Samsung Unveils Two Galaxy Z Fold Models and New Flip Phone at Latest Event

Samsung just admitted something today that they can't make one Galaxy Fold that actually does everything well. So, this year we're getting two. We're getting this short stocky looking Galaxy Fold 8 and then also a taller bookstyle Fold 8 Ultra plus a new flip phone and funnily enough what I think is the surprise MVP of the entire lineup, the nextG Galaxy watches. So, let's start with the folds because I think in principle what they've done this year is pretty smart. I guess they have enough data now to realize that there are actually two types of people who buy a fold phone. Some people want it as a mini laptop to get more work done. The others, and I'd say I'm one of these,

would want it as a mini TV. They only really care about using the big inner display to consume content. And that is who this new wide boy ZFold 8 is for. People who just want to have fun. Samsung have squished down the cover display into this almost square, which I wouldn't say is a hugely practical shape for day-to-day use. You can definitely feel that most apps like Tik Tok, they're not well formatted for it. Plus, kind of a stretch to reach across the thing. But the benefit of this Spongebob shaped body is that when you open the thing, the 7.6 in display on the inside is actually pretty normally proportioned. Unlike previous fold

phones, it does feel like a tablet with a 4 to3 aspect ratio. So, they had to kill the cover screen in a way to allow the inner screen to thrive. And thrive, it does. This is the brightest, highest resolution screen that Samsung's ever put on one of these folds. It's got a 15% higher pixel density than the last, which was already sharp enough, and it has the new anti-reflective coating. You know, the absolutely goated feature from Samsung's series phones. Plus, with nextG materials, they're saying that this display uses even less power than before, and that Samsung's finally hired an ironing department to smooth out that crease. More on creases later, though. So, there's no two ways about it. If I

wanted to watch a movie or play a game, this Fold 8 with its super high-end, now widescreen aspect ratio on the inside is a miles better experience than last year's Fold 7. And I guess to make it even easier to access that screen, Samsung's now created this extra little gap between the two slices. If you look here, this is how I'd have to use my fingers to get inside of the last gen fold. Now, I have just a tiny little bit more of a crevice to kind of wedge them into to be able to get some leverage. And they've combined that with a few extra magnets, which as you start pulling, they assist with a slight pushing force. It's subtle stuff, but even if you can reduce the effort from opening the thing by 10%. Which is what

I'd say they've done here, then that adds up when you've got to pry the thing apart 40 times a day. But the Fold 8 is a very weirdly positioned phone. By the way, you'd expect this to just be the direct successor to the Fold 7. But actually, if you make that comparison, you'll find it's more of a sidegrade than an upgrade. Some things have clearly improved, but really this is a slightly less expensive phone, launching at $1,900 compared to $2,000. And there are absolutely some cutbacks that come with that. Like how this is a smaller phone than the ZFold 7. Both the inner and the outer displays do have a bit less screen area to work with. And with that, it's also a little chunkier at 4.5

mm when unfolded versus 4.2. So it doesn't quite have that cuttingedge foldable feeling. And most noticeably of all, one of the cameras has gone missing. There's no telephoto camera on this phone. Samsung's hoping you won't zoom into that. And the remaining main and ultrawide are good, balanced, but nothing special. From the last fold, they have upgraded the ultrawide camera to a better 50 megapixel sensor from 12. But then the main camera's been downgraded from Samsung's Hero 200 megapixel sensor to a pretty good 50 megapixel one. Is this the first time we've seen a phone lose 150 megapixels?

You see what I mean, though? It's a little bit all over the place, right? It's good that you get the usual 20%ish improvement to performance with the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a bigger battery. Basically, the first battery upgrade ever for the Fold from 4,400 to 4,800 mAh, and faster charging, too, from 25 W to 45 W with wireless charging also getting a bump from 15 to 20. But these are very conservative changes. Really, this is just Samsung refreshing the fold to bring it in line with their other current devices. So, I would say there's definitely merit to this new wider form factor. But I was expecting this phone to either do more or cost less. Considering that for this price, you could buy a top-end ultra

phone and an iPad, which would give you a higherend smartphone experience and a better big screen movie experience. It just feels really hard to justify. I suspect that half the reason this exists is to try and get ahead of Apple's upcoming foldable. I mean, this is pretty much exactly the screen size and form factor that we're expecting Apples to be, which Samsung might have known a thing or two about since they are conveniently the company supplying Apple with their foldable screens. You can see how it would make sense for Samsung to already have something out that offers what Apple's trying to sell you to preemptively take out some of the novelty from Apple's announcement. But

