It’s been only a month since the Galaxy S26 series launch, and we may now have our first look at the Galaxy Z Fold 8 design coming courtesy of Androidheadlines.

From the above, the phone looks almost identical to the last generation. Specifically, the display is the same, the camera layout, as well as the bezels. All indicates a familiar design that appeared first with the Galaxy Z Fold 7.

Last year, Samsung went overboard and gave the phone a slim look, which not only facilitates a better user experience but also contributes to aesthetics.

Based on the leak, the Z Fold 8 is likely to come with 158.4mm height x 143.2mm width x 4.5mm thin dimensions once fully unfolded, which shrinks to 158.4mm x 72.8mm and 9mm folded.

Galaxy Z Fold 8 CAD Render (Source – Androidheadlines)

Compared to this, the Fold 7 measures at 158.4 x 143.2 x 4.2mm unfolded, and 158.4 x 72.8 x 8.9mm folded. That said, the height and the width are the same, but the thickness could be changed. So, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 may carry the same design and dimensions (slightly thicker), thus not making the phone any thinner than the existing generation.

Furthermore, it could also use the 8-inch internal foldable and 6.5-inch cover displays. However, the under-display camera is still a mission from the foldable side.

These are some observations from the CAD renders, but we might come to more details when more leaks start to come out. One of the biggest features of this phone will be the One UI 9.0 (Android 17) user experience, and second, we’ll have to see whether the company adopts ALoP telephoto camera for this year’s Fold lineup, as it did with the S26 Ultra.

Samsung usually releases the Z Fold and Flip lineups in the second half of the year, and this year might not be different.

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One UI has come a long way, and the on-device global search has become one of its key capabilities to find anything on the phone without going through specific directories and wasting your valuable time. Finder works perfectly fine in this direction, but One UI 8.5 has made it more accessible than ever.

Usually, you need to open the app drawer to access the finder feature. Here you can see suggested apps, settings topics, recent searches, and type new queries or use voice input. Besides these, on-device categories, the search also expands to online content, Play Store, Galaxy Store, and web results.

The execution is fast and accurate due to Samsung’s search algorithm optimizations. Meanwhile, the One UI 8.5 on the Galaxy S26 series has introduced a dedicated Finder button that launches the feature with one tap without opening the app drawer.

However, the feature may not be accessible by default, so you have to enable it from the home screen settings. To do so, go to Home screen settings from the home screen and tap on the slider in front of the “Show Finder on Home Screen” option. This option will now show on the home screen, and you can tap to see the feature to expand its options.

How to customize it

Finder is entirely customizable, and you can check all of its options from the Finder settings. Go to Now Brief and open Finder, then tap on the three dots outside of the search bar. Enable or disable search options to see the content in the results. You can also manage Personal data intelligence and dive deep into the data sharing for added services.

For now, there’s no confirmation whether it will come to old devices with the stable One UI 8.5, but we’ll have to wait for an official statement.

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Samsung Galaxy S26 series shipped with the newest features of Now Brief, an automated daily briefing feature that curates important information, tasks, and notifications that may improve your user experience.

Despite it being a good idea, the Now brief failed to impress users due to its low-accuracy of what Samsung promoted it to be. Most of the time, the feature shows weather, news article and YouTube video recommendations from your subscribed channels. And sometimes, it includes your photographs (from a particular day) and weekly screen time. Beyond that, the “Content to include” section has numerous categories that are part of the daily briefing.

However, the feature execution matters. The company has added a weather widget in the briefing, a news article that doesn’t refresh; if so, it’s not interesting. Most Galaxy S26 series and previous device owners may have been scrolling through videos on the YouTube app instead of waiting for them to appear slowly on their daily briefing. These might be a good example of how useless the feature could be.

That said, I recently started using Now Brief on a daily basis to test “Get richer insights“. It has YouTube and Gemini toggles; once enabled, they promise to deliver personalized content inside daily briefings. Yet, the company is asking for almost all of the important user data for personalized videos. Below is an example for YouTube.

