I have used my fair share of foldable phones over the years, but the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 might be the first one that feels as though it has settled on the right size.
Not the largest screen, mind you, nor the most powerful camera system in Samsung’s new foldable range. Those honours belong to the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, which is the more direct successor to last year’s Galaxy Z Fold7. Instead, the regular Fold8 goes in a different direction. It is shorter, wider and considerably more compact, with a 5.5-inch cover display that opens into a 7.6-inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio. It weighs 201g, too, making it lighter than many large conventional flagship phones, never mind most book-style foldables.
And after spending the weekend with it, I think this is now my favourite size and shape for a foldable phone.
The Z Fold8 makes a great case for the right size of a foldable phone
Photo: HWZ
To be clear, Samsung did not invent this passport-style form factor. Oppo explored something similar with the original Find N and Find N2, while Google’s first Pixel Fold also used a shorter and wider body instead of following Samsung’s previously tall and narrow approach. Huawei has experimented with wider foldables as well. In that sense, the Fold8 is not introducing an entirely new idea. Other manufacturers got there years earlier, and some of those phones were genuinely pleasant to use.
The problem was that those designs might have been slightly ahead of their time. When the original Galaxy Fold arrived in 2019, foldable phones were still treated as technological curiosities. People were worried about fragile displays, visible creases, complicated hinges and whether Android apps would behave properly when moving between two very different screen sizes. And rightly so, for such a drastically different phone size and form. A compact book-style phone certainly made sense too, but early adopters were still trying to understand why they needed a folding screen in the first place.
Seven years later, and I think that conversation has changed. Foldable phones are no longer unfamiliar or treated as halo products, even if they remain expensive. We have become accustomed to the idea that a phone can open into a small tablet, and manufacturers have had several generations to improve their hinges, displays and software. The Fold8 therefore arrives at a much better time for this particular shape. It does not need to convince us that foldables can work – we already know they do. It merely needs to show that a foldable does not have to be enormous to be useful.
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