then we've got the other type of fold user, the person who uses their inner display to work. And for these lot, it's all about the Zfold 8 Ultra. So, this phone is dimension-wise very similar to the Zfold phones of your, which as you probably guessed then makes the thing pretty sloppy for content consumption, but you want to open two apps at once. It's amazing because you effectively get two 6.5 in phone screens worth of content at the same time. But then, how much better is it than what we already had? This is the first time that Samsung's calling a Fold Ultra. So, you've got the same improvements to its opening mechanism with the wider gap in the magnets. Nice.

It's got that new chipset and all the same display improvements that we've just seen with the regular Fold 8. Ultra bright, anti-reflective, and if anything, the screen is even more impressive here because of its 8in stature. But the only thing that really feels more special, particularly about the Ultra, is the engineering. As you can probably tell, this is a pretty slim phone. It's actually the slimmest Samsung Fold ever at just 4.1 mm when it's open. Not a huge leap over the previous record of 4.2, but an improvement nonetheless. And what's great to see is that it's this thin while having an even larger battery than both the Fold 7 and the Fold 8 at 5,000 mAh. That's partly because this year's Folds and Flip are actually the first

Samsung phones ever to adopt a silicon carbon battery. These are just more energy dense than the lithium polymer cells we're used to, and partly because of new materials. So, behind every OLED display, you'll always have some kind of film. Most brands use a polymer film. Samsung here is saying they're using a titanium one. Now, this is super thin. We're talking less than 30% of a human hair. But Samsung saying that just this plus a second flexible titanium plate beneath it makes this display not just extremely thin, but stronger while also reducing the visibility of the crease. Can I tell? Yeah, kind of. It's still not creaseless, but they'll get there one year. maybe ninth times the charm.

Besides, this titanium tech is also on the base fold 8. So, all in all, then I'm not sure there's any particular change here that warrants this sudden jump to ultra. I'd call this the same level of improvement that we've seen year-on-year. Anyways, it's just now the price has gone up a little from $2,000 to 2,100. The ultrawide camera has had the same upgrade as the base fold 8 from 12 megapixel to 50, which to be fair is a double win cuz that's the same camera that you'll use for macro photography. But I think the more noticeable change with this year's cameras might just be the improved software processing that you get by having the latest chip. It made a very solid difference for

Samsung's series phones earlier this year. Seems to have had the same impact here. Things like less noise in the image and just a more balanced overall picture. There's a couple of other software advancements like uh now nudge. You know that feature that figures out what someone is asking for and then surfaces it up for you to be able to immediately send the one that basically didn't work when I first went hands-on with it. Well, it does more things now. Like if someone asks you to meet up, it can pop up an option to open your calendar. Or even this little quick message that you can tap to enter if you want to confirm the logistics. If someone mentions a location, it brings up the ability to with one tap go to

that location on Google Maps. In fact, you don't even need to open up the keyboard anymore to get these nudges, which definitely paints the picture of a more intelligent background presence on these new Samsung's. However, as soon as we tested the feature outside of the company's pre-made demo text messages, same problem all over again. Very inconsistent, barely worked. Now, to be fair, Samsung said this is because the software is still pre-release. But the point is, half a year on, I'm still yet to see Now Nudge do anything of use in the real world. My fan cam though is sick. You feed in any kind of video that you've taken, select who in that video that you want to track, and it just

follows that person as they move, zooms in as they go further away, and it all works surprisingly effortlessly. It's one of the very few recent features that I could actually see myself using for when I'm trying to record myself playing football. And as per usual, there's a bunch of Google features that Samsung has taken and optimized for their phones, like Gemini notebooks, which is, to be fair, cooler than I was expecting. You throw in any kind of media, could be photos or voice recordings or notes, and then this turns that into any kind of output like an infographic or summarized meeting notes. But yeah, ultimately this Fold 8 Ultra is really just business as

usual. I think what's happening here is not Samsung's finally decided to make the foldable superphone of our dreams and that's why it's called the Ultra. I think this is more we need to make two different folds for two different types of users. What do we call the one that's a little bit more expensive? Oh yeah. Well, Ultra, we've used that on some of our other phones. That'll do. Time to get out of this suit because that leaves us with the Galaxy Flip 8 and the most improved Galaxy watches. So, this year's Flip phone feels like a very simple tidy up. It's again easier to open up while also being thinner and

