Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 Review: Iteration Overshadowed By Innovation

Christian de Looper/BGRIt's been a big year for the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold line, which was treated to a whole new form factor to compete with the iPhone Duo. The same can't be said of the Galaxy Z Flip. Instead, Samsung's new Galaxy Z Flip 8 follows much the same formula as the Z Flip devices before it.

That's not to say that it doesn't bring some improvements, of course. Every year, the Z Flip gets a slightly thinner body, slightly better software, and incremental hardware improvements — and the $1,199.99 Galaxy Z Flip 8 follows that pattern closely. The main upgrades are a thinner and lighter chassis, a reworked cover-screen experience that actually behaves like a compact phone, and, in markets that get Qualcomm's latest chip, meaningfully faster processing.

Unfortunately, it also comes with a price bump. While the Galaxy Z Flip 7 started at $1,099, the Z Flip 8 pushes that to $1,199. For that extra $100, though, you're getting cameras, battery capacity, and charging speeds that are all essentially the same as last year.

I've been testing the Galaxy Z Flip 8 for a couple of weeks. It's Samsung's most polished clamshell yet, and for the right buyer, it's a great phone. But if you already own a Z Flip 7, you can probably skip it.

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The Galaxy Z Flip 8 weighs 180 grams and sits in at 6.1mm unfolded or 13.1mm folded. That makes it 0.4mm thinner unfolded, 0.6mm thinner folded, and 8 grams lighter than the Z Flip 7 — differences that you will barely notice if you have them both in front of you and certainly won't otherwise. Still, I already found the Z Flip 7 to be quite thin, so even if the Z Flip 8 isn't dramatically thinner, I'm not sure it needs to be.

Perhaps the bigger design change relates to the hinge. Samsung reworked the hinge, making the two halves have a deeper physical separation. Along with that, the magnets holding the phone shut are less aggressive, and there's more spring in the mechanism. The result is a phone that's noticeably easier to flip open one-handed than any previous Z Flip model.

IP48 water resistance carries over, which means the phone handles submersion in shallow water fine but is not fully dustproof. Samsung rates it for protection against larger particles, but fine dust, sand, and dirt can still work their way in. If you regularly take your phone to the beach, that's a real limitation at this price, especially when book-style foldables are getting IP68 ratings much more frequently now.

The main-screen crease is still there. You can see it, you can feel it when you swipe across the center of the display, and Samsung didn't bring over the titanium display structure it uses in the book-style Galaxy Z Fold 8 to help. For now, the crease is just part of the clamshell foldable experience. I don't think about it much during normal use, but I also can't pretend it's not there.

The rest of the build is solid. There's Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front, a glass-reinforced polymer rear panel, and what Samsung calls Advanced Armor Aluminum for the frame. It feels well-built and premium in hand. There are also a few color options. Graphite is the most conservative of the color options, Cream and Pink have a bit more personality, and the online-exclusive Mint is arguably the most interesting of the bunch.

The inner display is a 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel with a 2520 x 1080 resolution and an adaptive refresh rate that scales from 1Hz to 120Hz. The cover screen is a 4.1-inch AMOLED at 948 x 1048 with a 60–120Hz adaptive refresh rate. These are effectively the same panel specs as Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 7, which isn't a negative, considering they were already solid.

Brightness is improved, but only by a little. The Galaxy Z Flip 8's inner display has a peak brightness of 2,600 nits, which is actually the same as the Z Flip 7 — though I measured it closer to 2,800 nits at a 2% window size. To be fair, that's pretty much the same level of brightness that I measured on the Z Flip 7, so not much has changed here. Still, the inner display looks great, and that brightness paired with the AMOLED display type means you'll get a high contrast and solid visibility, even outdoors.

The cover displays are similar, too. I measured around 1,500 nits of brightness on both the Galaxy Z Flip 8 and Galaxy Z Flip 7, and I don't think you'll notice any difference between the two. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as the cover display already looked quite good on last year's model.

All that said, I would have liked to see some kind of anti-reflective coating on both the inner and outer displays. It can make a pretty big difference, and when you have a screen that's as glossy as the plastic screens of foldable phones, even brighter displays can sometimes be hard to see. Hopefully, we'll get that next year.

Like some previous Samsung phones, which chipset you get in the Galaxy Z Flip 8 depends on where you buy it. U.S. and North American models run Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, while some international variants use Samsung's Exynos 2600. My review unit had the Snapdragon chip paired with 12GB of RAM, and performance was a solid step up from the Z Flip 7.

Everything feels fast in daily use. Apps launch quickly, multitasking between split-screen windows is smooth, and the phone handles mobile gaming easily. I never noticed any stuttering or lagging, even when launching heavier games — load times felt on the faster side overall.

But, as you might expect, you won't get performance that beats other phones that are optimized for better thermals, and like some other foldable and flip devices, the Galaxy Z Flip 8 does have to throttle pretty dramatically as it heats up. In the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test I ran, the device had a stability of 37.8%, which is very low and means that over the 20-minute test, its lowest score was only around 38% of its highest score.

Still, thanks to the new silicon, the peaks are quite a bit better than last year's. In Wild Life Extreme, the Galaxy Z Flip 8 had a high score of 7,314 — better than last year's model. In Geekbench 6, it hit 10,900 in its multi-core score and 3,644 in its single-core score. The single-core score in particular is quite a bit improved; it's 57% better than the Galaxy Z Flip 7's.

Basically, while the Galaxy Z Flip 8 has great internals, its form factor means that its performance isn't quite as good as some other devices. If you think that's going to be the difference for what you need a phone for, then you'll want to look elsewhere. But most people don't push their phone hard enough to thermally limit it in the first place.

