Tag Archives: Samsung

Xiaomi Takes the IFA 2026 Spotlight as Samsung Makes A Quiet Exit After 35 Years

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Imagine spending 35 years building the most recognizable booth at the world’s biggest consumer electronics show, then deciding one year to just… not. That is exactly what Samsung is doing at IFA 2026. The company is hosting its own event at the Humboldt Carré, a conference venue in central Berlin, eight kilometers from Messe, starting September 2, two days before the official show opens. Samsung frames this as a focused environment for media briefings, retail meetings, and product launches, following the same logic it applied at CES 2026 when it left the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Wynn Hotel. Doing it twice in the same year starts to look less like a pivot and more like a policy.

While Samsung manages its event across town, Xiaomi is inside Messe Berlin, confirmed for Hall 6.2, with a full ecosystem pitch and no obvious competitor stealing the spotlight. Xiaomi announced its IFA commitment at the official IFA Kick-Off on June 30, attaching a €7.4 billion AI R&D budget to the news, covering electric vehicles, robotics, and operating systems through 2028. Its IoT platform connects over 1.16 billion devices as of mid-2026, which gives the “Human x Car x Home” pitch real substance beyond the marketing copy. Samsung will sponsor the IFA Creator Hub, a content studio for influencers at Palais am Funkturm. But a sponsorship is a very different thing from anchoring a show floor, and Xiaomi is anchoring the show floor.

Photo Credits: IFA

At CES 2026, Samsung left the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Wynn Hotel and applied museum-style layout techniques to give visitors more time with each product. The Humboldt Carré plan at IFA runs on exactly the same idea, consolidating launches, tech forums, and partner meetings under one roof with dedicated space for hands-on AI appliance experiences. Samsung also has a footprint inside Messe Berlin as the main sponsor of the IFA Creator Hub, a content studio for influencers at Palais am Funkturm. It will run its own programming there throughout show week. But sponsoring a content studio is a different brand position from anchoring a product booth, and on the Messe floor, that position now belongs to whoever occupies it.

Photo Credits: IFA

Reports place the Galaxy S26 FE launch on September 4, the same day IFA officially opens, which means every journalist in Berlin will be writing about a Samsung phone from inside a building Samsung chose not to be in. LG, TCL, and Hisense all held their hall bookings and published their stand numbers months ago. Xiaomi is in Hall 6.2, a short walk from the main press areas. The reporters who glance up from S26 FE coverage will be standing next to Samsung’s biggest competitors. The brand generating the most ambient attention on the Messe floor will simply be the one that actually showed up.

Xiaomi’s pitch at IFA 2026 carries weight because the company has actually built the ecosystem it is selling. Its IoT platform connects over 1.16 billion devices as of June 2026, phones and laptops excluded, which gives the “Human x Car x Home” framing real shelf-stocking credibility for European retailers. The €7.4 billion AI R&D commitment for 2026 to 2028, spanning electric vehicles, robotics, and operating systems, is sized for institutional buyers rather than spec-sheet readers. Xiaomi landed on the Fortune Global 500 for the seventh consecutive year in July 2026, ranked 232nd. It arrives at IFA knowing exactly what it wants from a European room, and with the numbers to back that up.

Photo Credits: IFA

Samsung’s controlled-environment strategy has a clean logic that gets harder to apply the bigger the show it leaves behind. Moving off the floor eliminates accidental comparisons, crowded aisles, and competitor booths visible from your own press conference, but it also removes the organic brand visibility a trade show generates just by being a trade show. Xiaomi does not have that problem this year. It is physically present in the room where buying decisions happen, where retail partnerships get formed over product demos, and where IFA’s roughly 220,000 annual visitors walk through looking for the next big thing. If the floor plan is the argument, Xiaomi is winning it before the doors even open.

