Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 First Impressions: For months now, the rumour mill has been buzzing about Apple working on its first foldable. Not just any foldable, but a smaller, more pocket-friendly one that's said to make foldables feel less bulky and more everyday-friendly. Well, Apple may still be working on it. Samsung, on the other hand, has gone ahead and launched one already.
After spending some time with the Galaxy Z Fold 8, I genuinely think Samsung may have beaten Apple to a trend it was expected to define. The more time I spent with the phone, the more I fell in love with it. It's compact without feeling cramped, powerful without trying too hard, and somehow makes carrying a foldable feel... normal.
Samsung has completely reimagined what a Fold can be. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 sports a 5.5-inch cover display that unfolds into a 7.6-inch inner screen, but the real story isn't the numbers. It's the size.
At just 201g, the Fold 8 feels incredibly light in the hand. It's slim, easy to grip and slips into your pocket without constantly reminding you you're carrying a foldable. Yes, it's ever so slightly thicker than the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, but unless you have both devices side by side, you'd be hard-pressed to notice.
I expected to spend my hands-on multitasking on the new Fold 8. Instead, I found myself opening articles, browsing websites and imagining reading entire books on it.
The inner display's 3:4 portrait aspect ratio feels tailor-made for reading. News articles look spacious, e-books feel almost like reading a paperback, and PDFs no longer require endless zooming and scrolling.
Switch to landscape, and the display transforms into a clean 4:3 canvas that's brilliant for Netflix, YouTube and Prime Video. Videos feel immersive without awkward black bars dominating the experience.
Samsung has also equipped the Fold 8 with a 3,000-nit peak brightness display and an anti-reflective coating, making it one of the most comfortable foldable screens I've used under bright lighting. Honestly, I can't wait to curl up with this and finish an entire novel.
The Fold 8 doesn't miss out on Samsung's biggest display innovation either. Like its Ultra sibling, it gets the new Flex Titanium display structure, designed to make the folding display stronger while reducing crease visibility.
Samsung says the titanium-based layers beneath the OLED panel offer significantly greater rigidity than previous materials while remaining incredibly thin. The result is a display that feels more solid when fully unfolded, with a crease that's noticeably less distracting during everyday use.
No, it hasn't disappeared completely. But for the first time, I stopped thinking about it after a few minutes. And that's probably the bigger achievement.
Samsung has also added a genuinely fun AI camera feature called My Fan Cam. Simply pick a person in your frame, and the AI automatically tracks them while intelligently reframing the shot as they move around.
Whether you're filming your child during a school performance, your favourite singer at a concert or a cricketer smashing sixes, the camera keeps your chosen subject front and centre without you having to constantly pan or adjust your framing. It's one of those AI additions that actually solves a problem instead of creating one.
The camera hardware itself is solid too, featuring 50MP wide and ultra-wide sensors, 10MP selfie cameras on both the cover and inner displays, along with support for 8K video recording.
Powering everything is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, the same flagship chipset found across Samsung's premium lineup. Keeping it running is a 4,800mAh battery with 45W wired fast charging, which should comfortably last through a full day, though we'll save our final verdict until we've completed our battery tests.
Performance during my brief hands-on felt exactly as you'd expect from a modern Samsung flagship: fast, fluid and effortless.
Foldables have spent years trying to become thinner, lighter and more practical. Ironically, it took Samsung making one smaller for everything to finally click.
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 isn't trying to outdo the Ultra. It isn't trying to be the biggest foldable on the market. Instead, it focuses on something arguably more important: being a foldable you'd actually want to carry every single day.
And here's the interesting bit: If the rumours are true, Apple has been working on a compact foldable of its own. But by the time Cupertino finally enters the category in September (as expected), Samsung won't just have arrived first, it will already have a serious head start. So, sorry, Apple. Samsung won this race.
