Pros and cons
Pros
Larger and more symmetrical front screen
Improved design with lighter weight and less noticeable crease
The inner screen is among the best on a foldable phone
New Ai features
Cons
£50 more expensive than the Galaxy Z Fold 5
No significant upgrades to charging speeds or battery life
Most new software features aren't specific to the foldable design
Designs and specifications
- Display: Main - 7.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED, 120 Hz; Cover - 6.3-inch Dynamic AMOLED, 120 Hz
- Dimensions open (inches): 6.04 x 5.21 x 0.22 in.; Closed: 6.04 x 2.68 x 0.48 in.
- Brightness: 2600 nits
- Battery: 4400 mAh
- Camera: 50MP main, 12MP ultra-wide, 10MP telephoto, 10MP cover selfie, 4MP under-display camera
- Processor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
- Storage & RAM: 256GB storage with 12GB RAM; available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB variants
- Weight: 239g
- Colours: Pink, Silver Shadow, Navy
- Pricing: Starting at £1,799 for 256GB, £1,899 for 512GB, and £2,099 for 1TB
When you first take the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 out of the box, you immediately get the sense that this is no ordinary phone. Although its weight and feel aren’t too dissimilar to your usual smartphone (thanks to Samsung reducing the device's weight by 23 grams compared to the Flip 5), the size of the screen, when unfolded, pushes the boundaries of what your phone can be used for.
The Z Fold 6’s outer screen measures 6.3 inches diagonally, up from 6.2 inches on last year’s model, thanks to a few more millimetres in width. Although it is difficult to notice the size upgrade at first, once you get playing around, you will find it should fit perfectly between both of your hands, making writing out a text easier than ever before.
As mentioned, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 is just 239 grams, remarkably only 7 grams more than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra! You really appreciate this when you are out all day and have the phone in your pocket. This was one of my big concerns about using the device, but you really can’t tell the difference compared to a usual smartphone when carrying it around all day.
Also, if you’re on the move and only want to check your phone quickly, the cover screen is incredibly user-friendly and easy to use to reply to a message or look something up online. The device feels and appears very durable, with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and Armor Aluminum, the same material used on the Galaxy S24.
The rest of the design is as polished as you would expect from one of Samsung’s top devices. The speakers and the camera array are nicely built-in alongside the flat and elegant buttons. Nothing feels clunky about this phone, and every millimetre has been optimised to ensure this sizeable foldable phone could easily pass as something from its S24 range when folded, which is an impressive feat.
Display and audio
The 6.3-inch cover screen is 2376 x 968 pixels, with fully adaptive refresh rates from 1hz to 120hz. This ensures the cover screen is nice for web browsing, email, and TikTok scrolling. It's okay for texts and messaging, though if you use it for longer messages, don’t be surprised if you find the keyboard cramped compared to the unfolded screen. For perspective, the screen is probably narrower than my iPhone 13 Pro by around half an inch.
What should draw you into this phone is the inner 7.6-inch 2160 x 1856 pixel screen, with a thin, flat bezel. The screen is incredibly fun to use, especially for activities like taking photos and video calling. Video calling is also made all the easier by Fold 6’s bright screen (2,600 nits), which is still clearly visible even in the midday sun.
Samsung has clearly put some work into minimising the crease in the phone. A crease is usually the payoff with having a foldable phone, but in this edition, it is less noticeable than on previous tablet foldable phones. Don't get me wrong; you can still feel and see the crease if you look at it from an angle, but Samsung has done solid work reducing it so that it's getting closer to being unnoticeable and not impacting screen use.
Visually, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a lovely, colourful, and contrast-rich tablet-like display, which is perfect for a host of tasks. This device is built to allow you to watch engaging content and show off videos you have found on platforms such as YouTube or Instagram to your mates.
I enjoyed watching Netflix videos on it, and it would be a great way to watch content on long journeys or even flights. It's also great for browsing websites and reading long articles, which is perfect for me as someone who likes to keep on top of the news.
In Flex mode, which Samsung refers to when you fold the screen at a 90-degree angle and place the Galaxy Z Fold on a flat surface, the display is great for watching videos and video calls. However, I found typing on it to be tricky, so I would stick to using the cover screen or the unfolded screen for this.
A really cool feature that I’ll never not be amazed by is running two apps side by side. Android’s multitasking feature was extremely helpful while video-calling a friend and researching what restaurant we wanted to go to that weekend.
However, I wish it was better suited for work calls. The partially unfolded setup lends itself to hands-free video calls, which is nice. But the inner selfie camera is only positioned about halfway up the left side of the screen. It’s an unprofessional and deeply unflattering angle that makes it difficult to feel part of the meeting. Plus, the narrow dimensions of the screen make for a cramped experience when folded like that.
It is also worth noting that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is perfect for an S Pen, especially for making the most of the new Samsung AI features that I will touch on later. Unfortunately, the S Pen isn’t the same as the S24 series, and it doesn’t come with the phone like it does with the S24 Ultra, which is frustrating given the Fold 6’s already very high price point. If you want the S Pen Fold Edition, at the time of writing you can find it on the Samsung website for an additional £54.00 and £89.00 if you want to add the case as well.
