Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 by Samsung: I almost forgot it was foldable

Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Flip 8 feels more like a normal phone than ever before. It’s thin, light, and has an all-in-one front screen. Whether it’s good or bad, I don’t know.

I spent three hours with Samsung’s new phone last week, and it doesn’t look much different from last year. Z 7. It still has a 6.9-inch FHD+ AMOLED display inside. It still has a 4.1-inch Super AMOLED screen on the outside. It still starts at 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and still has a 4,300mAh battery. But this year Samsung has added some features that make this feature fully loaded on the phone when it’s locked.

For starters, Samsung has added three new hands to the external display. If you look down from the top left of the screen, you will see your notification tray. Scroll down from the top right, and you’ll find quick settings. Scroll up from the bottom, and you’ll come to a fully-exploded app drawer. If you want to use your unlocked phone for anything, that’s what Samsung offers here.

Previously, you had to use Samsung’s Good Lock to unlock apps on the cover, and while it worked, it was a bit of a hassle. Now this is a natural part. At first glance, it’s nice to have the opportunity, but part of the magic of the mobile phone, for me, has always been failure. If the Flip 8 was just a phone, but a slow, square ladder, would I be less interested in destroying the doomscroll?

Samsung has also shaved fractions of a millimeter off this product to create what it claims is the thinnest and lightest phone on the market. The Z Flip 8 is 13.1mm thick folded and 6.1mm thick unfolded, and weighs 180g. That’s still bigger than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, which only comes in at 4.1mm, and it’s still bigger than a regular phone when closed, but as phones go, it’s the one to beat.

This year’s phone has also been made slimmer using the new Samsung Flex Titanium display technology, which is also in its new Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra. Samsung says Flex Titanium shaves thickness by using a thinner titanium film under the OLED, and a stronger connection between the base plate and the display unit. In fact, I’m not sure you’ll see a millimeter part, but Samsung says the display is 20x stronger, which is pretty impressive considering how many Z Flips with internal displays I’ve seen while riding the subway.

The new battery technology also helped make the phone smaller and lighter. Samsung has finally switched to silicon carbon – which allows for more battery life than lithium ion – although it claims to be using less silicon than its competitors for safety and longer life. In the Flip 8, the power and speed of acceleration are the same as the Flip 7, but it managed to make the cell smaller.

If you’re hoping for a major camera overhaul this year, you’ll be disappointed, as the Flip 8 sticks with the same camera hardware we saw in last year’s Flip 7. You still get a 50MP main and a 12MP ultrawide, which is good enough, but don’t expect a 200MP main camera from the Zrawide Ultra 8MP from the Zrawide Ultra 8 or the Zrawide Fold 8 8. That said, Samsung has brought its Super Steady Horizontal Lock feature to the phone.

Perhaps the coolest thing I tried out in my three hours with the device was the new “Now Brief” generator, which can create Now Brief widgets to show you more about your day. During my time with the device, the Samsung display asked the phone to display pollen levels each morning, and the Flip 8 created a UI to display the day’s pollen count. I’m eager to get my hands on the phone long enough to test this feature, as Samsung has made it seem like you can ask for a large variety of widgets. This seems very similar to what Google recently announced Android 17 applicationbut optimized to appear in front of the Flip.

The Flip 8 is more expensive than last year. This year, it starts at $1,199.99, up from the Flip 7’s $1,099.99 base price, for the same storage and RAM configurations. Almost everything is subject to the RAM apocalypse these days, but if you’re looking for a smartphone that has more phone than ever before when it was locked, the Flip 8 might be the one for you.