The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra opens from a phone into an 8-inch tablet, and it’s the model Samsung puts its best parts into. The stuff the cheaper Fold 8 skips all shows up here, like the 200MP main camera, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, and a 5,000mAh battery that’s bigger than the 4,400mAh cell in last year’s Fold 7. It starts at $2,099.99 with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and you can go up to 1TB if you want. Samsung announced it on July 22, and it goes on sale August 7.
Head over to Samsung or Amazon to pre-order the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra before it ships on August 7. Samsung will take up to $1,200 off if you trade in an eligible phone, or give you $200 in Samsung credit if you don’t have anything to trade, and there’s another $100 off at checkout if you pay with PayPal. Amazon does it differently and hands you up to a $350 gift card instead. Both throw in a six-month Google AI Pro trial that comes with 5TB of cloud storage.
A folding smartphone that opens up to a larger screen
The main benefit to buying now instead of waiting until August is the trade-in value. Right now, Samsung will credit you up to $1,200 for your old phone, but that number decreases once the phone goes into regular sale, and the difference could be paying full price versus something close to $900 for the base model. If you’re trading in no phone, the next best alternative is a $200 credit toward some items from Samsung. There are two downsides, though. The credit does not reduce the cost of the phone, and if you buy accessories with it, they have to be part of the same order or the credit disappears when you check out.
Open the phone up and the 8-inch main screen has a resolution of 2,504 by 2,256, or 422 pixels per inch. Peak brightness was increased to 3,000 nits this year for better sunlight readability, and there’s now an anti-glare coating on the inside of the display panel. A new Titanium Flex layer under the display makes the crease in the center much less visible than on last year’s model. Once you fold it closed, the 6.5-inch cover display lets you do everything you’d expect from a basic phone, so you can get through daily tasks without having to open it.
The cameras are the part that earns the Ultra name. The 200MP main sensor can now shoot HDR at full resolution instead of dropping down to a lower one to do it; the ultrawide jumped to 50MP to match the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and there’s a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom that the regular Fold 8 doesn’t get. Video goes up to 8K through the new APV codec, and Cine LUT puts color and tone grading right on the phone.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy runs the whole thing, with 12GB of RAM on the 256GB and 512GB models and 16GB on the 1TB. The battery is up to 5,000mAh across two cells now, and a new dual-path charging setup splits the 45W charging more evenly between them, while wireless charging tops out at 20W. It comes with Android 17 and One UI 9 already on it.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra starts at $2,099.99 and ships August 7, and where you pre-order really comes down to what you’ve got on hand. Going through Samsung gets you the full trade-in credit, the accessory money, and the Green Shadow color you can’t get anywhere else, so it’s the better move if you have a recent Galaxy or iPhone to hand over. Amazon’s gift card makes more sense if you’ve got nothing to trade and would rather put the bonus toward whatever you feel like.
