Samsung is known for experimenting in public. Even the giant 6-inch-plus smartphones we carry around today can be traced back to the 2011 release of the Galaxy Note, which started out as an effort to push the boundaries of screen size but ultimately got merged into the mainstream Galaxy lineup.
More recently, Samsung has pioneered foldable phones, seemingly without much consideration as to whether they’re ready for prime time. The original Galaxy Fold launched with obvious flaws like a tiny outer screen and questionable durability, while the first Galaxy Z Flip felt a little more mature without offering much functionality beyond the flashy clamshell design.
This year, Samsung is launching a new foldable form factor competing directly against an existing one, setting up a fascinating A/B test of which one the public will go for. It also happens to be taking place as Apple looms with its long-awaited entry into the space.
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Power users
Confusingly, the truly new device is called simply the Galaxy Z Fold8, making it sound like a conventional entry in Samsung’s existing line of book-style foldables. Instead, that expected iterative update has been dubbed the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, positioning it as a product explicitly aimed at power users.
That probably makes a degree of sense, considering who was buying these still-niche devices up until now. But the Z Fold8 is potentially a more mainstream proposition. It has a wider, squatter outer display—roughly the size and dimensions of a passport—and folds out into a landscape 4:3 orientation, as opposed to the square-ish inner screen on the Ultra.
This instantly makes the Z Fold8 more appealing for regular tablet use. In fact, the 7.6-inch inner screen is very close in size and shape to the iPad mini’s, back in the days when it still had a home button. Compared with the Ultra, you lose less of the screen to black bars when watching video, and many Android apps work a lot more naturally in portrait orientation than they do on a square screen. The Z Fold8 feels like a perfect phone for content consumption while still slipping easily into a pocket.
Conversely, the Ultra remains the better device for uses like multitasking. With an outer screen closer in dimensions to a regular smartphone, the key advantage of the inner screen is that it can run two full-size phone apps side by side. Samsung has also made space for a more capable camera system that includes a telephoto lens, albeit the same unimpressive 10-megapixel 3x module that’s been hanging around its phones for far too many years.
The Z Fold 8 also has some quirks of its own. The location of the earpiece and bottom-firing speakers make sense when the phone is closed, but they’re all you get once the phone is unfolded, meaning audio comes out of only one side of the screen. The fingerprint reader also feels awkwardly placed when the phone is in tablet mode.
But these are fairly minor issues, and the initial response suggests that people have been won over by the Z Fold8. The Korean outlet ETNews reported that Samsung has ordered an extra million devices for its launch production run after the Z Fold8 accounted for around 70% of preorders for this latest foldable lineup. Part of that could be down to early adopters wanting to try something new, but coupled with near-universally positive reviews, it does feel like there’s a genuine level of excitement around this phone.
Something new
Samsung isn’t quite the first to try out a folding phone with a wider form factor. Earlier efforts from Oppo and Google opened out into landscape, though they were still squarer than Samsung’s latest. Huawei has also tried similar devices; its Pura X was kind of like a flip phone version of the Z Fold8, though it never made its way out of China. Overall, it feels fair to say that Samsung has hit on something new here.
And that bodes well for Apple, which—coincidentally or not—appears to have hit on the same idea. The company is widely expected to be launching its first folding phone next month, and all reports and leaks suggest that it’s taking a very similar widescreen approach to the Z Fold8.
The potential for Apple is obvious. Android has never managed to attain a strong ecosystem of software that has been designed explicitly for tablets, but Apple shouldn’t have too much trouble getting its legions of third-party developers to convert their iPad apps for a folding phone. It should also be a great device for pushing Apple’s increasingly impressive library of Apple TV+ content.
The folding iPhone inevitably won’t be a big seller at first. These are still niche, expensive devices, and that’s before you even take Apple’s recent round of iPhone price hikes into account. But there is a pathway to mainstream appeal here, and it looks like Samsung just drew up the blueprint.
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