Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 review

One UI 9 on top of Android 17

One UI 9 is officially here, making its debut on the new Samsung foldables. Samsung kept its promise to deliver its latest popular custom UI on top of a fresh new Android 17 core. Veteran One UI users and even those returning from a break, even a relatively long one, should still feel right at home. There are no sweeping changes, mostly refinements. We personally feel like that is a plus, but we also get why some might not appreciate Samsung's approach of pretty heavily loading features on top of Android.

A thing to keep in mind is Samsung's industry-leading software support promise - the Z Fold8 comes with up to seven major OS updates in its future.

Now, as we said, nothing really major has changed about One UI. You can head on over to our comprehensive video overview of One UI 8.5 for a deeper dive, but beyond that, we think that most prospective Z Fold8 buyers will already have a pretty good general idea of what to expect UX-wise. So, we'll focus on what's new instead. Mind you, the list might not be complete, since we might have missed something smaller.

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 actions interface (which is now completely separate, by the way) appear to be a bit thicker and easier to use by default. They are also quite customizable.

General One UI 9

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.

One UI 9 Galaxy AI menu

An entirely new addition we noticed is the Warranty and Care menu in settings. It gathers 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.

New Warranty and Care menu

Everything is neatly organized into topics and sub-menus. Best we can tell, these are being pulled dynamically from some online source and are specific to your selected device. A couple of clicks in, you either end up with a list of actually mostly helpful steps to try to fix the problem yourself or, failing that, a single button to start a support chat. The system is set up in a way that incentivizes self-help first, and there is an AI assistant built-in as well. But, in 2026, even having the ability to click a few buttons and potentially even start a remote support session through a trusted platform right on the device you are trying to fix feels like a level of personal care and attention that we sadly lost somewhere long in our tech journey.

Most other additions we noticed are still within 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.

New Call brief feature

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.

Custom cards in Now Brief

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 in its new expanded state, enhanced 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.

New Bixby widgets

Since we are already looking at the home screen, the Google search bar seems is more anchored than before. Best we can tell, this has something to do with Android 17 itself, but you can no longer just long-press the search bar and move it or remove it. You can still remove it or "expand" it by having the local Finder bar next to it, but both of those things are done through the home settings menu for some reason. Making things more confusing still, the Google app also has its search widget that basically does the same thing, and it still behaves like a normal widget - draggable, adjustable and all those things. Weird.

Google search

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

Samsung Health has been completely overhauled with a brand new UI, celebrating the launch of Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2. Other apps like My Files and Reminder have seen smaller UI changes, but are in fact different.

Samsung Health • My Files • Reminder

My FanCam is a new addition in 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 video and re-crops frames so that the person stays centered. 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.

My FanCam

Finally, at least from the stuff we noticed, the Pro video capture mode in the camera app has gained access to a whole bunch of additional frame rate presets. This is great for creative freedom.

Pro video capture mode frame rates

Benchmarks and performance

The Z Fold8 might not be the true flagship offer on the revamped Z Fold lineup, but Samsung certainly didn't penalize it in the compute department. The new form factor, just like its established, now Ultra sibling, runs on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. And while it is true that said chip is a few months old at this point and bound for a next-gen replacement in a couple of months, these are kind of the realities of a modern foldable design and release cycle, so we can't reasonably be mad or anything.

In the CPU department, you are looking at an octa-core setup with two Oryon V3 Phoenix L cores, capable of whopping speeds up to 4.47 GHz. These are backed by six Oryon V3 Phoenix M cores, clocked at up to 3.62 GHz. The onboard GPU is an Adreno 840. Mind you, this is not your "ordinary" Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 either, but rather the SM8850-1-AD variant, also known as the "for Galaxy" flavor. This means slightly higher clocks on both the CPU and GPU. We just hope this new form factor manages to keep things cool enough under pressure.

The chipset is paired with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM pretty much across the board. A 16GB RAM variant with 1TB storage does exist, but it is hard to find and not exactly reasonable for most people with current memory prices as a whole. In any case, modern smartphone-tailored AI models seem to be happy with 12GB of RAM, and hopefully that remains true in the future as well. For storage, you can get 256GB, 512GB or the aforementioned 1TB. All are non-expandable. Samsung is using pretty fast (as per our testing) UFS storage chips, though we can't officially say whether these particular ones are UFS 4.0 or UFS 4.1.

Let's look at some actual performance numbers starting with GeekBench 6. For some reason, the Z Fold8 is a bit inconsistent in its multi-core scores in particular, even though we make sure to let the phone cool down between runs. The single-core numbers are a lot more consistent. Anyway, comparing it to the likes of the Galaxy S26 Ultra, we can see very similar output, but just a tad lower. We made sure to throw a few on the popular chipsets in the chart as well, mainly for reference.

This overall trend carries over to AnTuTu testing as well. That is to say that the Z Fold8 is putting out very formidable performance numbers, but not quite maximizing the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy's potential. And the same is generally true of 3DMark and its GPU testing too.

Thermal-throttling

Looking at the benchmark figures as a whole, we can kind of assume that the Z Fold8 is less aggressively tuned for performance even though on paper the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 inside it appears to be operating at its "boosted" Samsung-exclusive clocks. We suspect the reason is this is a tough form factor to properly cool. After running some torture tests, it quickly became clear that under prolonged loads the Z Fold8 can lose around half of its initial burst performance. This sounds pretty bad, and we've certainly seen better behavior, but then again, even the S26 Ultra throttles to about 50% under the same load, so we can't expect miracles here.

Naturally, thermal behavior is a bit better when the phone is unfolded.

Thermal throttling

Thermal throttling

That said, the Z Fold8 does get notably hotter to the touch than the S26 Ultra. Specifically, the area on its back right underneath the inside bottom edge of the camera island where the chipset most likely resides. To be fair, our review unit never actually got uncomfortable to hold.