So, you’re eyeing a new Samsung foldable but would rather stick with the more traditional and established form factor than go for the new Z Fold8. In that case, the phone you’re looking for is now called the Z Fold8 Ultra.
Unlike the Z Fold8, though, which genuinely brings a new shape with few direct alternatives on the market, the same can’t quite be said for the Z Fold8 Ultra. You could just as well go for last year’s Z Fold7 and get a largely similar experience while saving some money so this leaves us with a dilemma on our hands.
Table of Contents:
Design
Display
Battery Life
Charging
Speaker Test
Performance
Cameras
Verdict
For starters, you can compare the complete specs sheets or directly continue with our editor’s assessment in the following text.
Size comparison
As we mentioned, the Fold form factor is already well established, and Samsung isn’t reinventing anything here. The two phones are incredibly similar physically. The Z Fold8 Ultra is technically a hair thinner, but not enough to be noticeable, and the two weigh exactly the same – neither is particularly light.
Samsung hasn’t announced any major changes to the hinge mechanism, but it has built on last year’s flexible Titanium plate supporting the foldable display by adding another flexible titanium-alloy sheet inside the panel itself. Samsung now calls the whole approach “Flex Titanium” technology. The change is meant to make the panel more resilient, particularly to pressure and impact, while somehow also allowing for a thinner overall assembly.
Samsung’s press release also claims that the new construction helps “reduce crease visibility”. That doesn’t entirely match our experience. The crease is still very much present on all of the Z Fold8 Ultra units we’ve seen.
Samsung also says it has fine-tuned the display tension and magnetic force to make unfolding feel “smoother, lighter and more natural”. It calls this the Easy Open-and-Close Mechanism, apparently borrowing at least part of the concept from the South Korea-exclusive Galaxy Z TriFold. And indeed, you can really feel the difference in the ease of opening.
Separating the two halves of the phone is noticeably easier over the first 5mm or so, where the hinge offers virtually no resistance, and the magnets take less force to overcome. Even so, opening the phone one-handed remains quite difficult and will likely be impractical for most users.
Display comparison
The internal display remains 8 inches in size, just like on the Galaxy Z Fold7, but Samsung has upgraded the flexible 120Hz LTPO OLED panel in several other ways. For starters, the resolution has increased from the Galaxy Z Fold7’s 1968 x 2184 pixels to 2256 x 2504 pixels. HDR10+ video support is once again present, though Dolby Vision remains absent.
Samsung also advertises the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra’s display as being brighter than the Galaxy Z Fold7’s. Arguably more important, however, are the new Flex Titanium construction and the anti-reflective coating on the internal screen. It does make a noticeable difference to outdoor legibility, though it’s not as good as some competitors like the Magic V6.
The cover display, meanwhile, appears unchanged from the Galaxy Z Fold7, and Samsung doesn’t advertise any upgrades here either. It’s still a 6.5-inch LTPO OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and a resolution of 1080 x 2520 pixels.
Our testing didn’t reveal a meaningful increase in maximum brightness with a 75% white test pattern. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra reached around 1,400 nits in automatic mode, broadly matching the Galaxy Z Fold7. It did, however, come close to Samsung’s advertised 3,000-nit figure in our 10% white-patch test. Combined with the anti-reflective coating, this makes the new internal display noticeably easier to read in bright sunlight despite the similar full-screen brightness.
The cover display produced similarly impressive results, approaching 3,000 nits with a 10% white patch and reaching around 1,400 nits with a 75% white pattern – once again broadly in line with the Galaxy Z Fold7. Excellent performance in either case.
Battery life
The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra brings a meaningful battery upgrade over the Galaxy Z Fold7, even if its capacity is still not particularly large by current standards. Other phones making the switch from conventional Li-Po batteries to silicon-carbon cells have delivered more substantial gains, but the increase from 4,400mAh to 5,000mAh is still very welcome.
Our battery tests show a notable improvement not only in the overall Active Use Score, but also in the screen-on tests, including web browsing and video streaming. The bump up in Active Use Score is even more impressive all around when using the cover displays on both phones.
