Galaxy Z Fold 8 Review: Honeymoon's Over | Marques Brownlee

The Gist

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is a $1,900 foldable smartphone that feels amazing to hold and use daily, but its steep price, mediocre dual cameras, and app compatibility flaws ultimately make it a hard sell on paper.

Quick Overview

Samsung has built a genuinely new form factor with the Galaxy Z Fold 8, featuring a squatter 5.5-inch outer display and a pristine 4.3 inner display that make it feel like a thin notebook. Despite its lightweight feel, powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen Elite chip, and upgraded 45W charging, the phone suffers from a lack of flex mode, subpar stereo speaker balance, missing wireless charging alignment, and a stripped-down dual camera system lacking a telephoto lens.

Key Points: The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is priced at $1,900 and features a newly refined, thinner form factor. The outer display measures 5.5 inches diagonally with a slightly rectangular AMOLED panel and even bezels. The inner display expands to a 4.3 aspect ratio notebook style screen powered by Samsung's titanium flex hinge. Battery capacity sits at 4,800 milliamp hours with a maximum charging speed of 45 watts. The camera array is restricted to a 50 megapixel primary and a 50 megapixel ultrawide lens with no telephoto capability. Software runs on One UI 9 atop Android 17, bringing new responsive clock lock screens and volume sliders. App scaling and aspect ratio issues cause black bars or broken buttons in certain third party applications like Crossplay.

Context: Marques Brownlee reviews the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 after daily driving it for one week following its market release, evaluating whether its new hardware proportions justify the high cost compared to rival foldable phones.

Detailed Analysis

The honeymoon phase with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 wears off after a week of intensive testing, revealing both the brilliance of its new hardware execution and the frustrating compromises that come with it. The physical design hits all the right notes with its slim profile, squared off edges, and one-handed reachability on the outer screen. However, the pursuit of a lighter and thinner body forces hardware omissions, most notably the elimination of a telephoto camera and a flex mode hinge. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen Elite processor and faster 45W charging deliver great performance, software bugs, poor stereo speaker positioning during full screen video playback, and uneven third party app support mean the phone falls short of perfection for its $1,900 price tag.