Galaxy Z Fold8 or Fold8 Ultra: Samsung Sold Two Different Phones Under One Name
Buy the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra at £1,899. The two phones share a name, but they are not the same shape and they are not the same camera. The cheaper £1,699 Fold8 folds into a short, wide slab, gives you a 5.5in cover screen and has no zoom lens at all. The Ultra folds like a normal phone, keeps the 200MP main camera and a 3x telephoto, and holds a bigger battery. Same chip, same storage tiers, two genuinely different phones. That extra £200 buys more than any other £200 in Samsung's range right now.
Pick the one that matches how you actually hold a phone:
- You want the bestFold8 Ultra, £1,899. An 8in inner screen, 200MP main camera, 3x zoom and a 5,000mAh battery.
- You want it lighterFold8, £1,699. It is 201g against 215g, and closed it sits wide in your palm instead of tall.
- You take a lot of photosThe Ultra, no hesitation. The standard Fold8 has no telephoto lens, so zoom is a crop.
- You already own a Fold7Sit this year out. Owners on the Fold forums are close to unanimous, and the trade-in maths agrees with them.
- You just want a big SamsungA regular Galaxy S26+ covers most of it for a lot less. We stock that one. We do not stock foldables.
The strange part is that Samsung did not simply give the cheaper phone cheaper parts. It gave it a different body. Everything about this choice follows from that, so it is worth two minutes before you tap pre-order.
Samsung split the Fold in two
Until this year the Galaxy Z Fold was one phone. You picked a storage size and that was the whole decision. On 22 July Samsung announced two: the Galaxy Z Fold8 at £1,699 and the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra at £1,899.
Most people assume the Ultra is just the same phone with more storage. It is not. The cheaper Fold8 has a different body. Unfolded it is 161.4mm across and 123.9mm tall, which means it is wider than it is tall. The Ultra is 158.4mm by 143.2mm, the tall shape every Fold has had since 2019.
Fold the two shut and the difference is obvious. The Fold8 becomes a squat 81.9mm by 123.9mm block. The Ultra becomes 158.4mm by 72.8mm, which is the footprint of an ordinary phone. One owner on the Fold forums already calls the wide one the short king, and a separate thread lines it up next to an iPad mini.
So this is not a good, better, best ladder. It is two answers to the question of what a folding phone should feel like when it is closed, sold under one name at £200 apart. Samsung’s own naming does very little to warn you.
The shapes, in millimetres
Numbers make this clearer than any marketing page. Every figure below comes from the two official spec sheets.
| Galaxy Z Fold8 | Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra | |
|---|---|---|
| UK price from | £1,699 | £1,899 |
| Inner screen | 7.6in, 4:3 | 8.0in |
| Cover screen | 5.5in | 6.5in |
| Folded | 81.9 x 123.9 x 9.7mm | 158.4 x 72.8 x 8.9mm |
| Unfolded thickness | 4.5mm | 4.1mm |
| Weight | 201g | 215g |
| Main camera | 50MP, f/1.8 | 200MP, f/1.7 |
| Telephoto | None | 10MP, 3x |
| Ultrawide | 50MP, f/1.9 | 50MP, f/1.9 |
| Battery | 4,800mAh | 5,000mAh |
| Wired charging | 45W | 45W |
| Chip | Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 | Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 |
| S Pen | No | No |
Read down that table and the £200 stops looking like a premium. It is a bigger inner screen, a full size cover screen, four times the main camera resolution, a zoom lens the other phone does not have, and 200mAh more battery. You pay for it in 14g of weight and 0.4mm of thickness. A £200 step that lopsided is unusual in any phone range.
The cover screen nobody mentions
Reviews lead with the inner screen because it photographs well. The screen you will actually use most is the outside one, and that is where these two phones separate hardest.
The Ultra has a 6.5in cover screen at 1080 x 2520. That is a normal phone. You can answer a message, reply to an email or scroll a feed without ever opening it.
The Fold8’s cover screen is 5.5in at 1248 x 1972. Because the body is wide and short, that screen is wide and short too. It is not a small phone screen, it is a differently shaped one.
Owners are warmer about that than you might expect. In the r/GalaxyFold thread about the Fold8’s keyboard, the comparison that keeps coming up is the BlackBerry Passport, and more than one person means it as a compliment. Others point out the keyboard is resizable, so typing bothers them less after seeing it used in person, and one owner said video on the outside screen looks better than on their Fold7.
The sharpest point in that thread came from someone talking themselves out of it. Part of why they liked a folding phone in the first place was that the outer screen was easy to use one handed, unlike the iPhone Pro Max they had come from. A wide cover screen takes that back. That trade never appears on a spec sheet, so handle both before you decide.
The camera gap is the real gap
Here is the part Samsung’s comparison page glosses over. The Galaxy Z Fold8 has two rear cameras: a 50MP main and a 50MP ultrawide. There is no telephoto. Zoom on that phone is a digital crop of the main sensor.
The Fold8 Ultra has three: a 200MP f/1.7 main, a 10MP 3x telephoto and a 50MP ultrawide.
That also means the cheaper Fold8 is a step backwards from the phone it replaces. The Fold7 had a 200MP main and three lenses. Anyone upgrading from a Fold7 to a standard Fold8 is paying £1,699 to lose camera hardware, and the forums noticed within hours. One post titled itself around exactly that trade, camera downgrade against form factor, and drew 257 replies.
Fold owners are not uniformly upset about it. The most repeated counter argument is that three lenses is one more than most people use, and that a 10MP telephoto was never much of a zoom anyway. That is a fair point. Just make it knowingly rather than discovering it after delivery.
Still no S Pen, and now we know why
Neither the Fold8 nor the Fold8 Ultra takes an S Pen. Samsung dropped stylus support with the Fold7 and has not brought it back.
The reason is a layer called the digitizer. It is the extra sheet under the display that senses pressure and rejects your palm, and it adds thickness. To get a folding phone down to 4.1mm unfolded, Samsung took it out. No digitizer means no S Pen, on either model, at any price.
Samsung executive vice president HS Moon has said the S Pen could return on a future Fold. For now, if writing on your phone is part of your job, the folding line is not for you. A Galaxy S26 Ultra still keeps a pen inside the body and hands-on comparisons put it at roughly the same weight as the Fold8 Ultra. That comparison is doing a lot of quiet work in Samsung’s own lineup.
What Fold owners are actually saying
We read the first week of r/GalaxyFold rather than the review embargo posts, because the people arguing there have already owned three or four of these phones. A few things came up again and again.
The price landed badly. The thread titled around the Ultra’s $2,100 US starting price pulled 734 replies. The mood was not outrage at Samsung so much as tiredness.
Pre-order deals look thinner this year. An owner who bought the Fold7 on launch day said the discounts and freebies are noticeably worse this time, and is keeping the 7 because of it. Another reply offered a reason: margins are probably too tight now for the promotions Samsung used to run.
The community’s own advice is to wait. The most upvoted financial take is that Folds always fall. Multiple owners said they buy six months after launch and routinely save $500 or more. Others pointed out that Samsung trade-in values hold for roughly two years then drop, so upgrading every second or third generation costs far less per year than upgrading annually.
Opinion on the wide body is genuinely split. There is a thread defending it and a thread calling it a gimmick, both with hundreds of comments, and a separate one complaining that criticism gets removed elsewhere. That is not a phone with a consensus yet.
None of this appears on a spec sheet, and it is more useful than most of the launch coverage.
Coming from a Fold7?
Then keep it.
What the Ultra gives a Fold7 owner is a bigger battery, faster charging and a better ultrawide. What it does not give you is a new chip generation you will feel, and it takes nothing away only if you buy the Ultra. Buy the standard Fold8 and you lose a camera lens.
Owners who have run Folds since the 4 keep saying the 6 to 7 jump was the big one and this is not. When people who buy every generation start telling each other to skip, that is the clearest signal available. If your Fold7 is fine, it will still be fine in November when the price has moved.
Coming from a Fold5 or older, it is a different answer. Two generations of hinge and thinness improvements have stacked up, and trade-in values on older Folds are surprisingly strong right now. That is the upgrade that makes sense this year.
Why the prices look like this
Something odd is going on with the £1,699 figure, and it is worth understanding before you read another phone launch this year.
The standard Fold8 starts £100 below where the Fold7 started. Prices going down is not what 2026 has looked like anywhere else. Two days ago Google’s vice president Shakil Barkat confirmed the entire Pixel 11 range will cost more, and named the reason: memory. A gigabyte of the LPDDR5X used in phones sold for about $2.80 in 2025 and now runs near $12. For a phone shipping 16GB, that is roughly $192 of memory where it used to be $45, before the chip, screen or cameras are counted. AI data centres are eating the supply, and DRAM contract prices rose something like 90 to 95 per cent in the first quarter alone.
So how does Samsung cut a price into that? Our reading, and we want to be clear this is analysis rather than a Samsung statement, is that Samsung is one of the few phone makers that makes its own memory. What is a bought input for Google is an internal transfer for Samsung. A Fold owner on Reddit reached the same conclusion unprompted, which is usually a sign an explanation is the obvious one.
It also explains where the £200 went. The cheaper Fold8 does not just have a different shape. It has one fewer camera, a smaller cover screen and less battery. Samsung built a cheaper Fold by removing parts, then gave it a new body so the removal reads as a choice rather than a downgrade. That is good product marketing. It is also why the Ultra is the better buy.
If you want the longer version of the memory story and what it is doing to component prices, we wrote that up separately in our RAM and SSD prices guide.
So which one
Get the Ultra. For £200 you get the bigger inner screen, a cover screen shaped like a phone, the 200MP camera, an actual zoom lens and more battery. Nothing about the cheaper model justifies the saving unless you specifically want the wide body.
And that is the one honest case for the standard Fold8. If you have handled one and the short, wide shape suits your hand or your pocket better, buy it and enjoy it. Shape is personal in a way megapixels are not. Just go in knowing you are trading a lens for it.
If either price stops you cold, that is a reasonable place to land. We do not sell foldables. We do sell the ordinary Galaxy flagships, and a Galaxy S26+ or a Galaxy S25 will do almost everything these phones do without the hinge. Apple’s own foldable is expected in September too, which is worth knowing before you spend two thousand pounds this fortnight. We covered what is known about that in our foldable iPhone guide.
Samsung is not the only book style foldable worth handling, either. Google is expected to show a Pixel 11 Pro Fold at its Made by Google event on 12 August, and OnePlus and Honor both sell folding phones of this shape. We stock none of them. If you are about to spend two thousand pounds, see what a rival feels like first.
Both models are on sale at Samsung UK now, with delivery on the Ultra quoted from 3 August.
Common questions
The Fold8 Ultra, for most people. For £200 more you get an 8in inner screen instead of 7.6in, a 6.5in cover screen instead of 5.5in, a 200MP main camera instead of 50MP, a 3x telephoto the cheaper model does not have at all, and a 5,000mAh battery instead of 4,800mAh. The standard Fold8 is only the better buy if you want its wider, shorter body, and it is 14g lighter.
At £1,699 it is worth it if the wide folded shape genuinely suits you and you do not care about zoom. If you are choosing on value, the Ultra at £1,899 is better money. If you already own a Fold7, neither is worth it this year, because the standard Fold8 is a camera downgrade from what you have.
The Galaxy Z Fold8 starts at £1,699 for 256GB, with 512GB and 1TB options above it. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra starts at £1,899. The Fold8 launched £100 below the Fold7's original starting price.
No, and neither does the Fold8 Ultra. Samsung removed the display digitizer, the layer that senses pressure and rejects your palm, to make the phone thinner. Without it there is no stylus support at any price. Samsung has hinted the S Pen may return on a later Fold.
It depends what you want from it. The S26 Ultra still carries an S Pen in the body, and hands-on comparisons put the two at roughly the same weight, with the Fold8 Ultra at 215g. What it cannot do is unfold into an 8in screen. If you want the big inner display, buy the Fold. If you want a stylus or a lower price, the S26 Ultra makes more sense.
The Fold8 is a folding phone with a 7.6in inner screen and a 5.5in outer one. The S26 range are conventional slab phones with a single screen. Folds cost considerably more, are thicker when closed, and on the Fold8 you also give up the telephoto lens the flagship slabs have.
Both models were announced on 22 July 2026 and are on sale at Samsung UK now. Samsung UK quotes delivery on the Fold8 Ultra from 3 August. At least one long term owner has said the pre-order discounts and freebies are noticeably thinner than at the Fold7 launch.
History says yes if you can. Fold owners on the r/GalaxyFold forum repeatedly report buying around six months after launch and saving $500 or more, and Samsung trade-in values on an existing Fold tend to hold for roughly two years before falling. Nothing about the Fold8 generation suggests that pattern has changed.
Sources
- Full specifications: GSMArena: Galaxy Z Fold8; GSMArena: Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra.
- Pricing and the two body shapes: GSMArena pricing breakdown; GSMArena: Fold8 goes wide; Samsung UK.
- S Pen and the missing digitizer: Android Central; SamMobile.
- Hands-on shape and weight comparisons: GSMArena hands-on; Engadget.
- Memory costs and phone pricing: 9to5Google: Google confirms Pixel 11 price increase; Tom’s Hardware on DRAM contract prices.
- Lead photograph: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 and Fold8 Ultra by ScribblingGeek, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Product renders courtesy of Samsung.
- Owner discussion: the r/GalaxyFold threads on the Ultra’s starting price and upgrading from a Fold7.
