How Samsung Made Folding Phones Feel Normal: Eight Generations of the Galaxy Fold

​​​​​There was a time when the most interesting thing you could say about a smartphone was the size of its screen. Samsung changed that in February 2019 with a phone that folded open like a book, revealing a 7.3-inch display where a normal handset would have offered something a third of the size. Close it, and the Galaxy Fold shrank back down to pocket dimensions. Carry a phone, unfold a tablet.

Getting there was not easy, and Samsung has proved itself to be the top contender when it comes to foldable smartphones. The original Fold weighed 276 grams and measured up to 17.1mm thick when folded, numbers that felt more prototype than product.

It would have been reasonable to write the category off as an expensive experiment. Instead, Samsung treated it as the first data point in a longer project. Eight generations later, the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Z Flip8 lines are lighter, thinner, tougher and smarter, and a folding phone no longer needs much explaining to anyone shopping for a flagship.

Two families, two different bets

Samsung's foldable strategy splits cleanly into two stories. The Z Fold bet on expansion: a phone-shaped device that opens into something closer to a small tablet. The Z Flip bet on contraction: a full-size smartphone that folds down into something small enough to close a fist around. Both use the same underlying technology, a hinge and a bendable display, but they solve opposite problems.

By Samsung's own numbering, Fold3 and Flip3 count as the third generation, with later pairs continuing that annual cadence. The Z Flip arrived in February 2020, seven months after the original Fold went on sale, and the Z Fold2 followed that September. Fold4 and Flip4 were unveiled in August 2022, Fold6 and Flip6 in July 2024, and the eighth generation began its global rollout in August 2026. What started as a single, risky device quietly became a full portfolio.

Unfolding the future: how it all began

The original Fold's 7.3-inch Infinity Flex Display did the heavy lifting when open, while a smaller cover screen handled everyday tasks when closed. Samsung built software around that split personality too, introducing App Continuity and Multi-Active Window so apps could follow a user between screens without restarting, the earliest sign that multitasking, not just screen size, would become the real battleground.

None of that solved the harder problem: keeping a flexible display alive while a hinge repeatedly bent it in half. A foldable asks a screen to survive thousands of folds while the chassis around it opens and closes, and the hinge has to hold everything together without turning the phone into a brick. The rocky launch proved that folding-phone manufacturing tolerances were nothing like conventional ones, and Samsung's response over the next seven years was less about hiding those compromises and more about grinding them down, one generation at a time.

Then came the Flip

A year later, Samsung introduced a device that mattered just as much to its strategy: the Galaxy Z Flip. Where the Fold opened to get bigger, the Flip closed to get smaller. It landed in February 2020 with a 6.7-inch display folding down into something small enough to disappear into a jacket pocket, alongside Samsung's first foldable glass panel, built from Ultra Thin Glass, and a Hideaway Hinge that held the phone open at different angles for Flex Mode.

The Flip's real contribution wasn't a spec. It proved folding technology could serve two different kinds of buyers: people who wanted more screen, and people who wanted less phone. That split still organises everything Samsung builds in this category.

Refining both bets with innovation

Samsung's second generation, later in 2020, sharpened both ideas. The Z Fold2's cover display grew to 6.2 inches, its internal panel to 7.6 inches, and the main screen picked up a 120Hz refresh rate, alongside Sweeper technology to keep dust out of the hinge. The Z Flip, meanwhile, brought foldable glass into the mainstream conversation, pairing it with a compact clamshell body that looked much closer to an ordinary premium phone. The Fold was becoming the tablet-style foldable. The Flip was becoming the pocketable one.

The third generation, in 2021, was about trust rather than novelty. The Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 introduced IPX8 water resistance, reinforced their frames with Armor Aluminum, and Samsung said the main display was 80% more durable than before and tested through 200,000 folding cycles. Fold3 also gained S Pen support, turning the big internal screen from a video novelty into a productivity tool, while Flip3's larger cover display let owners handle more tasks without opening the phone at all.

Engineering the hinge into the background

Foldables live or die by a part no one thinks about on a normal smartphone: the hinge, which decides how a device feels when opened, how tightly it closes, and how much stress it absorbs on every use. Samsung's version evolved quickly, from the original Fold's bulky assembly through Fold2's Hideaway Hinge and Sweeper dust protection to Fold4's lighter linear mechanism and Fold5's Flex Hinge, which finally let the two halves close almost flush. The eighth generation pushes that structural work further still, with a new titanium reinforcement layer under the display on both Fold8 and Fold8 Ultra. By now, the Fold has stopped looking like a phone bolted to a hinge. Samsung isn't just improving the mechanism anymore. It's making it disappear entirely from the user's attention.

What the numbers show, and where the savings went

The original Fold weighed 276 grams, Fold4 brought that to 263 grams, Fold5 to 253, Fold6 to 239, and Fold7 to 215, a run of six straight generations spent chasing grams. Thickness fell just as fast, from 17.1mm folded on the original Fold to 8.9mm folded and 4.2mm unfolded on Fold7, which Samsung called 48% thinner than the phone that started it all.