The battery capacity of the Galaxy Z Flip 8 is 4,300 mAh, which is the same as the Z Flip 7. There is a difference between the two, though. Samsung has moved to silicon-carbon battery technology, which it used here to save on space. I'm glad to see that switch, not necessarily for this device, but for Samsung's future lineup. I hope it makes for much larger batteries in the Galaxy S27 devices, though we'll have to wait and see.

Regardless of that, the battery life was pretty similar to the Z Flip 7's. That's to say, it's fine, but not amazing. In a gaming test, the Galaxy Z Flip 8 lost 18% of its battery, which is down from the 21% that the Galaxy Z Flip 7 lost. So, it's perhaps ever so slightly more efficient — but you won't notice much of a difference if you use the Galaxy Z Flip 7.

The Galaxy Z Flip 8 doesn't upgrade on charging speed either, at least when it comes to Samsung's rated speeds. Like the Z Flip 7, the device has a wired charging speed of 25W and a wireless charging speed of 15W, along with 4.5W reverse wireless. That said, I did find the Galaxy Z Flip 8 to charge a little quicker than the Galaxy Z Flip 7 in my own testing, reaching a full charge in 75 minutes compared to the 88 minutes it took the Galaxy Z Flip 7. Neither of the two devices holds a candle to the Motorola Razr Ultra, though, which supports 68W wired charging and took 51 minutes to get from empty to 100%.

The camera system on the Galaxy Z Flip 8 is essentially unchanged from last year. You get a 50-megapixel main camera with optical image stabilization, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and a 10-megapixel selfie camera on the inner display. There's no telephoto lens, so there's no dedicated optical zoom. Samsung does offer a 2x "optical quality zoom" that crops from the full 50-megapixel sensor, but beyond that, everything other than the main sensor's native focal length is digital — and you can only zoom up to 10x regardless.

In good lighting, the main camera delivers reasonably good results — but, again, they're pretty much unchanged compared to last year. Colors are reasonably accurate, and detail is sharp enough. The device retained much of its detail in lower lighting too, which is always nice to see. As you zoom, the image will start to soften up, but at least in good lighting, images were usable up to around 5 or 6x. But that's identical to the Galaxy Z Flip 7; I didn't notice any meaningfully different behavior in low lighting or deeper zoom between the two devices.

The other cameras on the device, like the ultra-wide and the front camera, are also fine but not spectacular. The ultra-wide does a decent job at capturing colorful and detailed images, but it loses a lot of its detail in darker lighting.

That's true of the front-facing camera, too. Like with other foldables, though, you don't necessarily have to rely on the hole-punch, front-facing camera for selfie shots. Instead, you can use the cover display as a viewfinder and take pictures with the main camera, which will make for much higher quality selfies and means that the hole-punch camera really only has to work for video calls — which it does. Altogether, the camera on the Galaxy Z Flip 8 does the job, but don't expect anything particularly special.

The Galaxy Z Flip 8 ships with Android 17 and Samsung's One UI 9, backed by a promise of seven years of OS and security updates. That long support window is about as high as they get, and it means this phone should still be receiving updates well into the 2030s.

Cover-screen software is the biggest practical change on the Z Flip 8. Samsung redesigned its FlexWindow interface to behave more like a compact Android phone — you get notifications, Quick Settings, widgets, an app drawer, and Galaxy AI features accessible right from the outer display. You still can't use it with as much flexibility as the inner screen out of the box, though. Thankfully, that gap is closed with Samsung's Good Lock and MultiStar tools, which allow you to run full third-party apps on the cover screen — albeit with some bugs and quirks.

The rest of the interface is pretty much what you would expect from a device with Samsung's One UI. One UI has never been my favorite implementation of Android, but at least it's consistent.

Samsung's Galaxy AI suite is here in full, of course. You get Now Brief, Now Nudge, Gemini integration, Gemini Live, AI-powered app automation, Audio Eraser, and a dashboard for managing AI actions. A six-month Google AI Pro trial with 5TB of cloud storage is included in eligible markets, after which standard subscription pricing applies. The AI tools are fine, and they seemed to work well. Like other AI tools on phones, though, how often you use them will probably vary a fair bit.

The Galaxy Z Flip 8 is Samsung's most polished clamshell foldable, but probably not its most exciting. A thinner body, improved hinge, and better performance make it a nice flip-style phone to use — but if you have a Z Flip 7, there isn't much reason to upgrade.

That's especially true given the new price point. The $100 price increase on a device that keeps the same cameras, battery capacity, and charging speeds is a slightly bitter pill to swallow. This isn't a device for owners of a Z Flip 7. It's a device for owners of an older Z Flip model or someone who is looking to try the Z Flip line for the first time.

Samsung has been building clamshell foldable smartphones longer than anyone else, but you can't ignore the competitors. The most direct competition comes from Motorola, in the form of the Razr+ and Razr Ultra. The 2026 Razr Ultra is a better device with a larger battery, faster charging, and more, but it also costs more. The Razr+ is a bit closer on price, but it still charges faster and has a brighter inner screen.

The Z Flip 8 counters with a brighter cover screen, seven years of OS and security updates against Motorola's three years of OS and five years of security, and a much newer Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 against the Razr+'s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. For most, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 is probably the best flip phone you can get at its price point in North America. But if you're willing to spend a little more, the Razr Ultra is even better.

If you're upgrading from an older Z Flip or a conventional phone and value the compact foldable form factor, the Z Flip 8 is worth buying. If you own a Z Flip 7 or prioritize telephoto photography, battery life, or fast charging, skip it.