lighter than any previous Z Flip by a decent amount. To be fair, last year's was 6.5 mm unfolded. Here it's 6.1. And the frame is supposedly 10% more durable, however on earth that's being calculated. The chip has been upgraded, but for some reason, we're stuck with the Exynos variant here in the UK as opposed to Snapdragon. And basically nothing with the cameras, apart from the fact that you can now also use the horizontal lock feature on the selfie camera, just in case you're running away from the cops, but the vlog must go on. And in flex cam or camcorder mode, Samsung say this camcorder thing is a super popular feature. I think it's moronic to rotate your phone into this

now clearly unnatural position just to pretend like it's the 80s. Both can be true, but the one big change this time is what's happening on this front flex window screen. The bezels have further shrunk down, by the way, which is the only kind of receding hairline I'm looking forward to. And what it's making way for is how all of a sudden you now have a dedicated home screen on your cover screen. And almost anything that you can do with the phone open, you can now do closed. This has been a long time coming. This cover screen started off as a tiny little window that could do like three things total. And then each year as the screens got a little bigger, the functionality ticked up with it. Until

now, the front feels just like the inside. Now, this might be a bit of a hot take, but I don't know if this is a good thing. My favorite thing about the Z Flip phones has always been the friction that they create. They let you check the time whenever. They let you see that a notification's come in whenever. But so far, when you've wanted to do really anything much more than that on a flip phone, you've had to truly decide, is this task important enough for me to open the phone and risk a doomcrolling spiral. So, all of a sudden, making everything accessible on the cover screen actually negates the intentionality that first drew me to the flip. But that's just me. And they have

done a pretty stellar job with this new now brief widget. The idea is they have a whole load of different pre-built live infographics. Everything from weather stuff, the forecast, pollen count, UV index to health stuff, things like step count, sleep score, and nutrition info. And then you can pick and mix them depending on what you specifically want to keep track of on your home screen. Okay. Then we got the watches, which yeah, I mean is usually about the time in the presentation that I too would very literally clock off. But this time around, the upgrades feel like a really strong combo of much needed intelligent

hardware changes with software features that I could see making a big difference. So the base Galaxy Watch 9 now has a 25% lighter watch band, which they've pulled off by creating internal air pockets inside the thing. Pretty smart idea. 20% larger battery. That's a decent jump. and a faster chip, the Snapdragon Wear Elite, which seems to have addressed one of the most fundamental weaknesses with Samsung watches. They don't lag anymore and apps seem to open almost instantly. Okay, so sounds solid enough. But then the new Watch Ultra 2 gets even more and actually deserves the Ultra name. It gets all the same perks as the normal watch, but also with the actual body itself becoming 12% thinner than the

last Ultra. The battery is instead 35% larger, they're saying this is now true multi-day endurance, and the display now goes up to 5,000 nits of brightness. That would make this the world's brightest smartwatch display. Probably excessive for almost all use cases. But if extreme brightness is ever going to be useful, it's on a watch that you might end up using in extreme environments. You guys really burn me up. Then we got this new software stuff, part of Samsung's new revamped health experience. Firstly, a feature called vitals, which for the first week of wearing your watch will start to understand your baselines, things like heart rate and skin temperature, so that any time that you deviate from your

baselines, like your skin gets a bit warmer, your watch is going to be able to tell you, "Hey man, you're probably about to get sick. Wrap up." Good idea. There's a new heart health score which combines all of your collected stats to give you an AI overview of how healthy your heart is and how to improve. It's not going to be lab grade accuracy, but for me at least, seeing that number score, I think would really drive me. And the best one I think is this new fitness index, which compares all of your key metrics against other people of a similar age. I mean, if that doesn't motivate someone to want to be better,

then I don't know what will. And it's topped off with the fact that you can now activate Gemini on the watches with no wake words. You just lift your watch to your mouth and speak. And yes, it can actually tell the difference between when you lift your wrist to check the time and knowing when you're trying to talk. And honestly, speaking to your tech as opposed to proddding away at the screen is a better solution when you can. In fact, the entire script for this video, I didn't type it, I spoke it. I started using this tool from our sponsor Whisper Flow about two months ago and it's probably the single biggest productivity spike I've had in my life because doesn't matter what app you're

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