Amazon UK’s Prime Big Deal Days included a lot of offers on 2025 Galaxy flagships, but barely anything from the 2026 releases. There’s the Galaxy S25 for £600 (12/256GB) and the Galaxy S25 Ultra for £900 (12/512GB), for example. However, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is £1,080 (for the same 12/512GB configuration) and you don’t even need a Prime subscription, unlike the S25 series offers. The price gap doesn’t feel quite big enough to justify settling for one-year-old hardware.
So, instead we zeroed in on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip7. Yes, it also hails from 2025, but the new Z Flip8 isn’t even in stock on Amazon at the moment, while Samsung is asking £1,150 for the base 12/256GB model. You can knock £150 off that with a promo code, but you’d still be paying £300 more and only getting half the storage. The thing is that the Z Flip8 didn’t actually change all that much from the 2025 model. It comes with a new chipset, the Exynos 2600 replaces the Exynos 2500, but Samsung still doesn’t have a handle on thermal throttling.
The other changes are iterative updates – for example, in our review, we measured the inner display of the Z Flip7 at 1,471 nits and that of the Z Flip8 at 1,470. They couldn’t be closer. Both phones have 4,300mAh batteries and while the 2026 phone comes with a Si/C battery, the only thing this seems to have achieved is to drop the EPREL charge cycle rating from 2,000 to 1,200 cycles. The phone lasts longer on a charge and achieved an Active Use Score of 14:14h, beating its predecessor by over 2 hours. This is mostly the more efficient chipset, however.
Wired charging is rated at 25W for both phones, but the new one is marginally faster – a full 100% charge takes 1 hour and 19 minutes instead of 1 hour and 31 minutes. The new model is slimmer (13.1mm vs. 13.7mm when closed) and a bit lighter (180g vs. 188g) compared to the Galaxy Z Flip7. However, you would need to do a side-by-side comparison to tell the difference. So, getting the cheaper 2025 model may be the prudent purchase. By the way, you can get a cheaper flip with the Galaxy Z Flip7 FE – an 8/256GB model costs £500 after a hefty 45% price cut for Prime Big Deal Days. But this is basically a warmed-over Z Flip6, which makes it harder to recommend in 2026.
Source: GSMArena · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing