Hello and welcome to the Vergecast Flagship Podcast, Aspect Ratios. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're gonna talk to The Verge's Dom Preston about potentially the most interesting phone so far of 2026. I of course mean the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, bonkers name, fascinating phone. This is the new wide passport-shaped foldable phone. It came out last week and almost everyone I know or have seen or have watched or have listened to who has even held the thing had a really positive reaction to it. Dom's been testing the phone, he's got a review, and I just need to know, have we finally figured out foldables? We're gonna get into that, but first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, July 29th, 2026.
We continue to learn new details about OpenAI's recent hack of Hugging Face, including the fact that OpenAI's agent actually autonomously attacked a bunch of other services on the web just by finding login credentials on the internet for them. This whole thing is a low-stakes problem this time with super high-stakes potential for next time. And even within OpenAI, there seems to be a sense that this hack was a big deal and that maybe it's time to rethink how we approach AI safety in general, even if that means slowing down the pace of AI improvement for a while. Maybe as some have suggested, this is all just hype for OpenAI's models, but that looks less likely to me all the time.
Meanwhile, the US government announced an import ban on, among other things, humanoid robots. It bans any foreign-made machine larger than 4.4 pounds with a sensor that perceives the world and is capable of, and I'm quoting, locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement on the ground. By my math, that's basically everything, including a lot of like robot vacuums. As with other bans like this, there will be exceptions. It's all very messy and complicated and deal-making, but I guess if you're in the market for a robot, maybe go buy it now.
And finally, DoorDash is hitting the skies. It launched a new service called DoorDash Air and said that it won FAA approval to start flying drones in the near future. Obviously, DoorDash is not the first company to invest in drone delivery, but it turns out drone delivery is hard. Like literally, where do you drop things? But it turns out that the logistical and convenience upside here is apparently just too tantalizing. So you might actually get your air-to-ground Sweetgreen one of these days. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, July 29th.
All right, let's talk foldables. The Verge's Dominic Preston is here. Hi, Dom. You have the foldables. You have the Z Fold 8. You have the Z Fold 8 Ultra. You've been testing them. I will be honest, I mostly just want to talk about the Z Fold 8. I guess this is your first chance to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Z Fold 8 at this point is vastly more interesting a device for a bunch of reasons starting with the actual size and shape of the thing than the Z Fold 8 Ultra. Do you agree with that?
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, the Z Fold 8, I'm gonna try and say that, Z Fold 8 just rolls more naturally off my tongue. The Z Fold 8, obviously it's this whole new shape. It's squatter, it's wider, it's very different. It's something new from Samsung when they've had basically the same two shapes for six or seven years. And also we kind of think maybe we're gonna see another big company make a foldable phone in a shape a little bit like this in a couple months.
Yeah, there are some rumors about that you can say. So for that reason, actually, I want to start with your first experience with the thing. Like I confess I mostly hate an unboxing video, but I actually want your sense of what it felt like to hold the size and shape of the thing because the overarching reaction on the internet has been, it doesn't quite look right in pictures, but then you hold it and there is something about it that immediately makes you go, oh, this is the shape my phone should be. So tell me about your first experience with this kind of wide foldable.
Yeah, I mean, I kind of had the exact feeling you just described. I'd been really skeptical of all of the, we'd had these rumors for months that Samsung and then maybe eventually Apple were gonna adopt this, this wide form factor. We'd seen Huawei do it. They already released a phone a couple months ago in basically this exact same shape as well. And every time I'd seen these images, I'd seen Huawei's phone, I'd seen these prototypes and dummies and mock-ups and renders. I'd always thought, just looks weird. Like why is that phone so short? Why is it so fat? That can't be comfortable to hold. It's gonna be a stretch. It's just clearly gonna feel wrong. You just look at it and you know it's gonna feel wrong. And then I picked it up and like you said, you just kind of go, oh, that kind of works.
