I posted my review of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 just under a year ago, and while I claimed it was still the king of foldables, it felt a little lacklustre and was just a slight upgrade from the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4.
This time around, while the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is, yet again, just a slight upgrade from the Z Fold 5, if you are sitting on a Z Fold 4 and coming to the end of your 2-year contract, it certainly is an upgrade you should look forward to.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 features the more square design that we see in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. It looks sharp and much more premium than the rounded style we saw in the Z Fold 5. This design has also allowed Samsung to make better use of the outer screen. I complimented Samsung on getting the design right with the Z Fold 5. However, this new square design shifts the aspect ratio on the outer screen ever so slightly from 23:9 on the Z Fold 5 to 22.1:9 on the Z Fold 6, giving us a closer feel to the 21:9 ratio most of us are used to on standard slab phones.
The inner screen also changes aspect ratio, making it feel more square at 20.9:18 compared to the Z Fold 5’s 21.6:18.
All screens still support up to 120Hz and feature Samsung’s Dynamic AMOLED X2 display. However, they have managed to pump up the peak brightness to 2600 nits, making every visual punchier and brighter, with stark distinguishable contrasts between colours.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 also features a re-re-re-re-re-redesigned hinge. Both screens completely close, as they did with the Z Fold 5, but this time around, Samsung has been able to include dust protection, giving the Z Fold 6 an IP48 rating, a much better improvement over the IPX8 rating we saw in the Z Fold 5.
The overall redesign also brings the Z Fold 6 more in line with other slab phones in terms of size and weight. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 weighs only 239g, which is just 7g more than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. At 12.1mm thick when folded, it only takes around 3mm more in your pocket.
Under the hood, there was an upgrade from the Spadragon 8 Gen 2 to the Gen 3, which significantly boosts performance. As stated in our Phone vs Phone article in the NAG Magazine #WinterEdition, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is one of the ultimate foldable gaming devices, scoring 5,012 in the 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme benchmark, the highest we’ve tested on a mobile device. This performance boost also means multitasking will be a breeze, just like it always has on the Z Fold range of devices, even if the RAM remains 12GB.
It’s worth noting to all of you multitasking S Pen fundis that the outer screen still doesn’t support the S Pen. Perhaps that’s just something we’ll see in the Z Fold 12 or 13.
Regarding all-day performance, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 still packs the same 4,400 mAh battery that we saw in the Z Fold 5. Samsung claims that due to the improvements in hardware, you should be able to squeeze more time out of the device. However, in reality, we found that we were getting similar run times as we did with the Z Fold 5, at about 11 hours.
The camera array remains relatively the same as the Z Fold 5, with a 50MP main camera, a 12MP ultrawide lens and a 10MP telephoto lens on the phone’s rear. The main selfie camera sports a 10MP lens, and the inside selfie camera is as lacklustre as before, with just 4MP built in. There is an upgrade to the ultrawide lens, which comes with a new signal imaging processor designed to take better low-light photos, although there is not much of an improvement here overall.
Here’s the thing: All this hardware sounds good on paper when you isolate it from any other tech specs on other foldable phones out there. But with brands like Honor planning to release the Honor Magic V3 in September, which packs better hardware than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and may even land at a lower launch price, it may just come down to Samsung’s software that separates it from its competitors.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 comes with Samsung’s AI Gen 2 software, which is currently only available on the Z Fold 6. The S24 Ultra and the Z Fold 5 currently run the first generation of this AI software.
The second generation of AI software hosts a surprising amount of useful features, some of which you get in the Gen 1 package, like Live Translate during phone calls, Samsung Keyboard, Interpreter, Samsung Notes, Samsung Transcript Assist, Samsung Browsing Assist and some light AI image assist tools.
Chat Assist, which helps rewrite messages in different tones, is a second-generation feature, as well as a much more generative photo assist that allows you to transform photos into different art styles, and it can even generate AI in the drawing as if it were part of the photo. They have also included a circle-to-sum, which will sum up calculations on the screen when they are circled. These features may still come to the Z Fold 5 and S24 Ultra, as these are mainly software features, but there has been no confirmation from Samsung. It’s also worth noting that Samsung has only committed to keeping these AI features free until the end of 2025. There are no further announcements about what will happen once that deadline hits.
At the end of my time with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, I’m left with a few key thoughts. While I still believe this is an absolutely epic phone, compared even to regular slab phones out there, the market has a lot more players now, and Samsung really needs to pull the rabbit out of a hat for its next iteration. Yes, it’s an improvement over the Z Fold 5, but I still don’t feel it’s worth the upgrade, especially at its cost of R43,000. Samsung is leaning heavily on its brand fans and software features that may not even stick by the end of next year, even with seven years of Security updates promised. While Samsung still held the crown as King of the Foldables last year with the Z Fold 5, this year, with every other brand out there sporting hardware just as good, if not better, than the Z Fold 6, Samsung is going to have to get down in the mud to fight for that crown once more.
