Samsung reshuffles its foldable lineup with Fold 8, Fold 8 Ultra and Flip 8📱

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Samsung touched down in London this Wednesday for its summer Unpacked — its first major UK launch in fourteen years — and unveiled three new foldables at once. But somewhere between the applause and the spec sheets, a question kept coming up in the room and across newsrooms worldwide: which of these three phones is actually the successor to last year’s Z Fold7? This time, the naming plays tricks on you. Here’s the untangled version.

Z Fold8 Ultra: the real successor, under a new banner 📖

Let’s clear up the confusion you probably already sensed: the Z Fold8 Ultra isn’t a premium spin on some new device. According to Samsung, it’s the direct successor to the Z Fold7 — the one that keeps the narrow, tall « book » shape the company has refined since 2021. What’s new is the « Ultra » label itself, borrowed from the S series, making its first-ever appearance on a foldable.

Samsung isn’t hiding it: the Ultra is where all the meaningful upgrades land. A display less marked by the crease, a reinforced hinge, optimized battery life, and a camera system that takes a real step forward. The result leans closer to a premium tablet experience, with smooth multitasking and software tuned to make the most of that large screen.

On paper, this is a productivity machine. Unfolded, it packs an 8-inch main display alongside a 6.5-inch, 21:9 cover screen. Samsung calls it the thinnest Z Fold yet — 4.1mm unfolded, at 215 grams. The new « Flex Titanium » panel is meant to make the center crease nearly invisible while holding up better over time.

Under the hood, it’s running a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip and a 5,000mAh silicon-carbon battery — the largest ever in a Z Fold. The camera system follows suit: a 200MP main sensor, a 50MP ultrawide, and a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom.

Compared to the Fold7, the changes are real but targeted: better durability, a slimmer build, a bigger battery, and deeper AI baked into everyday tasks. It ships in White, Graphite, and Violet Shadow, with a Green Shadow option exclusive to Samsung’s online store. In France, pricing starts at €2,199 for 256GB, climbing to €2,399 for 512GB and €2,799 for 1TB — already above the €2,099 the Fold7 launched at last year.

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Z Fold8: a genuinely new shape shakes things up 🆕

Samsung is introducing a new format here, full stop. The Z Fold8 isn’t a direct replacement for the Fold7 — it’s a different bet altogether: more compact, more approachable, but also more upfront about its trade-offs, starting with a scaled-back camera.

In practice, this Fold8 is smaller, lighter, and noticeably easier to handle day to day. It sits somewhere between a regular phone and a mini-tablet, rather than chasing the immersive, oversized feel of earlier generations. Folded, it measures 123.9 x 81.9 x 9.7mm — considerably wider than the 72-75mm typical of book-style foldables. Unfolded, the 7.6-inch display runs a 4:3 ratio in landscape, built more for video and social content than raw productivity. The cover screen grows to 5.5 inches at a 10:16 ratio — far more usable for reading or browsing without unfolding the phone at all.

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At 201 grams, Samsung calls it the lightest Z Fold ever made. It shares the Ultra’s chipset and runs a 4,800mAh silicon-carbon battery, rated for more than 26 hours of video playback. The camera setup stays modest by comparison: a 50MP wide sensor and a 12MP ultrawide, with no dedicated telephoto.

This shape isn’t a first for the industry — Google, Oppo, and Huawei have all tried it — but it is a first for Samsung in Europe, and the timing looks deliberate: a direct answer to Apple’s rumored foldable iPhone, expected this fall. Design-wise, Samsung plays it safe with a restrained, premium color lineup: White, Graphite, Lavender, and an online-exclusive Pistachio. Preorders are open now, with shipping starting August 7 — making this Fold8 a plausible entry point for anyone who’s been on the fence about foldables, provided they can stomach the price: €1,999 (256GB), €2,199 (512GB), and €2,399 (1TB).

