The Galaxy Z Fold8 is the nicest foldable Samsung has made. It’s thinner, lighter, and, crucially, shaped less like a weird folding tech demo and more like a normal expensive thing people might actually buy. Five million preorders suggest Samsung isn’t alone in thinking the category has finally grown up (or maybe just that the preorder deals were too good to pass up).

Samsung has also gone directly after foldables’ most visible scar: the crease down the middle of the inner display. The Fold8 pairs a redesigned hinge with a new titanium-reinforced display structure meant to help the screen open flatter.

Unfortunately, like every folding phone, the Fold8 still has one enormous liability: it folds.

Pocket Sand, Meet $2,000 Phone

The Fold8 carries an IP48 ingress-protection rating. That 8 means strong water resistance. The 4 only protects against solid objects 1 millimeter in diameter or larger. In other words, this phone is not dustproof. Samsung itself warns owners to keep dust and sand away from the hinge.

Folding phones are a great option for anyone who lives and works in a cleanroom.

So naturally, we put dust in it.

Our dust test is not an IP certification test. The UV-reactive powder we used is much finer than typical beach sand. The glow just lets us see where it travels. Under the microscope, some powder and ordinary-dirt particles measured around 0.04 mm. Even relatively chunky beach sand in our sample had grains around 0.16 mm, well below the 1 mm threshold covered by an IP4X rating.

Look at all that UV dust glowing in the hinge.

After working the Fold8 open and closed, the hinge started making truly awful crunching and grinding noises, and the phone stopped opening normally. If your $2,000 phone sounds like it’s chewing gravel, that’s generally frowned upon. It’s also the exact same problem we’ve been tracking in foldables for many years.

The good news is that the dust mostly stayed put. Once we got inside, Samsung deserved some credit. The back cover isn’t awful to remove, and the sealed portions of the phone did a surprisingly good job. There was some UV dust around the edges and near the cameras, but the batteries, boards, and main electronics were remarkably clean.

A mixture of glowing UV sand and dark iFixit office dirt under a microscope under our Evident Scientific microscope. The line in the bottom right is 200 μm. The Z Fold8 hinge will struggle with anything under 1mm, including many of the particles we observed in dirt and sand. A Lot of Engineering Lives Inside That Crunch

Before subjecting the hinge to mechanical seasoning, we put the clean Fold8 through our beloved Lumafield Neptune CT Scanner. Samsung describes the Fold8’s opening system as a balance between “hinge mechanics, display tension, and magnetic force,” and the CT scan shows just how much coordinated movement folding one screen in half requires. All those moving surfaces also give fine particles plenty of places to cause trouble.

Samsung has reinforced the display itself, too. Its new “Flex Titanium” structure uses two titanium-based components beneath the OLED: a titanium-alloy film and a perforated titanium support plate. We cut into the display and found both. The film is roughly one-third the thickness of an average human hair, but Samsung says it’s 20 times stiffer than the polymer film used in its previous folding displays.

Those stiffer backing layers support the flexible OLED and help it return to a flatter shape after each fold. The crease is still there. It just has considerably more titanium fighting against it.

Whether that helps over the long term is still an open question. Foldable creases do not follow a neat aging schedule. One Fold8 reviewer has already seen the crease become more visible after only seven days, though it remained cosmetic. Some Fold6 and Fold7 owners report being unbothered by the crease after 10 to 12 months, while other long-term users of foldables have seen it become increasingly prominent. 

Here’s what the crease looks like on our Z Fold8 on day one (move the slider to see it with and without a video playing on the screen). It’s most noticeable in reflected light.

More seriously, some folding displays have developed black lines, dead pixels, or lost touch response at the fold, though display failure is a different problem from a cosmetic crease becoming deeper.

Samsung says Flex Titanium should reduce crease visibility over time. We’ll need long-term Fold8 use to know whether it actually does.

Better Batteries, Worse Access

The Fold8 has two exceptionally thin battery cells, with 18.68 watt-hours of capacity between them. Samsung continues to use the battery pull jackets we’ve praised in recent devices, letting the cells come free without drowning the device in solvent or dangerous prying. They still bent more than we’d like during removal, but the easy-release adhesive is a genuine repair win.

These are also silicon-carbon lithium-ion batteries. Silicon can store more lithium than the graphite commonly used in conventional anodes, increasing energy density, though its tendency to expand during charging creates engineering challenges of its own.

The Fold8 batteries deliver an 8.8% capacity increase over the Fold7 and, by our measurements, roughly a 5% increase in volumetric energy density.

Unfortunately, easy battery removal does not mean easy battery replacement. The two cells live on opposite halves of the phone, and getting to one requires going through the outer display. That’s a fragile, expensive component held down with very strong adhesive. A consumable part should not require putting another high-value component at that much risk.

Don’t Count on Replacing the Inner Display or Hinge

Still, there are a few repair-friendly choices worth praising. Samsung uses ordinary JIS/Phillips screws throughout. The USB-C port sits on its own cable instead of being soldered to a larger board, which gives a high-wear component a fighting chance at independent replacement. And if the outer display fails, at least it’s straightforward to access, even if its adhesive is extremely strong.

But nothing hurts the Fold8’s score like the inner display and hinge.

The plastic bezel surrounding the folding display chipped, cracked, and broke into pieces as we removed it.

Chiseling the inner screen out felt more like archaeology than repair.

The flexible OLED itself lifted more easily than expected, but between the fragile bezel and delicate display stack, our inner screen did not survive the procedure.

Samsung has previously treated the hinge and inner display as one replacement assembly, and for scoring purposes we have to assume the Fold8 will follow the same pattern. Damage to either component would therefore require essentially emptying the phone to replace the whole assembly.

Both battery cells are sacrificed in the process. You also run a substantial risk of damaging the outer display and selfie cameras along the way. It’s an expensive, painful repair even when everything goes right, and “everything goes right” is asking a lot.

Replacing the main camera array also requires removing the main board and replacing the thermal compound underneath it. 

And all of these repairs assume you can actually buy the parts. Official replacement parts for last year’s Fold7 remain scarce, which doesn’t make us optimistic about the Fold8’s parts outlook.

Samsung Says They’ve Solved the Foldable Crease. Now Can Someone Solve Foldable Repair?

Samsung eventually published a repair manual for the Fold7, and we’re optimistic the Fold8 will get one too. That documentation is just enough to bring our provisional repairability score to a fair 4 out of 10.

There are repairability bright spots, particularly the modular charge port and excellent battery pull jackets. But they can’t overcome the Fold8’s painful hinge and inner-display repair path, difficult battery replacement, and uncertain parts support.

The Fold8 proves something important: foldable smartphones can feel mature enough for mainstream consumers. But the question remains: can a foldable phone be repairable?

We’ll probably get a look at Apple’s answer next month. So far, Samsung’s answer sounds a lot like a hinge chewing gravel.