Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, Flip 6 review: The endless pursuit of perfection

What is a foldable? In smartphone parlance, it’s a device that folds into two halves. There are broadly two types of foldable phones in the market today. Those that fold horizontally like the Fold 6 and those that fold vertically like the Flip 6. Both have distinct use cases. While book-style folbables like the Fold 6 are designed to give you a 2-in-1 phone plus tablet experience, devices like the Flip 6 are meant to do just the opposite, they fold into something even smaller so you can fit them easily in your pocket. Kudos to Samsung for making both.

The Fold and Flip may seem like chalk and cheese, but the underlying mechanism is the same. Both rely on meticulously designed rails, hinges, and bendable screens to open and close. The trifecta needs to be absolutely precise to make everything work. More importantly, it needs to be strong and durable enough to ensure it works continuously without fail. Which is why, they are nothing short of an engineering marvel, these folbdables. If technology and gadgets excite you, these foldables make for one helluva ride.

And Samsung has held the keys to this joyride for almost half a decade. Since 2019, it has fashioned a new Fold and a new Flip, year after year reiterating on its commitment to a category that not many competing brands dare to touch even today. And it works both ways. The commitment is what builds confidence among people and reviewers like us to be swayed by all the engineering and then—expectedly—ask for more. Say for instance, a wider cover screen in the Fold, or the ability to run more apps on the Flip’s.

Fold 6, Flip 6—Build quality

While long-term durability concerns remain, the Fold and Flip are no longer seen as fragile objects. At least to people like us who have had the privilege to review these devices since the early days. The Fold 6 and Flip 6 are rock solid. You can take it to the bank. Samsung has come a long way. Particularly on the Fold 6, the inner workings have been tuned and tuned to near perfection bringing the weight and thickness down to a more ergonomic 239g and 12.1mm.

The chassis is flat, no curves whatsoever, bringing it in line with the Galaxy S24 series phones. (The sharp bottom edge could be a little uncomfortable for our left-handed friends and the big camera bump, difficult to live without a case). The Flip 6 looks and feels largely the same as the Flip 5 though it does hold stiff at more angles than before. 

Their IP48 rating makes the Fold 6 and Flip 6 the first commercially available foldable devices to be resistant to dust in addition to water (which has existed on these devices since the Fold 3 days). Any amount of protection, no matter how small or big, is appreciated. More so on a foldable.

Fold 6, Flip 6—Display

The inner displays are an exact do-over from last year. That’s 7.6-inch 1856x2160p (QXGA+) 120Hz LTPO AMOLED for the Fold 6 and 6.7-inch 2640x1080p 120Hz LTPO AMOLED for the Flip 6. The only major difference is that these screens can get brighter (2,600nits versus 1,750nits). Like protection, this upgrade too is much appreciated. As for the big ol’ elephant, the crease in the middle remains as unhinged as ever. You must learn to live with it. But credit where it’s due, there’s definitely an improvement over the first few generations.  

The Flip 6’s cover screen is same as the Flip 5’s— 3.4-inch Super AMOLED 60Hz with 720p resolution. It’s once again shaped like a folder leaving much of the bottom left part unused. The Fold 6 has a slightly bigger cover screen at 6.3-inch (versus Fold 5’s 6.2). Its LTPO AMOLED can also go as low as 1Hz (120Hz maximum) whereas the Fold 5’s could hit only 48Hz at the lowest. The resolution is 968x2376p (HD+) and peak brightness is 2,600nits. Compared to the Fold 5 (23.1:9), it has a slightly more usable 22.1:9 aspect ratio—baby steps to a more user-friendly future.

Fold 6, Flip 6—Camera

Samsung has brought parity to both the camera sets for the first time and while the Fold 6’s setup is virtually identical to the Fold 5’s, the Flip 6 is getting a big spec bump as a result. Both have 50-megapixel primary sensors with an f/1.8 optically stabilised lens. It is joined by a 12-megapixel f/2.2 camera with a fairly wide 123-degree field of view (FOV). The Fold 6 also has a third 10-megapixel 3x telephoto (f/2.4/OIS), mostly for bragging rights.