“If you turn on this option, your schedule, reservation, and booking information from Samsung Wallet, Notifications, Messages, Calendar, Reminder, and Gmail information, and sports information from your Google Account, sports information from apps you use, the titles of websites you visit, and YouTube videos you watch that are analysed on your phone by Personal data intelligence will be shared with Google, who will collect and process this data to provide recommended travel and sports videos” reads the agreement pop-up.

So, it’s not a normal slider; Samsung wants you to give consent for Now Brief to access all of this information in exchange to get video recommendation. It’s hard to say, there will be a person who reads this information, and gives Now brief consent in exchange for YouTube video recommendations. All they need to do is open the app and explore whatever they want to watch or see.

It’s not like they can’t disable the feature, but the feature will start sipping this data as soon as you tap on the slider.

The other side of the matter is the depth of such information, including your wallet. Why should we be providing this information to see videos? It doesn’t mean that companies don’t farm data to train AI, but Samsung offering YouTube video recommendations in exchange for vital user data should only be called “data farming.”

Of course, it’s on the user to decide on the consent, but you should not overlook the intent.

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Samsung continues to add new AI features in the Galaxy AI Suite and also updates the old ones, such as Now Brief, to make it user-friendly. This feature gathers the important moments from your device, such as Gallery pictures, energy score, sleep schedule, alarm, wallet, and more, and puts them in a single briefing curated with AI.

Talking about the new stuff, the Galaxy S26 series has brought a few additions to the Now brief that aren’t available for the Galaxy S26 series.

There’s a new section in the Now brief settings, “Get richer insights”. It shares your personal data with Samsung’s partner companies to receive “relevant” and “personalized” content in your daily briefings. There are two partners currently added in the settings: YouTube and Gemini.

YouTube will suggest more videos to you, and Gemini will give you some insights into your daily Gemini use case. After enabling these two, I am not getting anything useful, and whatever you may call it, it doesn’t make Now brief any more interesting, an element that’s lacking from the very beginning.

The concept of the Now brief is great, but its results aren’t nowhere near “great” word. So, Samsung should focus on providing some user-centric statistics that are not based on AI fantasy. It lacks preciseness of all of the things that the phone maker has promised to offer with content addons. These two features might expand to other Galaxy S25 series devices with stable One UI 8.5, but we’re not sure about that.

If you found these options useful, reach out to me at X/Twitter handle. I would love to read your thoughts on the upgraded Now Brief.

The post Even my Galaxy S26 Ultra can’t make Now Brief look useful appeared first on Sammy Fans.

Samsung has been testing One UI 8.5 beta for the past three months and left one premium Galaxy S-series phone out of the One UI 8.5 beta equation. Initially, the S25 series entered beta testing, specifically S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra. Yet, the Galaxy S25 Edge, Samsung’s slimmest S-series phone to date, has not received the beta update.

The phone comes with flagship specs and a high-quality camera system, but the most interesting quality of the device is its outlook. On the other hand, it has the same price tag as the newly released Galaxy S26+. These reasons convinced me that the phone deserved a shot at the new beta.

However, it isn’t the first time that S25 Edge users have been neglected. Last year, the company refused to release the One UI 8.0 for this phone alongside the main lineup. Though the update arrived later on, that doesn’t summarize the course of this action.

Some might argue that the phone was released in May 2025 and has a different firmware development cycle. We can agree to that, but Samsung had enough time to match the software update release time for all four models. Yet, it didn’t bother.

Also, what about the price tag? The S25 Edge may have been demoted in Samsung’s launch cycle, but it still has a user base that paid a good sum of money that rivals its latest flagships.

Past report suggests that Samsung is working on the 8th One UI 8.5 beta. And the stable update will come in April, which may also be the time when the S25 Edge will get this new software.

But that doesn’t mean that the S25 Edge shouldn’t be included in a new One UI beta program. Eventually, we can say that Samsung wants to keep it effortless and continue the three-device testing model in its beta program. So, it can sit back, relax, and develop the firmware for these devices with limited effort.

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