And you know, holding it closed, like using it just as the kind of, you know, regular closed, this is my normal smartphone experience. It's definitely a little odd. It took me a little getting used to, but when I say a little, I really mean a minute or two at Samsung's launch event. This is not like days of testing a thing and now it finally feels about right. I played around with this thing for an hour ahead of Samsung's launch and I thought, cool. Yeah, that's a very normal size for a phone to be actually. It turns out that works. I don't know that I came away like, bam, all phones should be this shape. I want to, you know, throw my current tall phone in the trash and grab this short little fat one. But it does work. I think there are a few like weird exceptions. I've run into a couple apps that render a little oddly and places where maybe the shortness of the display ends up feeling awkward rather than intuitive. But for the most part, it works.
And then obviously you, you open it up and you get this basically tablet shape and size screen. It's four by three on the inside, which is pretty much the shape of an iPad. So that obviously just quickly feels intuitive in a way that the older Z Folds, those Z Folds, you know, that kind of squarish taller thing always took a bit of getting used to. That's like two phones taped together. This is just a tablet.
So I agree completely about the internal screen. And I think even in photos side by side, you can see how it makes more sense, right? Because I think the thing with the taller ones for me has been that there are fairly clearly right and wrong ways to hold it. And I think even on the Z Fold 8 Ultra and its predecessors, it feels too tall on the outside and then you open it up and it feels just right in landscape open, but it's too tall again in portrait open. And so it's like, okay, we've made a bunch of sacrifices in order to get this one big wide screen. And I just don't, I am not a believer in that form factor. This one seems like it works internally in landscape. It works internally in portrait. And the one I have actually been most curious about is does it work closed? And I'm curious to know where you've run into some edges with this because everything on every phone for so many years now has been built for essentially a 16:9 portrait screen. What have you noticed, whether it's in Android itself or in One UI or in apps that you've been trying? Where does it not quite feel adapted to this new screen size?
Okay, so the first one I think a lot of people are gonna run into, and this is absolutely Samsung's fault, and I can't believe they didn't fix this and ship this with a slightly tweaked version going in. But the moment you pull down on the quick settings tray in this default One UI, I've not changed any of the settings here. It just doesn't actually all fit. You have to scroll down a bit to get all of your quick settings, which no longer feel quite so quick. And that's a tiny little thing, right? It's just that there's one row more than can fit on the screen and they could just remove a row. You can obviously go in and edit all this and take a row off. But it's one of those bits that just shows, yeah, okay, some of the default ways Android and apps are gonna run are just gonna feel a little bit awkward here.
The things that have gone actually wrong, I've seen a couple apps. I use Withings, I have a Withings watch and I use that for health tracking. And so one time I opened that and all of the app icons at the top of the screen had just kind of crunched together and were laid over the top of each other as it was trying to render everything.
This makes me think of like, do you remember when the iPhone first went to the notch and all of a sudden there were things in apps that would just be bumped up into that top part of the screen that weren't supposed to be? And it's like, yes, everybody can fix this. Yes, everybody eventually will. But you can just see how even these tiny little changes to the screen actually can jumble up a lot of things that have been very specifically placed.
Exactly. These small changes just screw things up in whole other ways. And Google has been working on this problem. It's been really working with developers and pushing the idea that Android should be more reactive, should be able to be more flexible around screen sizes. This has been to make it better on tablets where it has kind of always played second fiddle to iPadOS, but also for foldables, obviously. But it's still the case that because there has been such a default set of foldable shapes and sizes, there are still edge cases as soon as someone goes, oh, here's a new size and shape we can do. And it turns out developers just haven't made things reactive in quite the right perfect ways for it to all come together.
The other one I've seen kind of going the other way, I've seen a couple places where stuff at the top of the screen crunches because it's short. The other one I've seen is Instagram. This has happened sporadically to me. It's not every time or anything. But sometimes I'll open Instagram on the closed screen and there'll just be a white bar running down the right-hand side of the screen kind of where the extra width is. And clearly the app just runs into that width and doesn't know what to do with it so it fills it with white.
So it's not quite hitting another responsive breakpoint, but it's not designed to fill that space. So it's just like, I don't know, we'll just end right here.
