Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Review: a phone like a passport that the manufacturer can't keep up with producing

Sedm let vypadaly skládačky od Samsungu jako dálkový ovladač, který se dá rozevřít do čtverce. Letos korejská firma udělala něco, co se od ní nečekalo: nechala tenhle tvar žít pod jménem Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra a vedle něj postavila úplně jiný telefon. Fold8 je zavřený zhruba velký jako cestovní pas, otevřený připomíná menší čtečku knih. A po dvou týdnech používání můžu říct, že tohle je poprvé, co jsem u skládačky nepřemýšlel nad tím, jestli ji chci — ale nad tím, kolik jsem ochoten za tvar zaplatit.

Nejsem v tom sám a Samsung z toho má docela problém. Firma počítala s tím, že hvězdou léta bude dražší Ultra, a podle toho rozdělila výrobní plán. Místo toho zjistila, že zhruba 70 % předobjednávek celé řady Galaxy Z8 míří k levnějšímu Foldu8 — a že celá série nasbírala v Koreji za týden 1,44 milionu rezervací, tedy nejvíc v historii značky. Rekord držel od roku 2019 Galaxy Note10. Samsung od té doby navýšil výrobu o víc než milion kusů a shání panty, ultratenké sklo i řadiče displeje z kapacit, které si schovával na příští rok. Tvar prodal telefon líp než jakákoli tabulka parametrů.

Passport, notebook, or phone?

První kontakt je zvláštní. Fold8 měří ve složeném stavu 81,9 × 123,9 × 9,7 milimetru, po rozevření se každá polovina ztenčí na 4,5 milimetru. V ruce tak držíte něco, co je širší než iPhone 17 Pro Max, ale výrazně nižší. Do kapsy u kalhot sedne líp než klasický Fold, protože telefon nikam netrčí — jen je cítit, že tam něco je. Mozek si na ten tvar zvyká pár dní, prsty rychleji.

My unit is in the Cream shade, a creamy white. The matte finish on the back keeps fingerprints at bay better than I expected, and most importantly, it doesn’t feel like a phone trying to be inconspicuous while costing fifty thousand. Besides this, Samsung also offers Graphite and Lavender; the Pistachio variant is an exclusive to its own e-shop.

More significant than the color is the weight distribution. 201 grams is not light, but the camera module is smaller and lighter than on the Ultra, so the phone isn’t top-heavy. A fifteen-gram difference compared to its more expensive sibling seems negligible on paper, but after half an hour of reading, it’s not. The index finger can naturally rest over the top edge, and the wrist doesn’t have to compensate for anything. Samsung also milled a shallow recess at the hinge, allowing you to open the phone without using your nails — a small detail that was noticeably missing from previous Folds.

And then there’s the in-button fingerprint reader, an item usually dismissed with a half-sentence in reviews. Not here. It reacts before you even fully press the button, and it doesn’t mind a damp thumb. Personally, it’s one of the fastest sensors I’ve ever tested. Samsung thus (perhaps) accidentally created the best reader on the market in a component it doesn’t talk about.

IP48 and sand: certification that misleads in both directions

On paper, it’s a budget cut. The construction sounds premium — an Advanced Armor Aluminum frame, an outer display under Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3, a Victus 2 back, and a double titanium layer under the flexible panel, which Samsung calls Flex Titanium. However, durability ends at IP48. The eight means half an hour in one and a half meters of water, the four means protection only against particles larger than 1 millimeter. Grains of beach sand are finer, so the beach theoretically remains forbidden territory.

Theoretically. In his test, Zack Nelson poured clay and fine dirt onto the hinge, and the new, flatter hinge let nothing inside. In contrast, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold — the only foldable boasting full IP68 — failed in the same discipline, with sand getting into its mechanism. So, certification doesn’t tell the whole story, only the part that can be measured in a lab. For the Czech customer, this comparison is also rather academic: Google won’t officially release its foldable here.

The most intriguing is the bend test. The Fold8 bent like a bow, its back glass detached — and it survived. The more expensive Fold8 Ultra failed the same test and lost its inner panel, being the first commercially sold Samsung foldable to do so. A thinner body doesn’t mean a stronger one, and the Ultra moniker certainly doesn’t.

Where Samsung disappoints is repairability. iFixit gave the Fold8 four out of ten points, one more than last year’s Fold7. Replacing the flexible display remains an expensive and risky operation — during disassembly, the iFixit moderator chipped the plastic bezels around the panel, destroying the entire OLED layer. Seven years of updates is a nice thing; a service bill after a second fall, less so.

Outer display that forces you to open the phone

This is where the whole concept breaks. The outer 5.5″ AMOLED with a resolution of 1248 × 1972 pixels, a 10:16 aspect ratio, and a 120Hz refresh rate is shorter than a regular phone’s display, but wider. You lose height, but gain a keyboard on which you can type with two thumbs without acrobatics. On Instagram, you see fewer posts at once; in email, fewer lines.