With Fold8, Samsung stopped spending every recovered gram on thinness alone. Both new models move to a silicon-carbon battery chemistry, a first for a Samsung phone, which packs more capacity into the same or smaller footprint. Fold8 Ultra holds almost exactly to Fold7's profile at 215 grams and 4.1mm unfolded, and puts that stability toward a 5,000mAh battery, up 14% from Fold7's 4,400mAh, and a third rear camera joining the 200-megapixel main sensor. The standard Fold8 takes the opposite bet: an all-new wider, shorter shape that makes it the lightest Fold ever built at 201 grams, a reduction of 75 grams, or roughly 27%, since 2019, and even that lighter body carries a bigger 4,800mAh battery than Fold7 had. The grams didn't just disappear. Across both models they went straight into battery life, and on the Ultra, into a longer camera system as well.

The Flip's scenic route

The Galaxy Z Flip never had to become a tablet. It needed to be a genuinely good smartphone that happened to shrink when closed, which let Samsung lean into portability and self-expression. The 2020 original set the template; Flip3 added water resistance and toughness; Flip5, in 2023, delivered the biggest interface shift in the line's history with a 3.4-inch Flex Window, turning the exterior of a closed phone into a genuinely useful screen. Flip6 brought Galaxy AI into that space in 2024, and Flip7 pushed the Flex Window to 4.1 inches in 2025 while getting noticeably thinner. Flip8 continues that arc at 180 grams and 6.1mm unfolded, with more intuitive Galaxy AI built directly into the Flex Window. By now, the outer display isn't an accessory. It's a destination.

Bigger screens, and a decade of multitasking work behind them

Opening the Fold always got you more screen. The more interesting story is what Samsung built for that space: Multi-Active Window, App Pair and taskbar functionality, all aimed at making the unfolded display useful for running two or three things at once rather than just larger, on top of Samsung DeX for desktop-style use with an external monitor.

The two current Folds put that multitasking foundation to different uses. Fold8 wears an all-new wider, shorter shape, with a 7.6-inch internal display in a 4:3 aspect ratio built for movies, games and immersive browsing, and a 5.5-inch, 10:16 cover screen that feels like an ordinary phone when closed. At 201 grams it's the lightest Fold Samsung has made, and it leans on Galaxy AI's My FanCam, which tracks a chosen subject inside an existing video and automatically reframes the clip around them, layered on top of the same multitasking tools now stretched across a wider canvas. Fold8 Ultra takes the more traditional route, pairing an 8-inch internal panel with a 6.5-inch cover display and a triple rear camera, a 200-megapixel main sensor, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide and a 10-megapixel telephoto with 3x optical zoom, built for buyers who want maximum productivity rather than a new shape. Samsung is no longer asking one screen, or one Fold, to do everything.

Where AI changes the story

Galaxy AI arrived on the Fold line properly with Fold6 in 2024, bringing Note Assist, live translation, transcription and image tools built explicitly around the Fold's large display, the Flip's Flex Window and Flex Mode. Fold7 pushed further into multimodal AI, and Fold8 goes a step further still with agentic behaviour: share a photo of a landmark and ask Gemini to book a nearby hotel, and the assistant searches, filters by the stated criteria and keeps working in the background while the phone is used for something else, surfacing only the choices that need a human's approval. The Fold is edging from hardware curiosity toward a platform for a different style of computing, and on a wider, more capable canvas, that could end up mattering more than anything done to the hinge.

A family, not a phone

The eighth generation makes that shift explicit. Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra is the first device anywhere in the Z series to carry Samsung's Ultra badge, a productivity-first large-screen phone in the tradition Fold7 established. Fold8 is a genuinely new shape, wide and short rather than tall and narrow, built for immersive viewing and creativity. Flip8 continues the compact, expressive playbook the line has followed since 2020. Samsung frames the lineup around three pitches: Ultra productivity, immersive discovery and self-expression, a long way from 2019's single bet that a phone could also be a tablet.

The mainstreaming of an idea: setting a new benchmark

Samsung's real legacy isn't that it got there first, plenty of manufacturers experimented with bendable displays before 2019. It's that Samsung stayed, absorbed the lessons of a genuinely rocky launch, kept investing in the mechanical engineering flexible displays demand, and steadily removed the reasons not to buy one. The Fold asked people to change how they used a phone. The Flip asked them to change how they carried one. Both got lighter, tougher and smarter, and the folding mechanism gradually stopped feeling like a compromise and started feeling like a feature worth choosing.

Eight generations in, that maturity shows up in a decision Samsung couldn't have made in 2019, building two different Folds instead of one. The Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra keeps the proven profile and pours the engineering budget into more camera, more battery and more productivity. The Galaxy Z Fold8 tears up that profile entirely for a new shape built purely around lighter, wider, more immersive viewing. Neither is a compromise standing in for the other. A phone that weighed 276 grams and did one job now comes in two versions built for two different lives, and that kind of choice is only possible once a category has stopped being an experiment and started being a platform.