I saw what the Fold's double array speakers were capable of by playing the Gladiator 2 trailer, which I would recommend watching if you haven’t already.
The action-packed video, which mixed Paul Mescal's fight scenes with the well-known song ‘No Church in the Wild,’ had a surprising amount of detail and sharpness from the built-in speakers. Maybe there could have been more bass (as is the case with most smartphone speakers), but the sound certainly did enough to keep me engaged throughout, and overall, it definitely was an immersive experience.
Camera
In recent years, a three-camera setup has become the norm for all flagship smartphones, and Samsung hasn’t swayed from that with the Fold 6. The lenses don’t take up too much room on the back of the phone, but they still look professional.
Disappointingly, Samsung didn't do much to upgrade this array this year, and the cameras on the last Galaxy Z Fold 5 were a disappointment. These are the same camera specs as you'll find on the Samsung Galaxy S24, which is still a very solid camera, but with a phone this size, it feels like a shame that you can’t take top-of-the-range photos on it.
Read our Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 review
You can find out more information about the Fold 6's predecessor in our in-depth Z Fold 5 review.
In order to do that, Samsung needs to improve its 3X optical zoom and 50MP sensor on the main camera of its flagship foldable. I would've expected the Fold 6 to have at least 5X optical zoom and a 200MP sensor to match what's on its other flagship device, the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
For a nearly £2,000 smartphone (admittedly with two screens), I expect nothing but the best Samsung has to offer in every aspect.
Here's how the three cameras break down:
- 50MP wide-angle f/1.8
- 12MP ultrawide f/2.2 FoV 123-degrees
- 10MP 3X optical zoom f/2.4
As you can tell from the specs, the Samsung Galaxy Fold 6 has a good set of cameras, and I managed to take dozens of lovely photos while I was out and about in all sorts of conditions. The colours and sharpness were great across the board, the low-light performance was okay, and the portrait mode images of people, especially their dogs, were superb.
On the flip side, there's also a 4MP camera under the main screen, tucked away behind a small cluster of pixels when not in use. It's okay for video, but I wouldn’t try to use it for much else. A nice 10MP, f/2.2 selfie camera takes good portrait shots, but it can be a bit of a pain to get it to focus correctly right away. In order to get the best selfies of yourself, use the triple camera array by unfolding the phone, setting the cover screen to be the viewfinder, and taking selfies using the bigger cameras.
The Fold 6 significantly updated its ProVisual Engine, the computational part of its smartphone photography pipeline. And it did pay off, with the cameras capturing colours brilliantly, giving things like grass and skies a real crispness.
Overall the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 camera is good, and for the casual photographer (like me), you will not be disappointed with the quality of the photos you can take of things up close or at range. However, given the price point and being one of Samsung’s flagship devices I would expect the camera to be at a higher standard and at least be on par with the S24 Ultra.
Interface and operating system
The software is really where this phone comes into its own. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 continues the company’s era of AI and even adds some new features compared to the S24 series. The Fold 6’s Galaxy AI platform reaches into photography, image editing, text messaging, search, writing, drawing, health, and translation services.
Once you understand how to use them, these powerful tools are not only useful but often fun.
Key Galaxy AI features include but are not limited to:
- Circle to search
- Sketch to image (in Notes and Gallery)
- Interpreter (Listening and Conversation mode)
- Note assist (transcription, summarisation)
- Chat Assist (translation, writing style changes)
AI is a big buzzword right now in the smartphone industry, and I was intrigued to see if the features were generally useful or more of a gimmick. Overall, I really enjoyed what the Fold 6 had to offer, and if I had the opportunity to use the phone for longer, I would have learnt to use the AI features to make my use of the phone even more efficient and fun.
To begin with, Portrait Studio, a tool that transforms photos of people into AI characters, is a lot of fun to play around with, especially with friends. Quickly being able to transform selfies of you and your mates into ‘3D cartoons’, watercolour paintings, and sketches is intriguing for everyone involved, and it assures easy laughs.
Not all the images were accurate all the time, so I encourage anyone to try it with several different selfies to make sure you get one they are happy with. For example, there were a few occasions when my hair and eye colour were wrong, even if the overall likeness was quite accurate.
Selfie taken using Fold 6's 4MP selfie camera.
Image produced in Fold 6's AI Portrait Mode using photo on selfie photo.
The next feature I tried was Sketch to Image and it did exactly what it says on the tin by creating an object in a pre-taken image based on your drawing. This one particularly impressed me. Given my very poor drawing skills, I still managed to create a toy car on a table and a realistic bird in the sky that could pass as an actual part of the original image.
In a similar fashion to the Portrait Studio, it still had some teething issues. Sometimes, the sketches were not what I was expecting, so be prepared to give it a go several times before you get what you want. I would put this into the novelty category of AI features to have. It was good fun to begin with, but after a while, I got fed up with how clunky a lot of the drawings came out, and it was difficult to use without the expensive S Pen.
