Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8, Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, or Galaxy Z Flip8: Samsung’s New Foldables Are for Every Type of User
Samsung did something at Galaxy Unpacked July 2026 that it has never done before. Instead of the usual two foldables, tech enthusiasts got three – the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8. It’s the first time “Ultra” has entered Samsung’s foldable naming at all, and that alone signals a shift in the way foldables are now perceived. Everyone wants foldables now, and Samsung’s new lineup makes a strong case for why everyone should embrace the foldable future, because with this trifecta, the future starts now! It all makes sense because after all, one type of philosophy in terms of a folding phone cannot serve every kind of person who wants one. Thankfully, that problem stands solved with this lineup.
Before we explore which one’s the right pick for you, we need to rewind and understand why we need a foldable at all, because the original case for a foldable was simple: more screen when you need it, a normal phone when you don’t. That argument still holds, but it was never specific enough to explain who actually benefits. That’s where the new lineup with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 comes in. These phones are designed to acknowledge the pain points of everyone – whether it’s a founder running two apps side by side through a meeting, a student watching lectures on the metro, and someone who just wants a great camera in a phone that fits a jacket pocket. These are three different people with three different reasons to fold their phone in half, and Samsung knows that one device cannot be all three. That’s why, this year, the South Korean conglomerate has built a phone for each instead.
Who should buy the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra?
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is the first Ultra-branded foldable Samsung has ever made, and the name justifies what the phone offers. Let’s get into it. For starters, when you unfold it, you get an 8-inch QXGA+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X main display, the largest Samsung has ever put on a Fold, running at up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness with a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, alongside a 6.5-inch FHD+ cover screen that matches the same brightness and refresh specs so nothing feels compromised depending on which screen you’re using. And it runs on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, a 3nm chipset clocked up to 4.74GHz with an Adreno 840 GPU, paired with 12GB or 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage, backed by a 200MP main camera with OIS and Quad Pixel autofocus, a 50MP ultra-wide, and a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, which means Samsung has done the unthinkable. They’ve put a genuine flagship camera system, complete with HDR support in full 200MP mode, rather than the usual foldable compromise.
The real showstopper is Samsung’s agentic multitasking. With Now Nudge, your Fold8 Ultra can watch what’s happening on screen and open Multi Window at the right moment on its own, so if a friend texts you dinner plans, it can prompt you to drop the calendar open next to the chat instead of making you dig for it yourself. Gemini Notebook goes further still. Simply feed it a PDF of meeting notes or an audio recording of a presentation, and it turns that single source into a summary, a slide deck, a podcast, even a quiz, without a second app involved. But who’s even going to use this? Picture this, a lawyer reviewing a client call recording on the train home, turning it into talking points before they’ve even reached their desk, so much time and effort saved, and now that lawyer is prepared for that call without going the extra mile. That’s exactly the actual use case this phone is built around, and it’s backed by an expanded graphite cooling structure specifically engineered to keep that kind of sustained, demanding multitasking from throttling the phone mid-task.
It’s also the thinnest and slimmest Fold Samsung has ever shipped, 4.1 millimetres unfolded, at 215 grams, thanks to the same Flex Titanium display structure and Armor FlexHinge used across this year’s Fold line. Getting there is noticeably easier too: a new magnet-assisted Easy Open-and-Close Mechanism, borrowed from Samsung’s South Korea-exclusive Z TriFold, makes the phone genuinely simpler to pry open one-handed, one of the first things you’ll notice when you touch the device. Charging has moved too, up to 45W from the 25W ceiling the Fold line has had for years, and early EU energy label data puts battery endurance at roughly 51 hours, about 20% longer than the Fold7 managed, a real jump rather than a number padded by a slightly bigger cell. The phone also carries an IP48 rating for dust and water resistance, a meaningful reassurance given how much heavier daily use a productivity-first foldable like this is likely to see. In India, the Fold8 Ultra starts at Rs 1,99,999 for the 12GB/256GB variant, climbing to Rs 2,59,999 for 16GB/1TB, and comes in Graphite and Cream, with Violet Shadow as a standard colour and Green Shadow as an online-exclusive finish.
Who should buy the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8?