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Galaxy Z Fold 8 vs Fold 8 Ultra: Why the ‘Better’ Phone is a Worse Deal

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PCMag spent real time with both new Samsung foldables and walked away calling the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra the most capable foldable the company has ever shipped. Then it gave its Editors’ Choice award to the cheaper one anyway. That’s a strange thing to watch happen in real time, kind of like a judge handing the trophy to the runner who finished second because they liked her shoes better. Samsung built a $2,099.99 phone with a 200MP main camera, a 3x telephoto lens, a bigger battery, and the largest screens in the Fold lineup, and the people paid to obsess over spec sheets shrugged and picked the $1,899.99 model instead.

Forbes landed in the same spot. So did Android Police, in a review literally titled around the Ultra’s problem being the other phone. The Ultra is winning almost every line item on paper, and almost nobody who has actually used both wants to pay extra for it. Something broke in Samsung’s foldable hierarchy this year, and I don’t think $200 is where you’ll find the crack.

Designer: Samsung

Here’s the part that should embarrass the Ultra a little. Both phones run the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, carry the same storage and RAM tiers, and charge at the same 45W wired speed. The Ultra’s real advantages are a 200MP main sensor against the standard Fold 8’s 50MP, an extra 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, and a 5,000mAh battery next to the Fold 8’s 4,800mAh. That last gap is worth about one extra hour of video playback by Samsung’s own numbers, which is not nothing, but it’s also not $200 of nothing. You’re basically paying a camera tax dressed up as a flagship tax.

The engineering story underneath both phones is actually the good part, and it’s the part nobody’s arguing about. Flex Titanium tucks an alloy film thinner than a third of a human hair under the OLED panel, backed by a titanium plate for flatness, and reviewers who’ve run a finger across the open screen say the crease is basically gone. GSMArena called it more uniform and flat under direct touch. I’ll admit I didn’t expect Samsung to actually solve this after years of “reduced crease” claims that meant “still very much a crease.” This year it sounds like they meant it.

That fix cost something, and Samsung didn’t exactly advertise the trade. Flex Mode, the half-open laptop stance the Fold line has offered forever, no longer works on the standard Fold 8 because the new hinge can’t hold itself at 90 degrees. It survives on the Ultra, barely, described by reviewers as fiddly to trigger. Nobody put that on a spec sheet, and it’s a bigger design story than either phone’s camera bump.

Which brings me to the actual confusion. The Ultra name is supposed to mean “take the flagship, stack on the best of everything, charge more,” the way it works on the S series. This year the Ultra is following the Fold 7’s shape while the plain Fold 8 ships an entirely new passport-style body, different aspect ratio, different case ecosystem, zero parts compatibility. 9to5Google flat out called the Ultra the boring option this generation. Two phones share a family name and nothing else, and the one without the suffix is the one people actually want to talk about.

I’d take the regular Fold 8. Not because the Ultra is bad, it clearly isn’t, but because Samsung finally shipped a foldable shape that argues for itself instead of a spec sheet arguing for you. That’s rarer than a good camera.

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Samsung Killed the Galaxy Note, but This S27 Concept Brings It Back

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Samsung’s Ultra lineup has been on a gradual softening trajectory. The hard, squared-off corners that made early Galaxy S Ultra and Note phones feel deliberately architectural gave way to progressively rounder edges with each generation, culminating in the S26 Ultra’s fully rounded ergonomic corners. For users who preferred the original boxy confidence of those older devices, that direction has been a slow farewell to something they actually liked.

This concept for a Galaxy S27 Ultra reverses that. The sharp 90° corners are back, along with flat top and bottom edges that give the phone a distinctly geometric presence. The “Galaxy Note” name appears on the packaging, framing this as a full revival of Samsung’s discontinued productivity flagship identity rather than just another Ultra iteration. It’s a design argument about what the phone should have stayed.