Charging speed
The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra now supports 45W wired charging over Power Delivery with the appropriate PPS profile, up from 25W on the Z Fold7. Wireless charging has also been bumped from 15W to 20W.
These are far from minor upgrades. It’s almost hard to believe that last year’s Samsung foldables were still limited to 25W wired charging, but the difference is very real in practice. The Z Fold8 Ultra shaves roughly half an hour off a full charge, which is a substantial improvement considering that this amounts to around a third of the Z Fold7’s entire charging cycle. That hardly makes the Z Fold7 unusable, of course, but the Z Fold8 Ultra is noticeably more convenient in this respect.
Speaker test
This is one area where the Z Fold7 surprisingly ekes out a small win over the Z Fold8 Ultra, not because it has a particularly impressive speaker setup, but because Samsung has arguably made the newer model a little worse.
The Z Fold8 Ultra is slightly quieter than its predecessor, just barely missing the cut for a Good rating in our standardized testing. That may not even be its biggest issue, though, as the tuning has changed as well.
Music tracks sound fuller and deeper, but the stronger bass tends to overpower the mids and vocals, making the overall presentation sound somewhat muffled. We prefer the older tuning – the Z Fold7 sounds cleaner and louder.
Performance
Since both of these are proper Samsung flagships, they naturally get the full flagship treatment. In both cases, that means whatever top-tier Qualcomm chip was available at the time of release. Samsung also uses the “for Galaxy” versions of these chips, which typically run at slightly higher clock speeds than their standard Snapdragon counterparts.
So, the older Z Fold7 gets the Snapdragon 8 Elite, while the Z Fold8 Ultra moves to the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The latter is clearly more powerful, though there are some nuances to that, which we’ll get to in a bit.
Both are still thoroughly modern 3nm chips packed with up-to-date features and connectivity options. Aside from the upgrade from Bluetooth 5.4 on the Z Fold7 to Bluetooth 6.0 on the Z Fold8 Ultra, there isn’t really any meaningful connectivity difference to speak of, which is good news for buyers considering the older model.
Samsung hasn’t changed the memory configuration in any meaningful way either. Both phones come with 12GB of RAM as standard and can be had with 16GB in some higher-end variants. Storage starts at 256GB and goes up to 1TB on both, with comparable UFS 4.x-class storage. Neither phone offers expandable storage.
This is also a good place to briefly touch on software. Technically, the Z Fold8 Ultra has the advantage here since it is one of the launch devices for One UI 9, based on Android 17. The Z Fold7 should eventually get One UI 9 as well, along with most, if not all, of its new features. That seems especially likely since One UI 9 doesn’t introduce any major feature that appears to depend on new hardware. It’s mostly a refinement of the existing experience, with a few new Galaxy AI additions thrown in.
The Z Fold8 Ultra also has a technical advantage when it comes to long-term support. Both phones come with the same excellent seven-year software support promise, but being a year newer, the Z Fold8 Ultra naturally has an extra year of support remaining. In practice, though, relatively few buyers are likely to keep a flagship foldable for six or seven years.
Benchmark performance
Looking at the benchmark results, it’s clear – and entirely expected – that the Z Fold8 Ultra has more burst performance to offer across the board. The difference isn’t huge, though, especially in broader benchmark suites such as AnTuTu.
Then there’s thermal throttling, and neither phone does particularly well here. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is supposed to use an expanded graphite cooling structure but it still loses around half, and at times even more, of its peak performance under prolonged load. That’s hardly unusual for phones powered by modern flagship Qualcomm chips. Even conventional slab phones struggle to cool them effectively, and the foldable form factor only makes the job harder.
In an interesting twist, however, the Z Fold7 actually throttles less aggressively than its successor. So, in something like a prolonged gaming session, the real-world performance gap between the two may end up being fairly small. That’s good news for prospective Z Fold7 buyers.
Camera comparison
The Z Fold8 Ultra doesn’t introduce any major changes to the camera system. It’s almost entirely the same as on the Z Fold7, save for the new ultrawide camera, which swaps the previous generation’s conventional RGB sensor for a Tetrapixel one while keeping the same optical format.
Either way, it’s a triple rear setup headlined by what appears to be
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