Aside from their occasional tendency to overexpose, these cameras shoot well enough in all sorts of lighting conditions, as long as you’re not in the habit of pixel peeping. The selfie cameras (Fold 6 has two of those: 4MP on the inside and 10MP on the cover. Flip 6 has just the one, a 10MP on the outside.) are your usual spec-fillers, but the good thing is that you might not need them as much, as the form factor allows the more powerful back cameras to do all the heavy lifting for you.

Fold 6, Flip 6—Performance, battery life    

Speaking of heavy lifting, the customary annual chip upgrade gets you the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside the Fold 6 and Flip 6. The parity extends into memory as well. Both ship with 12GB of RAM by default. Storage goes up to 1TB in the Fold 6 and 512GB in the Flip 6. Performance falls in line with what we’ve come to expect from these devices over the last few years. They work well enough in day to day, not so much in benchmarks especially load testers like CPU Throttling and 3D Wildlife Stress. The Flip 6 does hit you with a bit of a surprise in terms of agility over an extended period. Samsung has done well with cooling.

All that efficiency bodes well for battery life. The Fold 6 and particularly the Flip 6, last 2-4 hours longer than their predecessors, as evidenced by both tests and real-world use. The Flip 6’s bigger 4,000mAh battery (versus 3,700mAh in the previous model) has something to do with this, too. The Fold 6 makes do with the same 4,400mAh as the Fold 5. Samsung’s undying reluctance to move on from 25W charging is becoming more and more difficult to justify at this point.  

The silver lining—if you can call it one—is that these devices are meant for the long haul. Samsung is committing to an industry-leading seven years of Android and security updates and the hardware needs to hold up to fulfill that promise. The battery is a crucial element that degrades over time, more so with fast charging. Maybe slow charging is a feature, not a bug.

Fold 6, Flip 6—Software

The One UI 6.1.1 software inside both these phones is chef’s kiss. Honestly, it doesn’t get any better than this. Samsung, at this point, is just flexing. This year, the big focus is on artificial intelligence. Another commitment it is reiterating with the introduction of some brand-new Galaxy AI features (first launched with the S24 lineup) with the Fold 6 and Flip 6.

Note Assist now supports real-time transcription, translation, and summarisation directly within Samsung Notes, streamlining note-taking during meetings or lectures. The Composer feature in Samsung Keyboard generates suggested text from simple keywords, making it easier to craft emails and social media posts. The Interpreter mode allows both parties in a conversation to view translations on the main and cover screens, while Live Translate now supports real-time phone call translations across third-party apps. On the creative front, Photo Assist and Portrait Studio enhance content creation, and the new Sketch to Image feature generates artwork from simple sketches. Additionally, Google’s Gemini and Circle to Search are now more deeply integrated, further boosting the devices’ AI capabilities.

Not everyone will fall for these features. Not everyone needs them. But they are conveniences, nonetheless. You got two screens, you might as well make the most of them sometime. For better or worse, these features also prove—or at least give the impression—that Samsung isn’t standing still. It’s constantly at work. The hardware may not be iterating as fast as we want (nay, expect), but these devices are getting better year-on-year. One year, it’s about adding water-resistance, one year it’s about closing the gap, one year it’s about AI and whatnot.

Fold 6, Flip 6—Should you buy them?

If you ask me, I’ll say, I would love a foldable with the OnePlus Open’s physical dimensions, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro’s camera and Fold 6’s software. (On the flip side, the Moto Razr 50 Ultra’s cover screen destroys the Flip 6’s cover screen in terms of both sheer size and scale of apps, can’t say the same about the rest of the package though.) That’s the dream. But that’s wishful thinking and we all know that. Or is it? Maybe the upcoming Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold will end our misery. Samsung has already breached the 2-lakh price barrier with its new foldables. Hopefully, Google sees this as an opportunity and doesn’t mess up the pricing.

But that’s all in the future and subject to the Pixel Fold actually being good. Until then, Samsung is the undisputed king of foldables, its Fold 6 being the most complete and compelling case for the category, even if its pricing may sting a bit. The Flip 6 somewhat justifies the price bump better with its improved camera and bigger battery.