Designer: AndroidLeo

The most unexpected element on the back isn’t the camera. Nestled beside the vertical triple-lens array is a dot-matrix LED display that shows customizable pixel art animations, swapping between icons as conditions change. It’s the same logic that Nothing applied with its Glyph Matrix and that ASUS uses on ROG devices: the back of a phone has real estate that can do something, and simply leaving it matte glass feels increasingly like an opportunity missed.

In practice, that small display becomes a second layer of expression without pulling attention away from the main screen. Notification icons, charge indicators, and personalizable graphics all live on a surface that’s visible when the phone rests face down or sits on a desk, the exact moment when the front display is least useful. The concept proposes this as an attention filter as much as a personalization feature.

The S Pen slots into the bottom rail via a spring-ejected silo, appearing chunkier than the slim stylus Galaxy Note and Ultra users are familiar with, which may be more a rendering artifact than an intended design change. The front is a flat, edge-to-edge panel with a dual punch-hole selfie camera configuration at the top center, serving the kind of stylus-optimized interface that the Note series built its identity around. The high-contrast red UI reads as purpose-designed for wide-open canvas navigation.

Camera specifications go ambitious: a 200MP main sensor paired with 48MP Sony sensors and periscope telephoto optics round out the vertical lens configuration. The USB-C port, notably, isn’t centered on the bottom edge, a small but visible deviation from convention. And this is where the whimsical and fantastical nature of the design shows through.

None of this is real, of course. Samsung hasn’t announced any plans to revive the Note name, and the dot-matrix display exists in the realm of render enthusiasm rather than confirmed engineering. What the concept captures is a reasonable frustration: the Ultra line has drifted from the qualities that made it distinct, and features appearing elsewhere, like Nothing’s Glyph Matrix, suggest the broader market hasn’t fully moved past wanting the back of a phone to say something.

The post Samsung Killed the Galaxy Note, but This S27 Concept Brings It Back first appeared on Yanko Design.

5 Ways Galaxy Z Fold 7 Still Impresses Over the New Fold 8 Ultra (Including the $600 Price Difference)

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Samsung has perfected the art of making last year’s phone feel obsolete before you have even recycled the box. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra landed July 22, 2026, with the usual fanfare: bigger battery, upgraded display, new Ultra branding, and a price tag to match. The Galaxy Z Fold 7, meanwhile, has been sitting quietly for a year building a case for itself that the Fold 8 Ultra cannot simply overwrite by being launched 365 days later. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 arrived in July 2025 as the thinnest and lightest book-style foldable Samsung had ever made, and the design bets it placed around weight, thinness, and camera hardware are ones the newer phone essentially confirms rather than replaces. Sometimes the sequel’s biggest achievement is simply showing what its predecessor got right.

At 4.2mm unfolded, 8.9mm folded, and 215 grams, last year’s Fold 7 was truly a generational leap in design and form factor. It shed 24 grams and 3 full millimeters in folded thickness from the Fold 6 (which measured 12.1mm folded shut), gained a 6.5-inch 21:9 cover display that made it genuinely usable without unfolding, and became the first Samsung foldable to carry a 200MP main camera. We covered that form-factor leap when the Fold 7 launched, noting how the hands-on experience felt categorically different from any Fold before it. The Fold 8 Ultra starts at $2,099.99, a full $100 above the Fold 7’s launch price, and street pricing on the older phone has already settled to as low as $1,499.99 with no trade-in required (that’s a $600 discount on what’s essentially last year’s phone). Before anyone files the Fold 7 under “last year’s news,” here are five reasons why I might just end up recommending the Z Fold 7 over this year’s Z Fold 8 Ultra.

1. The 0.1mm Difference You Will Never Actually Feel

The Fold 8 Ultra unfolds to 4.1mm and the Fold 7 unfolds to 4.2mm, a gap of exactly 0.1mm, roughly the thickness of a sheet of copier paper. The Fold 7 was the phone that did the heavy lifting to get here: it jumped from 5.6mm to 4.2mm unfolded in a single generation, dropping folded thickness from 12.1mm to 8.9mm, a shift dramatic enough that GSMArena observed at launch that those numbers put it “well within the range of a normal, non-bendable smartphone.” We noted the same thing in our hands-on coverage when the Fold 7 shipped: the form factor breakthrough had already happened. The Fold 8 Ultra shaves one more paper-thin slice off a number the Fold 7 already made impressive, and then stops. The Fold 7 earned the thinness headline. The Fold 8 Ultra mostly inherited it.

