Apple finally folded and has now a foldable phone. It’s called the iPhone Duo, and it’s genuinely impressive hardware. But if you’re deciding between it and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, the math — and the spec sheet — mostly favor Samsung.
Here’s the honest breakdown.
The Price Gap Is Not Small
The Fold8 Ultra starts at ₹1,99,999 for the 12GB/256GB model. The iPhone Duo starts at ₹2,99,900 for its base 256GB variant. That’s a flat ₹1,00,000 difference before you’ve even looked at what each phone actually does. Climb the storage ladder and the gap doesn’t close — Apple’s top-end 2TB Duo runs ₹4,49,900, making it the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever sold.
For context, that’s enough money left over to buy a genuinely great second phone, a laptop, or a very long vacation. When two devices are this close in capability, a lakh of rupees stops being a rounding error and starts being the whole decision.
If You Don’t Care About Being “Apple,” Samsung Just Wins Outright
This is the part that matters most: the Fold8 Ultra isn’t a cut-down alternative to the iPhone Duo. It’s arguably the more capable phone in several concrete ways.
A telephoto camera Apple doesn’t have. The Fold8 Ultra packs a 200MP main sensor, a 50MP ultrawide, and a dedicated 10MP telephoto lens with true 3x optical zoom. The iPhone Duo, for all its computational photography chops, relies on cropping into its 48MP main sensor for a “optical-quality” 2x zoom — there’s no dedicated tele lens at all. If you actually zoom in on your photos — portraits, travel shots, kids’ soccer games — a real telephoto lens beats a crop every time.
A bigger screen, both ways. The Fold8 Ultra’s inner display is 8 inches versus the Duo’s 7.6 inches, and its cover screen is larger too (6.5-inch vs 5.4-inch). On a foldable, screen real estate is the entire point of the product category — more of it is not a trivial win.
A lighter, thinner phone. At 215g and 4.1mm unfolded, the Fold8 Ultra is both lighter and slimmer than the Duo’s 254g and 5.2mm. Carry a foldable around all day and that 39-gram, 1.1mm difference is something your hand and your pocket will actually notice.
And it does everything the iPhone does. Video calls, mobile photography, gaming, split-screen multitasking, wireless charging, 5G, an AI assistant baked into the OS (Galaxy AI instead of Apple Intelligence/Siri), DeX for a desktop-like experience — there is nothing on the “things you can do with a phone” checklist that the iPhone Duo has and the Fold8 Ultra doesn’t. The experiences differ in flavor, not in capability.
So if your reason for wanting an iPhone is “I already have AirPods and a Mac” or “I like iMessage,” that’s a legitimate, personal reason to pay the premium. But if you’re phone-agnostic and just want the best foldable experience for the money, the calculus is straightforward: Samsung gives you a bigger screen, a genuine zoom lens, and a lighter phone, for a lakh less.
Where Apple Actually Pulls Ahead: IP68
Credit where it’s due — the iPhone Duo ships with an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance. That’s a genuinely hard problem to solve on a foldable, because the hinge creates a gap that’s historically been the weak point for ingress protection. Samsung’s Z Fold series has traditionally topped out at water resistance without a full dust rating, so if Apple has actually cracked IP68 on a folding phone, that’s real engineering to acknowledge — not marketing fluff.
This matters if you’re accident-prone, live somewhere dusty, or just want peace of mind dropping your phone in the rain or by the pool. It’s a legitimate differentiator, and for some buyers, it might be worth paying for on its own.
The Bottom Line
- Pick the Fold8 Ultra if: you want the biggest screen, an actual telephoto lens, a lighter and thinner device, and don’t want to pay an Apple tax on top of an already-expensive foldable.
- Pick the iPhone Duo if: you’re locked into Apple’s ecosystem, want the reassurance of IP68 durability, and the extra ₹1 lakh doesn’t change your calculus.
For most people comparing these two purely as foldable phones — not as iPhones or Galaxy phones, but as devices — the Fold8 Ultra offers more phone for meaningfully less money. Apple’s durability edge is real, but it’s one advantage against several of Samsung’s.
Note: The iPhone Duo only opened for pre-order and hasn’t shipped to reviewers yet, so some of this is based on Apple’s own specs rather than independent testing. Worth revisiting once real-world hinge durability and camera comparisons land.
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