A week with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 in Banaras: Samsung finally made a ph…

On my third day with this phone, a boatman at Dashashwamedh asked me why I was taking his photo with a passport.

I'm not exaggerating for a headline. He genuinely thought it was a passport. Then he asked if it was a "diary wala phone," then he asked the price, and then he made a face I will be thinking about for the rest of my life. Sawan crowd behind us, Ganga swollen up to the ninth step, and this man doing the mental math on ₹1,79,999 while holding an oar.

So that's the review, basically. But my editor wants 2,000 words, so let's go properly.

First, the confusing part

Samsung has split the Fold line into two this year, and if you don't get this right you'll buy the wrong phone. The Z Fold 8 Ultra (₹1,99,999 onwards) is the actual sequel to last year's Fold 7 — tall, narrow, 8-inch inner screen, 200MP camera, three lenses on the back. Boring in a good way.

The Z Fold 8 — the one I've had since 26 July — is the weird one. Short. Wide. Two cameras. 5.5-inch cover screen at a 10:16 ratio, 7.6-inch inner display at nearly 4:3. 201g, 9.7mm folded, 4.5mm when you open it out. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, 12GB RAM on the base ₹1,79,999 model, 4,800mAh silicon-carbon cell, 45W charging.

It's cheaper than the Ultra by twenty grand and it is by far the more interesting object. Sale starts 7 August. I've had a review unit for exactly one week, mostly in 88% humidity.

The shape is the whole story

Closed, it is 123.9mm wide. For reference, that is roughly a Kindle. It is the widest folded Samsung foldable ever, and the first thirty seconds of holding it feel wrong in a way that's hard to describe — your thumb keeps reaching for an edge that isn't where it should be.

Then it stops feeling wrong. For me it took about a day and a half.

Here's what sold me, and it's very specific to how we actually live here: I can type on the cover screen with one hand while the other hand is holding a chai. Every Fold before this had a cover screen like a TV remote — technically a phone, practically useless for typing anything longer than "ok". This one has a proper keyboard. I filed 300 words of copy from the back of an auto near Rathyatra without opening the phone once, in traffic that wasn't moving anyway.

The kurta pocket test: passes, surprisingly. Wide and flat sits better in a kurta pocket than tall and thick. Jeans pocket, it's a slightly awkward slab but 201g is genuinely light — lighter than a lot of normal phones, and 14g lighter than the Ultra. After the Fold 7, your wrist notices.

One real complaint about the shape: it's slippery, and the corners are sharp enough that I kept catching my palm on them while pulling it out. In a Godowlia crowd, holding a ₹1.8 lakh piece of glass that wants to squirt out of your hand, this is not a relaxing sensation. Buy a case on day one. Not optional.

The inner screen is the best screen I've used on a phone. Period.

Open it and you get a 7.6-inch, near-4:3 panel, 120Hz, and — finally, finally — an anti-reflective coating.

I need to explain why that last bit matters more in Banaras than in a review lab in California. Our light is brutal and it's brutal in two different ways. Pre-monsoon there's the flat white 11am glare where every screen becomes a mirror. Right now in monsoon it's the opposite: overcast, wet, everything reflecting everything. Foldable inner screens have historically been the shiniest, most reflective panels on earth. This one isn't. Sitting at Assi with the sky doing its grey thing, I could actually read a PDF instead of tilting the phone at seventeen angles like I'm performing aarti to it.

The crease. Samsung's Flex Titanium thing is real — it's the flattest Fold display I've touched. But let's not do the marketing thing: it's still there. You will feel it under your thumb when you swipe across. In a bright shop with tubelights overhead you will see the line. It's just no longer the first thing you notice, which is genuine progress.

And the 4:3 ratio, for our media diet, is a cheat code. India-Australia highlights on YouTube fill the screen with barely any black bars. The Fold 7's 16:10-ish inner screen always felt like a productivity tablet you were watching video on under protest. This feels like a small TV that happens to fold. I watched an entire episode of something on a Vande Bharat back from Prayagraj and didn't once wish for a bigger screen.

Reading is even better. Kindle app on this thing in portrait is genuinely a book. That's not a phrase I expected to type.

Where it's less good: web browsing in portrait. Chrome's address bar eats the top, your keyboard eats the bottom half, and you're left with a letterbox slit in the middle. Rotate to landscape and it's fine again — but that brings its own irritation, which is that your home screen icons rearrange themselves into a different grid every time you rotate. One week in, muscle memory has still not formed. Small thing. Constant thing.

The camera: good photos, missing lens, real problem

Two 50MP sensors on the back — main with OIS, ultrawide with a 120° field and its own autofocus. No telephoto. None. Zero optical zoom on a ₹1.8 lakh phone.

Let me tell you exactly how that felt at Ganga aarti.