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Z Flip8: the family’s quiet, sensible update 🤳

Next to its two larger siblings, the Z Flip8 keeps a low profile. It’s thinner and lighter than the Z Flip7 (180 grams, 6.1mm unfolded, per Samsung), but it skips both the silicon-carbon battery and the Flex Titanium panel reserved for the Folds. The camera system is carried over unchanged too, with a 50MP main sensor and a 12MP ultrawide. The design evolves in small increments — sturdier build, sharper finishes — and it fully leans into being a lifestyle phone without giving up on performance.

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Most of what’s new here lives in software, centered on a more customizable FlexWindow, the phone’s cover screen. The new Now Brief widget surfaces weather, your schedule, and notifications at a glance, no unfolding required. On the video side, Camcorder Grip makes one-handed shooting steadier, and Dual Recording captures both the person holding the phone and whatever they’re filming at once — built for vlogging.

The Z Flip8 comes in White, Graphite, Pink, and an online-exclusive Mint, starting at €1,299 (256GB) and €1,499 (512GB).

© Samsung

One UI 9: AI that anticipates you, and Android finally talks to iOS 🧠

Beyond the hardware, One UI 9 is where most of the real innovation lives. AI shows up everywhere: contextual suggestions, performance tuning, writing assistance, smarter photo processing. Samsung’s stated goal is an experience that feels fluid, intuitive, almost invisible.

The centerpiece is what Samsung calls « agentic » AI — software built to anticipate what you need rather than wait for a command. Now Nudge is the clearest example: if dinner plans land in a messaging app, it offers to open your calendar in multi-window mode so you can add them on the spot. Samsung also demoed something more ambitious: share a photo of the Eiffel Tower with Gemini, ask it to book a nearby hotel, and the AI searches for matching options while you keep using your phone — you just review and approve.

But the feature that will probably matter more to your actual day-to-day than any of these demos is a lot less flashy. Quick Share now works with AirDrop: in a friend group split between Android and iPhone, sending photos or files should finally stop being a headache regardless of which device is on the other end. Samsung says this cross-platform support rolls out starting July 2026 across the S26 line and all three new foldables.

Smart Switch got an update too — a small detail that changes a lot the next time you switch phones. Anyone moving from iPhone to Galaxy can now just scan a QR code on their existing iPhone, no third-party app required: accounts, passwords, passkeys, and eSIM data transfer wirelessly.

What does this actually mean for a reader in Yaoundé or Douala? 🌍

Let’s be honest: at these prices, none of these three phones will be an everyday purchase for most of TechGriot’s readership. Converted for reference only, the cheapest option — the €1,299 Z Flip8 — works out to roughly 850,000 FCFA, while the top-tier Z Fold8 Ultra clears 1.8 million FCFA. Foldables remain, here as everywhere, a niche category, typically reaching Cameroon through imports, diaspora connections, or a handful of specialized retailers — Samsung, as far as we can tell, hasn’t announced official distribution of this lineup in the country.

Still, some of what got announced today reaches beyond the price tag. Quick Share finally working with AirDrop speaks directly to a very local reality: families and friend groups mixing iPhones and Android phones, who’ve long struggled with the simple act of sending a photo across the divide. The same goes for the promise of a faster phone-to-phone transfer via QR code — a relief to anyone who’s ever had to switch phones in a hurry, without reliable Wi-Fi or the patience for a stubborn USB cable. Even the most expensive tech in the world keeps seeding ideas that eventually trickle down to more affordable phones.

Foldables are growing up, but the price tag hasn’t budged 🔮

By introducing the « Ultra » label on its foldables, Samsung is formalizing a split that already existed in practice: a productivity-first device for professionals willing to pay for it, and a more mainstream-leaning new shape built around content and ease of use. Six years after foldables first stumbled onto the market, the category is starting to segment itself like any other smartphone line — a sign, ironically, that it’s maturing.

The price question, though, still has no satisfying answer for most of the world, Cameroon included. As long as these devices sit several hundred thousand FCFA above a solid conventional smartphone, foldables will stay closer to an object of desire than a rational purchase. Real democratization is more likely to arrive elsewhere — through software features like cross-platform sharing, the kind that always end up trickling down to more affordable phones eventually.

So, would a foldable actually tempt you, or is the price still a dealbreaker? Let us know in the comments 👇