Yeah, something like that. It just kind of gives up in rendering partway through.
I feel like you just described every single one of my complaints with the Android design system right there. So the biggest upside I would think of this slightly wider screen on the outside is potentially that it would be better for typing with two thumbs. I would assume it's worse for typing with one thumb. And as a person who resolutely holds my phone in my hand with a pop socket and tries to type with one thumb and you have to do that kind of like reachy thing all the way across, even that sucks. And I am assuming it's far worse on the Fold 8. But I would also think that even just a little tiny bit of extra width would make typing on this thing really nice on the external screen. Am I right or am I wrong?
Yeah, the extra width feels really comfortable. I am a default two-handed typer. I hate trying to type one-handed. I think because the experience sucks. I used to always do the kind of swipey keyboard stuff, and then I got fed up of how many errors it kind of brought in. And I've just gone back to, I would use two thumbs like a Neanderthal and deal with it. And it is a little more comfortable with this. I think, you know, if you look at the size and shape, it's a little bit like a BlackBerry almost. And obviously you're not getting the keyboard, but I think just that extra kind of squatness does just give a bit more space for you to get two hands side by side on the back of the phone and space for the two thumbs to not be sort of tripping over each other as you try and type.
That goes a long way. That feels like just little bits of input things like that to me are the things where it's like, okay, you've made this a functionally more usable phone for me. Just tiny bits of little increases like that in we have a little more space. Maybe it can be a little taller. There's just little things on all of these devices that you can play with that I feel like, for me at least, go a super long way in making things feel actually pleasant to use.
Yeah, it feels pleasant and it just kind of feels a bit more fun. I mean, I'll say when I go to the gym, I have to scan a barcode from my app to get in. And the other day, the guy at the front desk was like, whoa, cool phone. What is that? And wanted to know about it. And this was before I'd opened it up. So I went to show him and he was like, whoa, it folds. But he didn't realize it was a foldable. He didn't know it was a Samsung. He just saw this little squarish form factor and thought, that's cool, I want one.
So, okay. Tease that out for me actually, because I think that is another reaction people have had. And I can't decide if it's just novel or if there is actually something about this shape, even absent the unfolding, which I want to get to. But it does seem like there's something about a phone that looks like this that just, it just scratches some itch that people have. And again, it might just be that it's a different looking phone and people are excited about different looking phones. But is there something about it even closed that feels better in some way to you?
Yeah, there's definitely a chunk of this that is pure novelty. And that is true for me. And I'm trying to sort of rationalize the bit of me that enjoys this because it's different and phones could be boring. And the bit of me that's like, does this form factor really work for me? One thing that I think does is actually, as much as the extra width gives benefits, but also kind of makes it say awkward to stretch your thumb across the phone horizontally, the shortness makes it much easier to stretch my thumb up the phone to the top, to swipe down with my notifications. I don't have to do that kind of shuffle of my grip up the phone to reach the top and swipe down. It's just within reach all the time.
And one of the things I've kind of realized as I've been testing this is if you set aside the extra width, this is just a small phone. And everyone wants small phones, except that no one buys small phones. But this has been the thing. Everyone complains that we don't have small phones anymore. And there are many, literally many dimensions in which a phone could be small, but one of them is height, and that's actually the one that's been the most neglected. We've seen people trying to make phones thinner, but it's been a long time since anyone's made one shorter. And I do think for some people lamenting the death of the small phone, this might scratch that itch because it is just a shorter display. It's much easier to reach the whole height of the display with one hand or with two hands without needing to adjust them too much. So that's definitely part of what I think makes it more comfortable and more pleasant.
