Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra review

One UI 9.0 based on Android 17

The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra 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. This is the most generous update policy in the Android world besides Google.

Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra vs. Z Fold8

One UI 9.0 continues the trend that One UI 6.1 started a while ago by heavily focusing on AI features. But let's get the obvious and not-so-obvious bits out of the way first.

Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra multi-tasking

One UI is arguably the best software experience you can get on an Android phone. Split-screen features, UI elements and general foldable-related features are what make One UI so good. This year, for example, Samsung subtly changed the behavior of the screen rotation. For instance, if you were using an app in landscape orientation on your inner screen, switching to the cover screen will transfer the app in the same orientation and will remain locked that way at first.

Home screen • Recent apps

Additionally, the Now Nudge feature instantly switches to split-screen view when you, for example, decide to take action on a suggestion to add a calendar event. The calendar will appear on the other half of the screen, so you don't have to switch between apps.

Settings menu and Gemini AI

Small, but neat software tweaks make the foldable One UI experience much nicer.

When it comes to design and overall experience, there are no drastic changes compared to One UI 8.5 that debuted with the Galaxy S series. You can check out our comprehensive One UI 8.5 video review below for more context.

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 customizabl.

Notification shade • Quick toggles and controls

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.

Back to Now Nudge again, it 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.

Now Nudge

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.

Gemini Notebook

Gemini Notebook is just a clever way to leverage AI for taking notes. These notes, as a result, can be more complex. You can add sources like a photo, news reports, documents, voice notes, presentations, etc., and Gemini will sort them for you and answer questions based on the notes in your Notebook. You can even ask it to make relevant infographics. We have a strong suspicion that this feature will come to other Android 17 devices in the near future.

Benchmark performance

Like last year, the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra doesn't run on the regular flagship SoC from Qualcomm. It employs an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and Samsung calls it SD 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. The Galaxy S26 Ultra (and the S26 and S26+ in some regions) were the first and only phones to launch with the chipset, but that exclusivity has ended. The SM8850-1-AD SoC can now be found in other phones as well.

In any case, the  "AD" suffix indicates that the main 2x Oryon V3 Phoenix L cores are clocked at 4.74 GHz instead of 4.6 GHz. The rest of the 6x Oryon V3 Phoenix M cores remain at 3.62 GHz. The Adreno 840 GPU is also supposedly clocked higher. The AD version of the SoC should have its Adreno 840 clocked at 1300 MHz, as opposed to 1200 MHz on the vanilla AC version.

The available memory configurations are 12GB/256GB, 12GB/512GB, 16GB/512GB and 16GB/1TB. As evident from the scores Samsung is using very fast UFS storage, even if it doesn't confirm if they are UFS 4.0 or UFS 4.1.

Although the benchmarks show great performance from the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra + Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 duo, you probably don't want to push it too hard for too long. After running a few extensive benchmarks, we noticed that performance drops quickly, and we had to wait some time between runs to make sure the device had cooled off completely. The handset scores slightly lower than the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which features the same SoC, but manages to beat other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-powered phones that run on the regular SD 8 Elite Gen 5 version.

Sustained performance

As expected, the sustained performance is far from great. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra features a very powerful chipset, which in turn is crammed inside a very thin body (you can only use half, you see). This makes cooling the chipset a real challenge, and the CPU and GPU stress tests below show it.

CPU and GPU stress tests

Interestingly, the device itself didn't get all that hot; it was barely warm, actually. The only hot area was around the camera module where the chipset resides, but the rest of the body remained somewhat cool.