip phones. An alternative to that would be the Moto Razr 60 Ultra that my friend recently bought on sale at a comparatively lower price of ₹65,000. But if you want the latest and greatest flip phone, then the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 is the one for you to acquire.