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Who is the Galaxy Z Fold 8 4? This thing has no S Pen, no Flex Mode, and no zoom lenses. And those are three key features that foldable fans have been fighting for the last couple of years. And every single feature that was removed was very deliberate. So, I've had this now for the last week, and once I figured out why Samsung did this, it changed how I see foldable phones for the next 5 years. And the answer involves a phone that doesn't even exist. And one of those missing features, I've been telling Samsung to kill it for the last few years. But we'll get to that confession very soon. Let's start with the first clue, the S Pen. I have said it many times over the last few years that the S Pen on a Fold
was a waste of time. I got roasted for it. People told me I didn't understand productivity, that the pen was the whole point of a big folding screen. And look, I kind of get the romance in pocket notebook that you can sketch on, but in practice, you had to buy the pen separately. You also had to carry it separately because the foldable phones had no slot for it, and remember it existed. I never did. Most people also never did, and this year they stopped selling S Pens with the foldables entirely. Two generations of bring it back, and Samsung's answer was to delete the product entirely. Then the Fold went thin, and the pens went with it. But a
missing pen could just be them trying to save money. The next clue is where this becomes some sort of a strategy, and we're talking about Flex Mode. If you've never used it before, Flex Mode is a feature where you half fold the phone, you sit it on the table like a tiny laptop, and the software splits the screen into two. You have the video on top, controls at the bottom. It's been a Samsung foldable staple since 2020, every Fold and every Flip. The Fold 8 doesn't just have it. And here's the part that proves the intent. The Fold 8 Ultra still has Flex Mode, and you're looking at the same company, the same launch event, and the same software. Now, since they removed the S Pen and they removed Flex Mode, they removed technically two
groups of people, which are the creator crowd and the tinkerers. Those two groups are gone. And now that we have one thing left that they removed, it's the one that stings the most when you think about how expensive this phone is. Now, number three are the cameras. The Z Fold 8 ships with two 50-megapixel cameras, a main sensor and an ultrawide sensor. There is no telephoto or optical zoom, unfortunately, but the ultrawide gets 200 megapixels of that main sensor and a proper zoom lens. In 2026, on a phone that costs around what, 1,900, shipping without a telephoto lens is a very loud statement.
Samsung is betting that the person that is buying this phone takes photos of their food, their dog, and their friends across the table. They crop at most and they're fine. Camera enthusiasts, group three, like me, their door is basically that way. So, let's do the math on who is left. Remove the pen people, the Flex Mode people, and the camera people. Then, look at what the Fold 8 actually keeps. A 7.6-in inner display in a 4 by 3 shape, reading and basically doing everything online because almost everything online is rectangle. Peak brightness of 3,000 nits, so it holds up outdoors. It weighs around 201 g, which is the lightest fold Samsung has ever shipped. Lighter than some slab phones people carry every
single day. A cover screen with a normal feeling 16 by 10 shape instead of the tall remote control that we've seen on older folds. You strip away every power user feature, and what remains is a small tablet that folds in very comfortably. A normal phone, basically. And that is the whole pitch of the Z Fold 8. Samsung marketed this thing the same way you market a fashion accessory because that is the buyer. The software tells the same story. Instead of an S Pen input, Samsung is leaning on Gemini and app automation to handle the heavy lifting. The kind of thing that works for someone who wants results without learning a workflow. Every signal points at the same buyer and here is where the phone that doesn't exist
walks into this whole review. The leaks have been consistent for months. Apple's first folding iPhone is expected later this year with an inner display around 7.8 inches in a 4x3 shape, almost exactly the same shape as the Z Fold 8. And Samsung has already built this year's phone for its existing foldable fans. It's called the Ultra. The Fold 8 exists to intercept someone else entirely. The person who has been waiting for Apple to make folding phones feel normal. If the 4x3 format becomes a standard, Samsung more or less defined it, you know, months before Apple could. If an iPhone user gets curious about foldable phones this year, there's already one phone on the shelves
shaped like the thing they were waiting for. Samsung either steals those buyers early or at minimum, it makes Apple's big reveal feel very familiar when it lands. Either way, the outcome works. Okay, now the counter arguments. This phone is 1900 USD. The skeptics have a completely fair point and the exact person this was designed for is the person least likely to spend $1900 on a phone. Real buyers will grab a-series or the base flip and move on with their lives. And on paper, Samsung built a mass-market product with the enthusiast price tag and that mismatch could sink this whole strategy. But here is my pushback having used this phone for the last week. Let's be honest about the shape. Samsung didn't exactly
invent this. Oppo did the wide passport thing back in 2021 and Google did exactly the same thing with the first [snorts] Pixel Fold. Both of them walked away from this design and Samsung spent years insisting a tall and narrow design was the correct one. So, the Fold 8 is something of a concession. Samsung is adopting a shape it previously rejected at the exact moment Apple is about to make the exact same shape as well. It's kind of crazy. When Oppo and Google built it, it was a niche experiment. When Samsung builds it with the Fold name attached to it, months before the iPhone version, I think it's a land grab, and that reframes the price as well. Think about who this phone is intercepting, the person waiting for the
Apple foldable, and most of the time they don't even know what it cost. However, when you think about it, the most anticipated iPhone in a decade, the first of its kind, will land more or less the price of this phone or even more expensive. So, for the buyer this phone was built for, 1,900 was always the entry fee to this shape. Samsung more or less just started charging for it a few months early. Secondly, a normal person describes behavior more than they do their budget, because plenty of people with money have zero interest in styluses or zoom lenses. They just want the nice things that are easy to live with. And for the first time, Samsung builds the Fold around them instead of people like me. Because
after a week, everything this phone removed is something that I never really used, and everything that it added is something that I was looking forward to. For example, it's light enough that I stop thinking about it in my pocket or while I'm holding it to take pictures or videos. The cover screen feels like a phone instead of a compromise, and when I open it up, the video actually fills the whole display, and that is something that I really like. But, there is one thing I miss though, losing the telephoto lens is very hard to accept, but the crazy part is I missed it the same way you miss a gym membership. In a week, that moment only happened once or twice. The other few hundred pictures that I took, you know, of my
food, my desk, I stopped within 10 ft of me, which is to say that I'm living proof of Samsung's bet, whether I like it or not. So, who is the Z Fold 84? And I know some of you are thinking Samsung already answered that years ago with a Flip. It really didn't. The Flip sold people a smaller phone, and a smaller phone was always going to be a party trick. The actual dream, the one that got people into foldables in the first place, is the big screen that vanishes in your pockets. For 7 years, Samsung only sold that dream to power users like me wrapped in a stylus support and multitasking demos most buyers never really asked for. The Z Fold 8 gives that screen to everyone else and the uncomfortable punchline is
that after a week using this phone, I'm apparently everyone else.
