Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 review

Android 17 with One UI 9

The Galaxy Z Flip8 boots the latest Android 17 out of the box, garnished with Samsung's own take on the Android experience - One UI 9.0. You can expect 7 major OS updates and security patches - the same excellent commitment Samsung flagships have enjoyed for a while now.

Overall, nothing really major has changed about One UI, as you will see in our One UI 9.0 video below, which lists most of the new features you can expect to see here. You can head on over to our comprehensive video overview of One UI 8.5 for a deeper dive.

Starting with the overall UI, it all looks very familiar, but just a bit "tidier" and "cleaned up" here and there. For example, the brightness and volume sliders in the Quick Toggles pane appear to be a bit thicker and easier to use by default. They are also quite customizable; you can even have them placed vertically.

Home screen • Recent apps • Apps

Notification shade • Quick toggles and controls • Settings

Multi-tasking is available - you can use split-screen or pop-up window, or even all three of them at once.

Multi-tasking

You might remember how the Galaxy AI menu had extensive text descriptions attached to every item, which made things a bit overwhelming at first glance. Those are now gone, with any additional text relegated to the bottom of the menu. It's small touches of polish like that.

An entirely new addition we noticed is the Warranty and Care menu in settings. It is very convenient. What it does is gather all of the Samsung devices logged under your account into one hub. From here you can view some info, including warranty and quickly try to fix issues and troubleshoot things.

Warranty and service menu

Now let's talk Galaxy AI. Call Assist isn't new, but it only used to have Call screening and Live translate. Now there is a Call brief option. If you opt in, it listens to your calls carefully, and if it picks up on any information it potentially has relevant details on, like you start discussing an event that happens to be in your calendar, it will automatically pop up the info right in your active call screen.

Call briefing

Speaking of "briefings", Samsung's Now Brief - the already highly-customizable feed has gotten even more personal with the addition of custom cards. These are AI-powered, which is probably why the system currently limits you to only three at a time, and there are also some limitations on how often you can create and edit prompts for the cards.

Now Brief customizable cards

Currently, the feature has its "sources" organized in three categories - Weather, Health and Videos. These broadly determine where the data will be pulled from. Some sources might require additional permissions to communicate with third-party apps like YouTube. We were able to very effortlessly create a tailored feed of GSMArena YouTube videos only related to Samsung. It's a pretty good idea, especially if it grows in scope.

Bixby, now featuring with Perplexity access, has new widgets. These are mostly meant to offer quick access to voice prompts as well as chat history and act a lot like Gemini's similar interfaces.

Driving report seems to be something new we haven't seen before. It is curated in the Connected devices menu. What it promises is to log all of your car trips and various telematics automatically. All you have to do is select your car's Bluetooth connection so it can identify it and, of course, give the app a lot of permissions.

Driving report

My FanCam is a new addition to the Galaxy AI roster. It is an AI-backed auto-framing and zooming video editor. It works on any video (seems to require HEVC encoding), not just the ones captured by the phone, which is great. You just select a person (it has to be a person as far as we can tell) and then the AI analyzes the following video frames and re-crops things so that the person stays in frame. It is even smart enough to recognize events like a ball being thrown and going inside a hoop so it can follow that action as well. It works surprisingly well.

Now Nudge can now be found in more scenarios than just your keyboard while typing. You will find it hovering over your chat in the bottom-right corner or offering quick access to an app right from the notification card.

Advanced Automation helps you do stuff without leaving the app you are using. Samsung calls it that because you can simply ask the AI to look for relevant bookings while looking at a nice photo on Instagram. Gemini AI will understand which place on the screen is being shown and will suggest bookings for that area.

Now, the Z Flip8 has the same cover screen as the Z Flip7. It's still a widget-based interface with, admittedly, plenty of capabilities when it comes to operating basics like weather and calendar, there's good notification handling and the ubiquitous Gemini assistant can be summoned without opening the phone.

Cover screen

Plenty of apps are supported on the cover screen, if not all. But not all of them are optimized for this ratio and resolution. We guess you have to find which one looks good the hard way - by trial and error.

"Apps" on the cover screen

Finally, you can also set optimized widgets and homescreens on the cover screen.

Widgets

Performance and benchmarks

The Galaxy Z Flip8 is the only new Samsung foldable to feature different chipsets depending on the region, similar to the Galaxy S26, for instance.

The Galaxy Z Flip8 utilizes the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy in the US, Canada, and China, and the Exynos 2600 chipset in the rest of the world (including our review unit).

The Exynos 2600 is a top of the line chip manufactured on a 2nm process and designed with a strong focus on accelerating AI workloads while improving efficiency.

The chipset relies on the latest ARM CPU architecture and adopts an interesting 10-core configuration (1x3.80GHz C1-Ultra & 3x3.25GHz C1-Pro & 6x2.75GHz C1-Pro). Instead of the traditional big-middle-little cluster arrangement, Samsung replaces the small efficiency cores with mid-tier cores, aiming to deliver better sustained performance while maintaining high efficiency for lighter tasks. According to Samsung, the new CPU delivers up to 39% higher computing performance compared to its Exynos 2500 predecessor (Z Flip7).

Xclipse 960 is the GPU, which promises a major leap forward as well. Samsung claims up to up to 39% computing performance, along with as much as 50% better ray tracing performance compared to the Exynos 2500.

AI processing is handled by a significantly upgraded NPU, which Samsung claims offers up to 113% higher AI performance.

The Z Flip8 base configuration now starts at 12GB/256GB, while 12GB/512GB option is available, too. The storage uses UFS4 chips.

The Galaxy Z Flip8 may be using one of the most powerful chips on the market, but it has been severely limited by its foldable design and lack of proper heat dissipation and cooling. Even in quick benchmarks that last less than 5 minutes, you can see it is trailing behind similar phones like the S26.

Overall, the Galaxy Z Flip8 features one of the most powerful mobile platforms right now, but it will never utilize its full potential.

And this is quite obvious on the stress tests, where the CPU has lost more than 50% of its power in less than 5 mins. The GPU situation is even worse, with about 65% performance loss after the first 3-5 mins.

CPU test • GPU test

This poor thermal performance raises the question of whether it was even worth putting a flagship chipset in such a thermally constrained design. The Exynos 2600 certainly appears handicapped inside the Flip8. It still provides great burst performance, AI capabilities and connectivity, though, so this approach isn't without its benefits.