You just made me realize why I'm excited about this device. I have always been on the side of flip phones over foldable phones because I think big phone that turns into bigger phone is not that useful. iPhone Pro that folds out into an iPad, I actually don't think is all that much a utility gain for most things. But I'm a big believer in phone that folds into smaller thing, right? Watch that unfolds into phone I think is a very cool idea. It changes the way you interact with device. It lets you use it in different ways for different contexts. And this is actually maybe the closest thing to the perfect sweet spot that we've seen. It is a small phone, but it is still a fully functional phone even when it's closed. And then when you open it, it is now somewhere between big phone and tablet. So you're getting it, the downside would be it's sort of an awkward tweener that is a little bit bad at everything. But it sounds like in reality, this form factor might actually be something much closer to the best of both worlds. That it is small and big in one package, but it's not so big or so small that it becomes useless. Does that make sense? This feels like it might have hit that middle space really nicely.
Yeah, totally. I've seen, I think it was 9to5Google ran a piece around Samsung's launch kind of making the case that this feels like this might be the last hurrah for the Flip series because the Flip 8 was a kind of small, subtle upgrade. It didn't change a whole lot other than some software stuff for the outside screen mostly.
Ironically, to make it bigger. They just made more outside screen now.
Exactly. But this phone kind of feels like it could serve that space because like you say, it's the small tablet that folds down to a small phone. And that was always kind of the pitch of the Z Flip series for me was like you say, you just want your phone to get smaller in your pocket. And this does that. This is a smaller phone in my pocket than most other phones are. It's that bit bigger than the flip phones though, so that suddenly it really is a fully usable total phone without compromise while it's closed. And obviously they're getting better at what they can do with the Flips. It was a big part of Samsung's focus here. That's been what Motorola's been pushing on its Razrs for a long time. But there feels like there's a bit of a recognition of like, oh, if we just make the closed version of this a little bigger, suddenly it is a real phone. We don't have to work so hard to make it feel like one. And we can just move on with our lives and say it's a slightly bigger version of a Flip that opens up and gives you a slightly bigger phone on the inside.
Yeah. What is your experience so far with what makes you actually open the screen? I feel like everyone I talk to who gets a foldable phone ends up surprised at how rarely they open the phone. Has that been your experience so far too?
I have definitely noticed a shift in how I'm using this compared to how I've used previous foldables. And that is to say I am opening it more. I kind of hate reviewing foldable phones because I am not the target market for a big foldable. When I review them, I never open them. I kind of have to make myself. I have to remind myself, oh, open this thing. Try and do some multitasking. Open emails and Bluesky at the same time for some reason. Just find something to do with all that screen space.
And I think that's how actually a lot of these users experience these devices, right? Which means all you've actually done is bought a needlessly thick, needlessly problematic, needlessly expensive version of your phone. And it's been one of the things that has talked me out of these devices for a long time is that there aren't a lot of compelling moments where you have to immediately open your giant foldable phone to be the other thing that it is supposed to be. But you're saying this one maybe is a little more naturally flowing between the two.
It is. And I think you could probably cast that in both a good way and a bad way. I open it more specifically for reading. If I'm reading a longer article or anything like that, I really feel that instinct to open the phone, turn it into a kind of portrait orientation in the tablet mode and read like that. And it feels like a really natural screen size and aspect ratio. It's kind of like having an e-reader or something. Obviously it's not e-ink, but it's that kind of size and shape. And it feels very natural to read that. I don't really do ebooks that often, but if I did, I bet I would kind of enjoy this again with the caveats that e-ink is better.
I think part of that though is also that that squished down smaller outer screen is not great for reading. It's good for a lot of things, but actually everything does feel a bit squashed and small and you don't have very much vertical space and you're scrolling all the time so you're trying to read something. So there's sort of good and bad. You open it because it's a really nice experience to read on the inside, but you also do it a little bit because it's a slightly worse experience than you're used to trying to read on the outside.
I have used it a bit for watching stuff. I'm not really a movie watcher on my phone, even on a tablet. I do that when I'm flying and that's about it. But I have tried that a bit while reviewing this. And again, I can see that that will work very well for some people because you do get that extra screen space. The shape of it means you get a little bit more screen in landscape open for watching video or playing a game, I guess, than you would if you used the kind of classic tall Z Fold and now Ultra shape. It's not loads more though. It is just kind of a little better than what you got before.