The Fold 8 Ultra holds that same 215g weight while fitting a 5,000mAh battery, up 14% from the Fold 7’s 4,400mAh cell, by switching to a silicon-carbon composite anode that stores significantly more energy per unit of physical volume than conventional graphite. That is real engineering and it deserves credit. The catch is that maintaining a 4.1mm profile with Flex Titanium, a two-layer titanium system replacing the polymer film beneath the OLED panel, also means the display is now physically incompatible with the EMR digitizer the S Pen requires, so neither the Fold 8 nor the Fold 8 Ultra support stylus input in any form. You would need a caliper to prove which phone is technically thinner, and you have lost the S Pen on both. Most people carry neither.

2. Both Weigh Exactly 215 Grams

Samsung’s own comparison page lists both the Fold 7 and the Fold 8 Ultra at exactly 215 grams, which is either proof that Samsung found the sweet spot a year ago or a quiet admission that the successor could not improve on it. When the Fold 7 launched, Samsung made a point of noting it weighed less than the Galaxy S25 Ultra, a legitimately striking benchmark for a book-style foldable carrying a full 8-inch display inside. That weight, combined with the 8.9mm folded profile and the new 21:9 cover screen, was the ergonomic package that made the Fold 7 feel like a phone you could carry all day rather than one you carry as a statement. The Fold 8 Ultra holds that same 215 grams while fitting a larger battery, which is impressive. But from your palm, your jacket pocket, or your wrist after a full day, there is no difference between the two.

The Galaxy Z Fold 6 weighed 239 grams and folded to 12.1mm, numbers that made daily carry feel like a deliberate lifestyle choice rather than an automatic one. Samsung spent multiple generations chipping away at that figure while simultaneously adding larger displays, bigger batteries, and more complex hinge hardware. The Fold 7 was where the weight finally cleared a threshold that stopped being a talking point and started being a genuine advantage. The Fold 8 Ultra confirmed that 215 grams is the number Samsung is now defending, not improving. If daily carry comfort is why you are considering an upgrade, the Fold 7 already delivered that in 2025, and you would be spending $600 more to carry the same weight in a slightly newer chassis.

3. It Is Genuinely, Significantly Cheaper Right Now

By the time the Fold 8 Ultra went on sale at $2,099.99, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 had already dropped to $1,499.99 at Samsung.com with no trade-in required, putting the live price gap between the two at $600. That is not a rounding error in phone pricing; that is practically a separate mid-range device worth of money sitting between the two numbers. As early as May 2026, the Fold 7 was already at $1,599 at Samsung.com and around $1,649 at Best Buy and Amazon. Samsung’s own pre-launch clearance is about as honest a signal as any company sends: the older phone has value worth capturing before the new one dominates the headlines. The bargain is real regardless of the inventory motive behind it.

The Fold 7 at $1,499.99 gives you a 200MP main camera, a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a 6.5-inch 21:9 cover display, an 8-inch main display, and seven years of software updates. The Fold 8 Ultra at $2,099.99 gives you the same display sizes, the same primary camera resolution, a 50MP ultra-wide upgrade, a larger battery, and 0.1mm less thickness. For some buyers, particularly those shooting wide-angle photography deliberately or upgrading from a Fold 5 or earlier, that $600 premium is arguable. For everyone else, the Fold 7 at its current price is the kind of deal where the question shifts from “should I buy this” to “how quickly can I get it here.” Samsung’s pricing history suggests there is room for it to slide further before the year ends, which makes the current window feel worth acting on.

