Samsung Z Fold 8 (Wide) Impressions: Better Than I Thought!

All right, welcome to your first look and hands-on with three... new Samsung folding phones today... in increasing order of interestingness.

So we've got a new Z Flip 8, then a new Z Fold 8 Ultra, and then a Z Fold... 8... I promise that's the correct order.

Okay, so the new Flip, the Flip 8 looks a lot like the Flip 7, but it's a bit thinner and, and lighter.

Otherwise, this is gonna be a safe, incremental upgrade, which is right in line with what we've been expecting from Samsung.

It does get the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy to match the S26 series with all of its performance...

and image processing pipeline and NPU. And then little things like they beveled the inner edges to make the phone slightly easier to open.

And they improved the cover screen experience to be a bit more like a regular... outside screen. Pull down from the left for notifications, pull down on the right for quick settings, and then up from the bottom to get your apps.

It's fine. Is, you know, is being 8 grams lighter and... half a millimeter thinner going to make a difference to someone who has last year's phone or the year before?

No. but this is the... slow and steady improvement that we've come to expect from Samsung. So then, speaking of slow and steady, year-over-year improvement, this is now the eighth generation of the big one, the Galaxy Z Fold. Now, honestly, they've been on this slow and steady thing for so long that it's felt like

even though they kind of started first, a lot of the more aggressive competition has caught up and passed them.

So what did Samsung do with this new generation of the big Fold? Well, it is a small... incremental improvement again, but then they also did something really clever, which you'll see what I mean in a second.

So, new Snapdragon chip again, check. Also slightly thinner and lighter than last year... check. But then they've also updated the ultrawide camera to a new 50-megapixel sensor, so it can now shoot 8K video alongside the same 200-megapixel primary as last year.