When a company teases its upcoming products so heavily — the Galaxy Z Fold 8 was the star of a Spider-Man: Brand New Day commercial a full week before today’s Samsung Unpacked, for heaven’s sake — it can feel underwhelming when it’s actually revealed.
But knowing that Samsung was going to announce a trio of new foldable phones and a pair of updated watches isn’t the same as discovering interesting details about them. Now that the products are officially official, here’s what stands out to me.
Another aspect (ratio) on foldables: The Z Fold 8 ‘Wide’
Squint just a bit and most phones look like interchangeable rectangular slabs. Nearly every mobile phone is modeled after handsets that needed to position the speaker at your ear and the microphone at your mouth. Companies have stuck with the same basic design because that’s what people are familiar with.
The Z Fold 8, with its squat folded size and 4:3 aspect ratio when opened, invites you to think about using a phone from another angle. The traditional tall screen of most slab designs has locked us into an infinite-scroll, squeezed-video existence that crushes us from both sides.
OK, that was too dramatic. A narrow phone fits well in your hand.
But there’s room for more phone variety. As CNET Senior Technology Reporter Abrar Al-Heeti wrote in her hands-on article, “the Z Fold 8 feels equally optimized for watching horizontal videos or multitasking in landscape mode, and browsing vertically oriented apps in portrait mode.”
To be fair, taking on a predominantly wide orientation invites risk… think back to the Planet Computers Gemini PDA built wide to accommodate a physical keyboard, or the quirky LG Wing. But bending the design into a foldable phone hopefully gives the best of both orientations.
The format isn’t entirely new: The iPad also has the same 4:3 aspect ratio (when used horizontally), as does Samsung’s Galaxy Z TriFold when fully opened. But those are very different devices.
If the design is embraced, Apple might see it as validation for its rumored iPhone Ultra foldable, which may have similar dimensions.
The new, revised foldables: Z Fold 8 Ultra and Z Flip 8
Does it really count if my “favorite” things include almost every new announced product? Yes, because as always with phones, details matter. And there are some details of the other two foldables that stand out.
For example, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra strongly resembles last year’s Z Fold 7, just with an upgraded Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, a 5,000-mAh battery and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera.
But look at that crease between panels. No, really, look closely, because – at least from the presentation and early looks by my fellow CNET writers – Samsung has minimized the crease to the point where it’s almost invisible (likely thanks in part to the phones’ new titanium flex hinge). The Z Fold 8 Ultra could be the foldable that doesn’t pop an asterisk in your mind each time you open it, thinking, “It’s not that noticeable, really.”
One big way Samsung has improved the Z Fold 8 Ultra is by reducing the crease, as seen in this comparison with last year’s Z Fold 7.
Samsung
When we’re talking about a device that you’ll open dozens of times a day, that type of improvement makes a huge difference.
In the same vein, the Z Flip 8 follows on from the Z Flip 7 but is “noticeably lighter and thinner than prior iterations,” writes CNET Senior Editor Mike Sorrentino. It’s also using the cover screen better, letting you switch apps quickly, for example, so you don’t need to open the phone to do anything meaningful.
A watch that’s meant to be used: Galaxy Watch Ultra 2
I’m not a runner, but living in the Pacific Northwest, I know that a perfectly level run is rare. Navigating hills can make a huge difference in how much effort is expended during a run.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2‘s trail-running feature looks like a good way to bring more of the real world into all the exercise data captured by a smartwatch. In her testing with the watch before the announcement, CNET Principal Writer Vanessa Hand Orellana noted that getting terrain information into the watch — by importing a GPX geotrack file — was an awkward process, but that data should be available later via Google Maps.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 also has a hydration reminder feature, which seems perfectly paired with exercise. But she noted that the reminders pop up based on algorithmic prediction, not on any sensors monitoring sweat or salinity.
I’m shocked – shocked! – to learn that AI is happening in here
We can’t have product demos without AI features these days. Samsung showed off agentic features such as Now Nudge and the new Gemini Notebook app, which are quickly becoming table stakes for AI software. The phones will include six months of a Google AI Pro subscription.
But there are also some creative ideas at play. My FanCam lets you single out a person in a video and keep the focus on them, no matter where they move in the frame. The example shown was a stage full of dancers that focused on one woman, with the video cropped to a tall phone-friendly ratio. If grandparents have a hard time spotting which kid on stage is theirs, this feature could rapidly prove its worth.
It’s a neat use of AI that doesn’t involve generating imagery that was never in the content to begin with. As my colleagues have pointed out, however, cropping that tight is bound to degrade the overall quality of the footage, so My FanCam might just become an it’s-good-enough-for-social-media feature.
The running coach on the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is much improved, according to Orellana, hopefully making it more than just a friendly booster chiming your greatness in your earbuds at regular intervals.
Silicon-carbon batteries are coming for better battery life
What do people really want in their phones? Longer battery life. That’s even more important with foldable phones with three power-sucking screens. So it was great to see Samsung incorporate silicon-carbon battery technology into its new phones.
There was an audible “whoa” in the crowd at the event venue when the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra’s silicon-carbon battery was highlighted. For example, Samsung promises the Z Fold 8 Ultra can get 27 hours of video playback, and the Z Fold 8 can get 28 hours.
The Galaxy watches do not use silicon-carbon batteries, but the Galaxy Ultra 2’s battery is 35% larger to give up to 60 hours of use on a single charge.
Plus a pricey, not-so-favorite thing
New products compel us to look at new features, but we can’t ignore the biggest change that might determine whether you decide to buy one of Samsung’s new devices: price increases. The base Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra each cost $100 more than their predecessors, no doubt due in part to increased component costs worldwide thanks to “RAMageddon.” The Z Fold 8 actually costs $100 less than the Z Fold 7, but that’s still $1,900 for a mobile phone.
Everything is expensive, and Samsung and other companies are building products that use some of the world’s most precious materials. But that means little if the pool of people able and willing to buy them shrinks so much that they can’t sell enough devices. It’s all the more galling when a flush company like Apple hikes prices across most of its products to seemingly protect its already high profit margins.
Still, this is the technology world we’re in, and I can’t discount that for many people, a wide foldable phone like the Z Fold 8 is exactly what they’re looking (and maybe saving up) for.
See full bio
Read the full article here