Don’t be fooled, the standard Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 isn’t a scaled-down Ultra. In fact, it’s the most robust foldable in the classic Fold segment ever, because Samsung rebuilt its entire aspect ratio from the ground up, and at 201 grams, it’s the lightest Z Fold Samsung has ever made, lighter even than the groundbreaking Ultra despite unfolding into a wider display. That weight saving comes alongside a new Flex Titanium display structure, a titanium-alloy film paired with an enhanced titanium plate that both reduces crease visibility and improves durability. All this is backed by an Armor FlexHinge with a widened inner bezel gap built specifically to make the phone easier to unfold one-handed.
When unfolded, the screen runs a 4:3 aspect ratio built specifically for films and games, now hitting up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness, a 15% jump over the Fold7, and a low-reflection finish keeping it usable in direct sunlight. Rotate it, and it switches to 3:4, a shape that suits e-books and long articles far better than the tall, narrow panels folding phones have used until now. The 5.5-inch cover screen runs 10:16, matching the shape people already scroll short-form video in, so switching between formats doesn’t feel like fighting the screen. A 4,800mAh battery backs all of this with over 26 hours of video playback, which matters given how squarely this phone is aimed at content. On the imaging side, a 50MP dual rear camera system handles everyday shooting like pro.
And let’s be clear – it isn’t only for watching, either. My FanCam, powered by Galaxy AI, can take a video and automatically reframe it around one person you select, which is a great tool for pulling a clean and focused clip of your kid’s school play out of a longer recording without touching an editing app. The agentic AI here also takes real action rather than just organising information. Samsung demoed this on stage with a simple example: share a photo of the Eiffel Tower or any other landmark in the world with Gemini and ask it to find a nearby hotel, and it searches, filters by your criteria, and waits for you to approve before booking anything, working quietly in the background while you carry on with something else. It’s the kind of feature that makes the difference between a phone that shows you information and one that actually acts on it. In India, the Fold8 starts at Rs 1,79,999 for 12GB/256GB, up to Rs 2,39,999 for 16GB/1TB, and comes in Graphite, Cream, and Lavender, with an online-exclusive Pistachio finish.
Who should buy the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8?
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 is for people who want a foldable that fits even the smallest pockets of their shortest beach shorts. Don’t believe it? Just look at the numbers, at 6.1 millimetres thick unfolded and 180 grams, it’s Samsung’s thinnest, lightest Flip yet, built with an Armor Aluminium frame and Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the back, and most of its usage doesn’t require opening the phone at all.
FlexWindow is the real story here. Weather, your schedule, notifications, even currency and stock updates now appear as organised cards on the cover screen through Now Brief, without unfolding anything, running on a 4.1-inch cover display that’s more intuitive than ever. You can browse the Gallery app, reply to messages, and run quick tasks straight from that cover display, which increasingly makes the case that a Flip doesn’t need to open to earn its keep most of the day. Unfold it, and the 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X main display is where the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 truly shows its capabilities, a full-sized screen for a phone that might spend most of its day folded shut, which is not a bad thing in this case. That’s because both displays run the same 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, so there’s no longer that feeling of “oh, my cover screen is just a novelty,” both screens are now primary screens.
The camera leans into what this shape is genuinely good at. A 50MP main sensor pairs with a 12MP ultra-wide, and both the front and rear cameras support 4K video recording, useful for anyone treating this as a genuine content-creation tool rather than a backup camera. FlexCam, exclusive to the Z Flip line, lets the phone prop itself open at an angle for stable, hands-free shooting, while Super Steady’s horizontal lock keeps footage level even while moving. Dual Recording captures both the person filming and their subject in the same shot at once, built specifically for the kind of two-perspective vlogging and social content that’s now standard on Instagram and YouTube Shorts. It runs on a 4,300mAh battery with 25W wired charging, reaching roughly 55% in half an hour, alongside 15W wireless and 4.5W reverse wireless charging, packing meaningfully more capacity into a device that still got thinner than its predecessor.The phone also carries an IP48 rating for dust and water resistance, matching the durability standard Samsung’s brought across the rest of this year’s lineup. In India, the Flip8 runs on the Exynos 2600, priced at Rs 1,24,999 for 12GB/256GB and Rs 1,44,999 for 12GB/512GB, available in Graphite, Cream, and Pink, with an online-exclusive Mint finish.
How Galaxy AI Elevates the Experience On Each Phone
What actually ties the lineup together isn’t identical software running three times over, it’s the same AI philosophy applied to three different lives. Samsung’s own framing for this generation, in CEO TM Roh’s words at the keynote, is that “mobile devices will become the most personal entry point to experiences that understand and adapt to each user,” and that plays out differently depending on which of the three you’re holding.
On the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, it anticipates multitasking before you’ve asked for it. Now Nudge reads what’s happening on screen and opens Multi Window at exactly the right moment, so a colleague sending a spreadsheet link mid-call can prompt the phone to pull it up in a split window without you reaching for it. On the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8, it acts on your behalf through Gemini’s agentic layer, the same “share a photo of the Eiffel Tower, book a nearby hotel” example Samsung demoed on stage, where the AI searches, filters by your criteria, and waits for approval while you keep working in an entirely different app. Gemini Notebook goes further still – hand it a PDF of meeting minutes or a recorded client call, and it turns that single file into a written summary, a slide deck, or even a podcast, useful for anyone who’d rather review a five-minute audio brief on the way to their next meeting than reread a transcript. On the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8, it surfaces what matters before the phone is even opened. Now Brief turns your schedule, the day’s weather, and pending notifications into glanceable cards directly on FlexWindow, so a quick glance at the cover screen replaces the usual unlock-scroll-check routine most people run through a dozen times a day.
Underneath all three sits the same connective layer. Gemini Intelligence now handles cross-app automation across more than 40 supported apps and services, and a new AI Assistant Activity dashboard in One UI 9 gives you one place to review exactly what any AI agent did on your behalf, rather than hunting through separate apps to piece it together after the fact. Samsung’s backing this with Knox Enhanced Encrypted Protection and a Personal Data Engine built to keep that intelligence processed on-device rather than routed through the cloud by default, plus Privacy Alerts that flag when something’s quietly trying to access permissions it shouldn’t. Every device in the lineup also ships with a six-month trial of Google AI Pro and 5TB of cloud storage included. What makes it all such a special experience is how the same underlying Galaxy AI is tuned to how each device actually gets picked up and used.
So, Which New Samsung Foldable Should You Buy?
If your day genuinely runs on multiple apps and decisions happening at once, back-to-back calls with a document open in one window and a calendar in another, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is built for exactly that. Its 8-inch display isn’t just bigger for the sake of it, it’s the canvas Now Nudge and Gemini’s agentic tools were actually designed around, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 underneath means that split-screen workload never feels like it’s asking too much of the hardware.
If you want a foldable mainly to watch, read, and create content on a screen finally shaped properly for it, the standard Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8, now the lightest Fold Samsung has ever made at 201 grams, is worth the money. Its new 4:3 and 3:4 aspect ratios weren’t an afterthought bolted onto last year’s shape, they’re built specifically for the way people actually consume things, films and games unfolded, books and articles rotated, short-form scrolling on the cover screen, with My FanCam thrown in for anyone who wants to turn a long recording into a clean, focused clip without opening an editing app.
And if you want the foldable format without the full productivity suite, something pocketable that still shoots genuinely good two-person video, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 is the one built around exactly that need. FlexCam and Dual Recording exist for the exact moment a flip phone makes the most sense. Propped open on a table, filming both sides of a conversation or a vlog without a tripod anywhere in sight. Now Brief means most days you’ll get everything you need off the cover screen alone, never opening the phone at all. This is a meaningful shift for anyone who’s wanted a foldable but couldn’t find one built around how they’d actually use it; for the first time, Samsung’s built three distinct enough options that the choice comes down to your needs, not a compromise.
Coming to the pricing, the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra starts at ₹1,99,999, while the Galaxy Z Fold8 will retail starting at ₹1,79,999. In case you want to grab the Galaxy Z Flip8, you can own one starting at ₹1,24,999. Samsung is currently giving a ₹10,000 bonus as part of an exchange offer on the phones and if you join Galaxy Forever, you can get up to 55% assured Buyback value, an option to pay over 24 No Cost EMIs, and Samsung Care+ worth ₹32,999 (accidental and liquid damage cover with zero deductibles for 25 months). All three handsets are currently up for pre-order, with early deliveries starting from August 4th onwards.