The wide-angle stuff is lovely. Standing on the ghat steps you can frame the whole line of pandits, the crowd, the boats stacked five deep on the river, all in one shot, and the ultrawide holds detail into the corners in a way Samsung's ultrawides historically did not. Nightography has quietly become very good — the flame trails came out clean, not the usual orange mush.

But the moment I wanted a tight shot of one arm swinging one deep-diya, from thirty feet back, behind four rows of people? Digital crop. Mush. That's it. That's the whole answer.

Same story at Sarnath. You can't get close to the Dhamek Stupa, so the shot everyone wants is a compressed telephoto frame of the carved bands. I got a 2x digital crop that looks like a screenshot of a screenshot.

I want to be fair: for the 90% of shots that are a plate of kachori-sabzi at Ram Bhandar, a group photo at a shaadi, a document, a shop board — this camera is completely fine and often lovely. Colours are Samsung-punchy, dynamic range is strong, autofocus is instant. Motion is where the processing still falls apart; anything with a moving subject in low light comes out smeared. Standard Samsung.

But the Ultra has the 200MP sensor and a 3x lens for twenty thousand more, and if photos are why you're spending this money, that maths is not in this phone's favour. I'd rather Samsung shipped this at ₹1.65 lakh and been honest about it than pretend a missing lens is a design philosophy.

Heat is the Banaras tax

This is where I'm going to be blunter than the foreign reviews you'll read.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in a 4.5mm chassis is a physics problem. In an air-conditioned room, this phone is untouchable — BGMI on max settings, buttery, no complaints. Outdoors here, in late July, at 34°C with humidity that makes your shirt a second skin, it throttles. Not "gets warm." Throttles.

Recording 4K at aarti, unfolded, with the screen at full brightness because the sun was still up: about eleven minutes before the frame near the hinge got genuinely hot against my fingers and the preview started stuttering. Google Maps on the cover screen, screen at max, on a scooter from Lanka to Sigra — warm enough that I noticed through the case.

None of this is unique to this phone and none of it made anything crash. But every glowing review saying "flagship-grade performance" is written by someone who has never held a foldable at Chowk in Sawan. Factor it in.

Speakers are also just okay. Loudness is average and in unfolded landscape the stereo separation is basically theoretical — one channel is next to your palm. Fine for a reel, not fine for actually watching something in a noisy room, which in this city is every room.

Battery, charging, and the box that has no charger in it

4,800mAh, and it lasted. Every single day of the week I came home somewhere between 12% and 25%, on what I'd call heavy-journalist use: hotspot on for hours, camera, Maps, two hours of video, constant WhatsApp. Screen-on time was hovering around 5 hours. That's not Oppo Find N6 numbers and it's not going to survive a full day of shooting without a power bank. But compared to every Fold before it, it's a real improvement.

45W wired now, up from 25W, and it goes to roughly 70% in half an hour, which is exactly the "charge while showering" window we all actually use. 20W wireless. No magnets built in for Qi2 — you need a case for that, which is annoying and a bit cheap at this price.

No charger in the box, obviously. Dig out your old 45W brick or the fast charging is a certificate you can't claim.

Software, briefly

Android 17, One UI 9, seven years of updates. Multitasking is still the best in the business and the floating notification panel on the big screen is a small, smart touch.

Galaxy AI is here in volume — Now Nudge, Call Brief, My FanCam. I used Call Brief on two actual work calls and the summaries were accurate. My FanCam, which auto-crops a video to follow one person, is a genuinely useful reel tool if you shoot events. The rest of it I turned off by Thursday. Your mileage will vary depending on how much you believe in this stuff. I don't, much.

One removal worth flagging: the hinge snaps fully open now, it doesn't hold at 90 degrees. So no propping it half-open on a table to shoot a timelapse. And no S Pen support, again.

So should you buy it, guru?

Buy it if: you consume more than you shoot. If your phone is mostly YouTube, cricket, reading, browsing, WhatsApp, and you've wanted a foldable but hated how narrow and useless the outer screen was. This is the first Fold where the closed phone is a good phone and not a compromise you tolerate until you can open it. At ₹1,79,999 with the ₹10,000 upgrade bonus or ₹9,000 bank cashback and 30-month no-cost EMI, it's the most fun ₹1.8 lakh you can currently spend on a phone.

Don't buy it if: photography is the point. Get the Ultra, or honestly get an S26 Ultra and put the sixty thousand you save into something that appreciates. The missing telephoto is not a spec-sheet quibble, it's a daily one, and this city is built out of things you have to shoot from far away.

Rating: 4 / 5. Half a point off for the camera, half for the heat.

I'll be sad to send this one back. That hasn't happened with a review unit in a while. Samsung stopped iterating and actually changed something, and the change turned out to be right — which, in 2026, in a market where every phone is the same black rectangle with a slightly different bump, is worth saying out loud.

Har Har Mahadev. Buy a case.