That's interesting. And that actually tracks fairly closely to the way Samsung has pitched this thing. Even in that launch event, right? They're talking about the outer screen being for sort of quick hits, scrolling and typing and responding to text messages and whatever. And then when you want to really dive into something, you open up the screen. And the way they talk about it is very like, I am a YouTuber and I watch a short and then I decide to duet the short. So I open up the screen and duet the short. And I think all of that is kind of contrived and ridiculous, but that's also the experience you want, right? That it does sort of naturally move from one screen to the other where you're like, okay, I can do a bunch of stuff on this screen.
And this is the problem people have with flip phones is I think you run out of the list of things that are fun to do on the outer screen too quickly. Even on the, you know, on the Razr, you go to respond to a text message and you pull up the keyboard and it takes up the whole screen so that you can't see the message you're replying to. Like now it has fallen apart and I have to open up the screen. You hit that threshold too quickly on a flip phone. Whereas on this one, it sounds like, that threshold still exists. But you hit it a little more seamlessly where it's like, okay, yes, there is stuff I can and want to do on the outer screen, but then there is a natural set of things that makes me open the display. And that's the right list. Whereas like you go to the Ultra and you never hit that thing because you have a fully fledged gigantic screen phone on the outside. So there's no reason to open it up unless you really want to.
So I think like this all might be me just, you know, being nice to a phone that kind of sucks on the outside for some things, but that division of labor actually makes some sense to me in terms of how you're supposed to use this thing.
Yeah, I definitely feel like anytime I want to kind of engage with a task or some hashtag content for more than 20 seconds or so, it feels very natural to say, oh, I'll treat myself to the big screen and I'll open it up. And yeah, that makes more sense to me than that other shape. That other shape, and certainly the way Samsung's now pitching the Ultra this year is really that that is the productivity device. And the Fold 8 is the content consumption device. And, you know, I could quibble with elements of that, but I think it basically makes sense.
I mean, I think there's then that big question of how many people, as you said, really want a foldable for productivity? How many people really do use that multitasking that they're pitching the Ultra for? I think it is better for that. I think, you know, the extra height you get on the Ultra and Samsung classic form factor here, Samsung basically says when you open up the Ultra, you're getting the equivalent of two 6.5-inch smartphones side by side. And that means it really feels natural to pull an app on each one and do stuff with it. I don't use my phone that way. I haven't figured out why that would ever make sense for me in my job. But maybe it does for someone out there, and that's great. People say they use it that way. And so the Ultra definitely feels better for that.
As soon as you try and do that with this, you're gonna feel weirdly compromised because you're gonna pull an app up in each one and you're like, oh, cool. I've just got the same slightly short and stubby apps I had on the outer screen. And that's great for some things. That's great for messaging, that's great for little web browsing. But it's kind of annoying if I'm actually trying to, I don't know, open a spreadsheet or check my stocks or whatever business people do. This one doesn't feel right for that.
So this is also why I think you may have just explained why Apple would be interested in this form factor, right? Because I think I always think about the very first iPad demo being Steve Jobs sitting in a comfy chair just casually browsing on his device. And I think that was the original conception of the iPad, right? Is that it is, it is bigger, it's more immersive, but it's very casual. It is not like a capital P productivity device. And I think in a way, Apple has kind of lost its mind about what the iPad is supposed to be. And to the extent that this gives you both the sort of super productive everything in your fingertips phone, but then opens up into something a little calmer and a little more casual and a little more roomy, feels like it is actually close to the original conception of what is the iPhone and what is the iPad.
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My last question on this, and I have two more Z Fold things I want to know about, is it sure seems like the industry is about to decide that this is the correct size and shape, you know, give or take a little bit around the edges of a foldable phone. Is that a good idea? Like by the end of 2026, if the whole phone industry is like, this is what foldables look like, do you think we've landed in the right place?
I think we've landed in a place that's probably more appealing to more people. I think, as you said, I think the use case for this is a big screen productivity. I want a mini computer that folds up into my pocket thing kind of felt like it made sense and I don't know how many people actually could or would want to use their phone that way.
