Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra has failed a bend test from JerryRigEverything, the first time one of the company’s foldables has broken under the channel’s manual durability check. The Z Fold 8 Ultra is the priciest and thinnest phone in Samsung’s foldable range, and until this test every Z Fold that came before it had survived the same abuse.
JerryRigEverything’s test is independent of Samsung: the channel opens and closes the phone by hand, then applies lateral bending force well past anything a normal folding motion produces, to find the point where the hinge or internal frame gives way. It has run the identical test on every Z Fold generation, and Samsung’s phones have held up even as each generation got thinner. The Z Fold 8 Ultra is where that run ends.
How the Z Fold 8 Ultra held up before now
Samsung has spent several generations shaving millimetres off the Z Fold line while keeping the hinge and internal frame stiff enough to survive independent bend and torsion tests. That combination, thin body plus a frame that does not flex under pressure, is the harder engineering problem than thinness on its own: it is easy to make a foldable thin, and much harder to make a thin foldable resist a sideways bend without its screen or frame cracking. The Z Fold 8 Ultra is the thinnest Z Fold Samsung has shipped, and 9to5Google’s report on the test points to that thinness as the likely reason it finally gave out where its predecessors did not.
What the failure says about this year’s foldables
The Z Fold 8 Ultra is not the only foldable from this summer’s crop to fail a bend test. Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold, which we reported on cracking in its own bend test as its price climbed, showed the same pattern: a book-style foldable pushed thinner while priced higher, then failing a stress test that older, thicker models in the same line passed. Two separate manufacturers, two separate hinge designs, and the same outcome, suggests the trade-off between thinness and structural durability is a shared limit for the current generation of foldables rather than a flaw specific to one phone.
For anyone deciding whether to buy a Z Fold 8 Ultra, this does not mean the phone will crack in normal use. JerryRigEverything’s bend test applies force no owner would ever put through a phone in daily handling. What it does confirm is that Samsung’s margin for error has narrowed: previous Z Folds had enough structural slack to absorb that kind of extreme abuse and still close normally afterwards, and this one does not.
Image: The photo: Samsung Galaxy ZThe screenshots: Google via Openverse, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
