This is what a phone made for creative professionals looks like. I think the Z Fold8 Ultra has set an extremely high standard here, and ticks a lot of boxes for a premium price. It has an optimised design and software features to enhance multitasking, productivity, content creation, and casual browsing for all kinds of use cases, though sadly it's missing one key element that would make it the ruler of the market - why, oh why, did Samsung bail on stylus compatibility?

The highlight of the review is the camera, which handles small details remarkably well when shooting with the 200MP camera. For a more in-depth look at the Z Fold8 Ultra camera, check out my camera phone shootout where I pit it against the standard Z Fold8 model.

One of the most important aspects of a camera phone for creative professionals is, of course, the camera. Even if you're more of a casual smartphone shooter, part of being a creative is creating content now (whether we like it or not), and having a phone that can walk you through the entire script, shoot, edit, upload process in one device is a key selling point.

We need to address the S-Pen issue. I'm a long-time Samsung user and a proud owner of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, so it's hard for me to imagine life without the Samsung Ecosystem taking the wheel. The Samsung S-Pen is a stylus that used to come included as part of Galaxy devices up until the Z Fold6 series, after that, it was abandoned following last year's Z Fold7 series (though it still remains on the flagship S Ultra series). Not having a stylus might seem like such a small element to moan about, but it made a huge difference for things like sketching, digital art, signing documents, and photo editing.

It feels like a huge and rather confusing loss to ditch this compatibility yet again with the Z Fold8 series, when arguably it makes the most sense to use a stylus with a foldable display with larger screen real estate to use it on. Samsung: bring back the S-Pen. Even if it can't be part of the device physically and must be sold separately to use, that's fine by me. Okay, rant over. Let me know in the comments if this is a bugbear for you too.