Sketch to Image and Portrait Studio are delightful and entertaining, but it's hard to imagine how I would use them on a regular basis. However, Samsung's Composer feature, which generates text for messaging and social media captions and replies, was a lot more useful. Again if I had been using the phone for longer, this feature would have really had an opportunity to flex its muscles. So far, it's given me a response that is not too far from what I would have sent myself when replying to a friend's message or drafting an Instagram caption with different keywords.
I was really intrigued to see how the new features could take advantage of the Galaxy Z Fold 6's two screens. The best I found was the new conversation mode in its Interpreter translation app. The app can display translated text on the cover screen facing outward and the inner screen at the same time, so you can easily have a conversation with participants speaking different languages (up to 16). Using the cover screen and one of the folded screens in flex mode (bent halfway), you can both see the translations live, making the conversation flow.
A tiny button near the top of the screen triggers conversation mode, which wasn't immediately obvious to me at first. I recommend doing this somewhere quiet because background noise can mess with the translations and not get your original message across. This happened to me several times when testing this feature in the office with my bi-lingual colleagues, so something to bear in mind if you are using outside. But the fact you can use this offline makes this tool very handy to use if you are actually abroad.
Samsung's AI features can be impressive when they function as intended, but I hoped for more innovations tailored to the Z Fold's unique large-screen design. The only new feature that really makes the most of the foldable screen is the conversation mode in the Interpreter app.
Fold 6's Sketch to Image AI mode.
Photo of Tower Bridge with added AI seagull using Sketch to Image feature.
Processor and performance
The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is packed full of Samsung's best-performing hardware. It boasts a larger vapour chamber to help keep the device cool, especially during intense activities like gaming. This certainly did the trick with my gaming experience on the classic ‘Bubble Shot Misson’, which I played for a solid 30 minutes without noticing the phone getting warm.
The Galaxy Z Fold 6 uses Qualcomm's latest technology and gets a bespoke version of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chip, which boosts clock speeds and is backed by 12GB of RAM. Its performance was very quick for all the activities I used it for, such as browsing the web for news or shopping, which was seamless. Using Google Maps felt quicker than on my iPhone 13 Pro, and using maps felt particularly easy given the screen size, especially if I had to navigate through smaller back streets.
Another plus point is Samsung's new foldable, and the Galaxy S24 family will also be guaranteed to run new versions of Android for seven years.
Battery and charging
Anyone would be correct to have questions and concerns about the battery life of a device this large. The good news is that the battery life on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 consistently lasted throughout the day while I used it for several different activities.
For context, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 has the same battery capacity and charging speeds as the Galaxy Z Fold 5, unlike the Galaxy Z Flip 6, which received a battery upgrade over its predecessor.
How much you get out of the device will depend on how often you use the internal screen and display brightness. The most comprehensive test I performed was watching a 4K video on YouTube with the brightness turned up to its max (2600 nits). After a couple of hours of playtime, the battery went from 89% to 72%, which was impressive compared to other phones with which I had done a similar test.
In general, the battery life typically dipped to about the mid to high 30s after roughly 15 hours of use. On days when I spent more time out in bright sunlight snapping photos, the battery level dropped to the high 20s and low 30s after about 14 hours of on-off use.
Once again, I would have liked to have seen Samsung improve the battery performance to justify the Z Fold 6's higher price point. Nonetheless, the Galaxy Z Fold 6's battery did charge from about 40% to 90% in roughly 30 minutes of wired charging. This is comparable to the Galaxy S24 Ultra, despite the latter supporting 45-watt charging while the Z Fold 6 supports 25-watt charging.
Pricing and availability
After announcing the device in early July, Samsung officially released the Galaxy Z Fold 6 on 24 July 2024. As of August 2024, storage starts at 256GB for £1,799, 512GB for £1,899 and finally 1TB for £2,099. Each storage type is £50 more expensive than the Fold 5 model started at, but with the added AI in the Fold 6, it is easy to see why.
It goes without saying that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an incredibly expensive handset. If you want to purchase the device but are worried about the price tag, it is worth saying that Samsung usually has fantastic trade-in deals and sales, and it's unlikely you'll pay full price. So be sure to shop around before buyiny.
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The verdict
The first thing to say is that the Fold 6 was a lot of fun to use. I was pleasantly surprised at how lightweight it felt, and after a while, I completely forgot about the crease in the middle of the screen. If I were a big fan of foldable phones and had a budget to spare, then I would be very tempted by the Fold 6 as the technology is the best I have seen and used in this type of device.
The AI features were also very entertaining and if I had been using the device for longer then I’m sure I would have gotten to grips with them even more, although the novelty may have worn off with features such as the Portrait Studio.
Given the high starting price, Samsung has clearly given up on making book-style foldables mainstream. This is a premium device targeted at customers willing to pay top dollar for it, and it seems content to continue in that direction rather than making the Z Fold more accessible.
My criticism of the Fold 6 centres around its high price. It is understandable that this kind of advanced technology comes with a price to match. However, I still would have liked to see more unique software features made just for the Galaxy Z Fold and improvements to charging speeds and battery life.