It sounds like a flaw, but that’s the trick. Because less content fits on the cover panel, you open the Fold8 much more often than older generations. With the Fold 7, you could get through the whole day with it closed, and the large display was a bonus you reached for in the evening for videos. Here, you genuinely use the inner display because the phone’s design pushes you to. The foldable finally makes sense as a foldable, not just a regular phone with a secret compartment.

The bezels around the cover display are not thin, and Samsung reserved the anti-reflective coating, which the latest Galaxy S Ultra series models received, for elsewhere. However, you won’t notice it in brightness — the panel measured approximately 1,500 nits in typical operation and a peak of 3,000 nits in a small area.

No more black bars. The 4:3 aspect ratio changes everything

Vnitřní 7,6″ Dynamic AMOLED 2X s rozlišením 1 828 × 2 448 pixelů je hlavní důvod, proč tenhle telefon existuje. Tvar, který Samsung marketingově prodává jako 4:3, znamená, že standardní video už nesedí uprostřed obrazovky obehnané dvěma tlustými černými pásy — a starší obsah ve formátu 4:3 vyplní panel beze zbytku. Ultra má sice úhlopříčku 8″, ale její čtvercový tvar vás nutí telefon otočit. Když ho rozevíráte desetkrát denně, tenhle krok navíc otravuje.

Samsung has reduced the crease to a degree that you don’t perceive it during normal use. However, it hasn’t disappeared — you can find it with your finger and by looking at a sharper angle. In direct sunlight, even three thousand nits won’t guarantee comfortable reading; this is a value for HDR content in a small area, not typical operating brightness. A minor drawback is the punch-hole for the selfie camera, which can obscure a button in a game menu or interfere with a longer block of text.

Performance with nowhere to dissipate heat

Inside works the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy — variant SM8850-1-AD with slightly boosted clock speeds, two Oryon V3 Phoenix L cores up to 4.47 GHz, six Phoenix M cores at 3.62 GHz, and Adreno 840 graphics. It is complemented by 12 GB RAM; sixteen gigabytes are only available with terabyte storage.

In Geekbench 6, the phone scored around 3,000–3,250 points in the single-core test and 8,000–9,000 points in the multi-core test. GSMArena measured significantly more (3,528 and 10,619 points, respectively), so the variance between units and conditions is evidently large here. However, for practical use, this is not very significant — in both cases, it’s the top of the Android world, and in normal operation, you have nothing to fault the phone for.

More interesting than the absolute numbers is what happens when you load it for a longer period. In 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, the performance dropped from the best run of around 5,100 points to just under 2,100, which is roughly 41%. The explanation is trivial: there’s nowhere to hide a vapor chamber in a 4.5-millimeter thick body. Physics doesn’t argue with marketing.

But before you write off the phone, here’s some context — even the Galaxy S26 Ultra drops to about half its performance under the same load. The difference is that the Fold8 heats up more during this, specifically on the back under the bottom edge of the camera module.

Battery finally stopped being an excuse

Foldables had a reputation for weak batteries for years, and Samsung played a big part in that. This year, it finally opted for a silicon-carbon battery, which means 4,800 mAh in a body smaller than last year’s Fold 7 with 4,400 mAh. The result is noticeable: in looped video playback, the phone lasted over 16 hours; in normal use, it can handle a full day, and with more moderate use, even a day and a half.

Charging remains at 45 W wired and 20 W wireless: 39% in fifteen minutes, 65% in half an hour, a full battery in approximately 69 minutes. The Oppo Find N6 with an 80W charger can do it in 46 minutes, so it’s not a record by any means. With this battery life, however, I didn’t mind — I looked for the charger once a day, not three times.

What bothers me much more are the magnets. The phone supports the Qi 2.2 standard, but without built-in magnets, you can only achieve a magnetic profile with a special case. Without it, you can’t snap the phone into a car mount or onto a power bank. And once you put on the case, you break the very balance that makes the Fold8 meaningful. Google managed it with Pixels, but Samsung stubbornly hasn’t. A small consolation is 4.5 W reverse wireless charging for headphones.

Two cameras for fifty thousand

The rear setup is simple: a 50Mpx main sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and optical stabilization, plus a 50Mpx ultrawide lens with f/1.9 and a 120° field of view, which can also focus, making it suitable for macro photography. There are two selfie cameras, both 10Mpx, one on the outer and one on the inner display. You won’t find a telephoto lens here — for that, you need to opt for the Ultra.

The cameras themselves work well. In recent years, Samsung has moved away from oversaturated colors, and images from the main sensor are balanced, with well-managed HDR, and usable even after dark. The 2x zoom, achieved by cropping from the fifty-megapixel chip, is close to optical quality. 4x zoom already softens, and 10x zoom is digital mush that’s not worth turning on.