4. The 200MP Main Camera Is Still Doing the Work

The 200MP wide-angle main camera with ProVisual Engine in the Fold 7 is the same sensor class Samsung put in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, one of 2025’s benchmark smartphone cameras, and the Fold 8 Ultra carries that headline resolution forward unchanged. At F1.7 aperture with optical image stabilization and Quad Pixel autofocus, it was the moment Samsung’s foldable camera finally stopped making concessions against its own S-series lineup, and that standing holds a year later. Portraits, street photography, architecture, food, travel, and whatever low-light situation you find yourself in: the Fold 7’s primary camera performs at the same level as the Fold 8 Ultra on the lens both phones share. The Fold 8 Ultra’s marketing emphasizes improved ProVisual Engine processing, which is technically accurate, but the sensor it is working with is the same 200MP hardware the Fold 7 has been running for a year. That does not suddenly change because a newer model arrived.

I will be honest, the ultra-wide is where the Fold 8 Ultra makes its strongest single camera argument, jumping from 12MP to 50MP, and for anyone who uses that lens with intention and regularity, it is a gap the Fold 7 cannot close. The Fold 8 Ultra also adds 8K video recording, which will matter to a specific kind of creator. These are genuine wins, and this article is not pretending otherwise. But the camera most people aim most of the time is the primary 200MP wide, and on that lens, both phones are drawing from the same well. If your photography does not live on ultra-wide frames or 8K timelines, the Fold 7 is not leaving anything meaningful behind.

5. Seven Years of Updates, and the Clock Has Barely Started

Samsung committed seven years of Android OS updates and security patches to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 at launch, tracking it forward to Android 23 from its starting point of Android 16 and One UI 8.0, making it the first phone in the world to ship with Android 16 out of the box. It has since received One UI 8.5, and that support window is fully intact for anyone buying a discounted unit today. The seven-year commitment Samsung formalized across its Galaxy S and Z lineup from 2024 onward makes the Fold 7 a device with a genuine long-term horizon, not a three-year countdown to planned obsolescence. Picking one up at $1,499.99 now does not mean inheriting a depleted window; it means starting from roughly the same point a launch-day buyer started a year ago, with six more Android generations still incoming. You are not buying into a dead end. You are buying into six more years of the same software future.

The Fold 8 Ultra carries the same seven-year promise, so there is no software advantage to paying the premium. Both devices reach Android 23 as their ceiling, and both receive the same One UI update cadence through that window. The only meaningful difference is that the Fold 8 Ultra ships with One UI 9 and Android 17, which the Fold 7 will receive via update anyway. Paying $600 more to have Android 17 on day one, a few weeks before the Fold 7 update ships, is an unusually expensive cure for impatience. Software longevity is the Fold 7’s quietest argument, and it tends to be the most convincing one for anyone who has watched a phone get dropped from updates two years after launch.

Flex Titanium does meaningfully reduce the crease on the Fold 8 Ultra’s inner panel, the 50MP ultra-wide is a real camera leap over 12MP, and fitting a 5,000mAh cell at the same 215g through silicon-carbon anode engineering is the kind of progress that compounds across an ownership cycle. For first-time foldable buyers or anyone on a Fold 5 or earlier, the Fold 8 Ultra is a strong device at a premium price, and it goes on sale August 7. If you are a Fold 7 owner staring at a $600 gap, a 0.1mm thinner profile, and a stylus that neither phone supports anymore as the headline reasons to upgrade, the math is genuinely hard to close. The Fold 7 already solved the problems that made book-style foldables annoying: the weight, the bulk, the pocketability, the camera gap with Samsung’s own flagships. It is doing all of that right now at $1,499.99, and sometimes the smartest phone in the room is just the one that got there a year early.

The post 5 Ways Galaxy Z Fold 7 Still Impresses Over the New Fold 8 Ultra (Including the $600 Price Difference) first appeared on Yanko Design.