Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold8 both just won Best of Innovation in the CES Innovation Awards 2027 program. The Consumer Technology Association runs the awards, and Samsung more than doubled its Best of Innovation count from the 2026 program.
Phones are the headliners, though the list runs wider, covering the Visual Display business, home appliances and the chips inside other companies’ servers. Samsung’s display arm earned two more Best of Innovation wins that the company hasn’t named yet, and its enhanced Bespoke AI Laundry Combo picked up an Honoree slot.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra (256GB, Graphite)
8-inch main display · 4.1mm unfolded · 5,000mAh battery
Price: $1,889.99, $2,099.99 (save $210, 10% off)
Where to buy: Buy on Amazon
The Ultra is Samsung’s slimmest Fold and it carries the biggest battery
The Ultra badge is Samsung’s top tier, the name it reserves for the standard of performance, capability and innovation across the Galaxy line.
It’s the slimmest Galaxy Z Fold Samsung has built, at 4.1mm unfolded and 215 grams.
The battery grows instead of shrinking to pay for that thinness. The 5,000mAh cell is the largest capacity the Z Fold series has carried, and it lands inside the thinnest body the line has produced so far.
Its 8-inch main display opens into a genuinely wide multitasking workspace for side-by-side apps and long documents. The Flex Titanium structure underneath pairs a titanium lattice plate with an ultra-thin titanium-alloy film that leaves the panel flatter and the crease harder to spot.
A 200MP wide camera supports HDR at full resolution, and a new 50MP ultra-wide replaces the 12MP unit from the Fold7 generation.
That ultra-wide adds macro shooting and pulls in about 34% more light through its wider F1.9 aperture. That’s a real camera jump.
The standard Fold8 went wide, light and media first
The regular Fold8 is a different bet, a new shape that treats the cover screen as the main event rather than a narrow preview window you glance at on your way in and then open past.
That cover screen measures 5.5 inches in a 10:16 ratio shaped for scrolling, messaging and short-form video, and the phone opens to a 7.6-inch display in a 4:3 ratio built for games and films. Content and comments sit side by side on the wide panel, indoors and out.
It’s Samsung’s lightest Galaxy Z Fold yet at 201 grams, and both rear cameras now shoot 50MP each, too.
The pair shoots 8K video and a Dual Recording mode that captures front and rear views side by side in a single uncropped frame.
Samsung built the Fold8’s Flex Titanium to absorb impacts and keep the crease faint across years of folding, with a lattice plate under an ultra-thin alloy film doing the work, cycle after cycle, year after year, on each fold.
Our Galaxy Z Fold8 review called it the one phone I could use forever, and the trade behind that verdict runs honestly in both directions at once, every single day.
The wide shape trades the Ultra’s bigger workspace and stronger camera reach for a lighter daily carry.
Most buyers should start with this one, and Samsung’s component teams take over the story from here.
The memory and storage honorees feed AI servers and phones
Samsung’s 512GB DDR5 RDIMM took an Honoree slot in Computer Hardware and Components, built on 32Gb DRAM dies stacked four layers deep instead of the eight layers in conventional 16Gb-based modules. The simpler packaging is a side benefit for server builders.
A server with 16 memory channels can carry 8TB of it, double the 4TB ceiling of 256GB modules, and Samsung rates the power draw 15% below its conventional 512GB parts. The named workloads are generative AI training, machine learning and enterprise big data analytics. That’s the math the judges rewarded.
The LPDDR5X SOCAMM2 module is the detachable one, a low-profile part built for AI servers.
It quotes 153.6 GBps of bandwidth, 2.6 times a conventional DDR5 RDIMM, and energy efficiency Samsung rates more than 70% better in the same slot.
Servers are the quiet story here. UFS 5.0 is the phone storage piece too, and it doubles the sequential speed of the UFS 4.1 generation it replaces in this awards round.
Its bandwidth reaches 10.8 GBps and random reads improved more than 3.4 times across a large storage area. The package shrinks 16.7%, power draw drops 40% against UFS 4.1 and capacities run 512GB and 1TB, starting with Samsung’s own Galaxy phones early next year.
The full winner list lands January 4, right before the show
Samsung still hasn’t named its two Visual Display Best of Innovation winners. Those names are the one gap left.
The awards span design and engineering across consumer tech, and Samsung’s slice of the 2027 program covers AI features, immersive displays, smart home gear and semiconductors.
The complete list arrives January 4, 2027.
CES runs January 6 through 9 in Las Vegas this winter, where both Folds will sit on the show floor on display next to everything else the judges picked and the rest of this year’s honoree class.
The enhanced Bespoke AI Laundry Combo’s Honoree slot follows the original model’s recognition in 2024, which makes appliances the third Samsung business on the 2027 list.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 (256GB, Graphite)
7.6-inch 4:3 main display · 5.5-inch cover screen · 201 grams · Dual 50MP cameras
Price: $1,709.99, $1,899.99 (save $190, 10% off)
Where to buy: Buy on Amazon