The missing telephoto lens is a justifiable choice — it would add weight and thickness, precisely what the Fold8 aims to address. However, that justification is harder to find when you realize that for 48,990 CZK, you get two rear lenses, while many phones for a third of the price have three. What only a foldable can do helps somewhat: open the phone, switch the preview to the outer display, and take selfies with the main sensor. You’ll try it once for fun, and then you won’t take selfies any other way. Video handles 8K at 30 fps or 4K up to 120 fps, and dual recording from both sides at once is available, as well as super stabilization with horizon lock.

One UI 9: AI that doesn’t annoy

The Fold8 runs on Android 17 with the One UI 9 overlay, and Samsung promises seven years of system and security updates.

I expected the Galaxy AI suite to be the usual parade of features you try once and never turn on again. Some of them indeed are. My FanCam for automatic person tracking in video needs a well-lit and sufficiently large subject, otherwise, it refuses to work, and a manual mode is missing. Photo Assist’s natural language photo editing is nice, but existing apps can do that too.

More interesting is Gemini, which has moved towards agentic behavior and can plan a series of calendar entries based on a single sentence — asking for confirmation before proceeding. And then there are Gemini Notebooks, which turn a pile of recordings, photos, and notes into a clear structure. Task automation is currently limited to the USA, Britain, and Korea, so we’ll have to wait for it in the Czech Republic.

Samsung has expanded multitasking to three applications side-by-side; saved pairs can be flipped between horizontal and vertical layouts and pinned to the home screen. In practice, a reasonable limit is two applications horizontally — three already turn each window into a strip. DeX also remains, which can launch a full-fledged desktop environment on an external monitor via USB-C. This is still not a given with competitors.

Komu tenhle tvar nesedne

It’s not just about habit. Users who have spent years with classic Folds describe that they simply haven’t retrained themselves — the vertical inner display is better suited for long typing sessions and productive multitasking. When you hold the open Fold8 vertically, the keyboard takes up a large part of the screen, and you feel like you’re fighting with the display.

Add the speakers. Both sit on the same half of the body, one at the top and one at the bottom. The phone handles this when closed horizontally and open vertically, but in open landscape mode, any illusion of stereo separation falls apart. Moreover, the Fold8 plays quieter than the Fold7, which wasn’t a powerhouse to begin with.

And then there’s Flex mode, the ability to let the phone stand partially open like a mini-notebook. The Fold8 doesn’t have this, and it’s not a software limitation — the new stiffer hinge doesn’t hold intermediate positions, and the phone always snaps fully open or closed. If you typically prop your phone on a table for video calls or photos, this is a regression that’s better experienced in a store than read about in a review.

Don’t get your hopes up about the stylus even with the more expensive model. The S Pen is not supported by the Ultra this year either — Samsung removed the digitizer from the Fold7’s design due to thickness and hasn’t brought it back to any of this year’s models. VP HS Moon told reporters that the company is looking for a way to fit the stylus layer into a thinner body; he did not provide a timeline or commitment. Anyone who writes by hand on a foldable today is sticking with the Fold6. And they will be for a while.

How much it costs in the Czech Republic

The official price list is as follows: 256 GB / 12 GB RAM for 48,990 CZK, 512 GB / 12 GB for 53,990 CZK, and 1 TB / 16 GB for 63,990 CZK. At Alza, all variants are sold five thousand cheaper — 43,990, 48,990, and 58,990 CZK — and a trade-in bonus of 5,000 CZK for any older phone can be added. The real acquisition price for the basic version thus comes to around 39,000 CZK.

The most unpleasant comparison, however, lurks within its own stable. The Galaxy S26 Ultra with 256GB storage can be found at Czech retailers for around 22,000 CZK, roughly half the price of the Fold8. For that money, you get a 200Mpx main sensor, a telephoto lens, IP68, and 60W charging. The Fold8 Ultra then starts at 53,990 CZK — a five-thousand-crown difference between two such distinct phones only makes sense in a table, not in a customer’s decision-making.

Verdict: buying a form factor, not specs

The Galaxy Z Fold8 is the most interesting phone that has passed through my hands this year, and at the same time, the one for which it’s hardest to write a recommendation. On paper, it loses to devices half its price — two cameras, IP48, a forty-percent performance drop under load, no magnets, repairability 4/10. Practically, it’s the first time I’ve stopped thinking of a foldable as just a foldable.

Samsung has done something here that we don’t often see from major manufacturers: instead of adding features, it removed some and thereby gained a form factor that changes how you use the phone. You open it more often, read more on it, and video looks the way it should. And judging by how desperately the company is sourcing components to meet demand, it didn’t just hit the mark with reviewers.

If this is useful to you, the Fold8 is a great buy, and you won’t get anything better for the money. If you expect a complete feature set from a fifty-thousand-crown phone, buy the Ultra — or get a classic top model for half the price and keep the difference.

Editor’s rating: 91 / 100

Would you pay almost fifty thousand for the correct aspect ratio, or is that still too much for you?