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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 review: Can the OG book-style foldable reclaim top spot?
Summary
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 comes with refinements in design, durability, display and software compared to the Z Fold5 but falls short with its camera upgradesFrom heavy, boxy designs that weighed down your wallet and pocket alike, book-style foldables have come a long way in the past year, with the likes of the OnePlus Open and the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro assuming increasingly smartphone-like dimensions.
With the Galaxy Z Fold6 ( ₹1,64,999 onwards), Samsung’s category-defining OG foldable has gotten lighter, slimmer, more durable and tantalizingly close to a candy bar smartphone experience. Then again, is the largely incremental update over the Fold5 and a generous helping of AI smarts enough to stave off an increasingly competitive landscape that is taking big leaps compared to Samsung’s cautious small steps? I’ve lived with the Z Fold6 for the past four weeks to answer just this.
Durable design
On the face of it, it may look like little has changed – the Z Fold6 is slightly wider and shorter than the outgoing model, not to mention significantly thinner. Combine this with a lighter 239g weight, just 7g over the S24 Ultra, and you have a phone that’s not only lighter to wield and carry but also a far more usable, more normal phone-like, cover screen than the remote control-esque cover displays of previous Folds. In use, I quite liked working on the 6.3-inch 1-120Hz cover screen for whenever I didn’t want to make the effort of using the larger inner display.
Also read: Vivo X Fold 3 Pro review: This modern-day foldable phone comes at a premium
The flat-edged, boxier design feels more refined and premium, on trend and in line with current premium flagships. It’s also durable, with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection, Armor Aluminum for the frame and a stronger, better sealed off hinge that gives the phone its IP48 dust-water resistance. That’s good enough to take a dip in the pool, but not at the beach.
Display
With the Fold6 open, you’re left staring at a gorgeous 7.6-inch, 2160x1856 pixel inner screen: a colorful, contrast rich display that’s further proof of the fact that Samsung does make some of the best screens around. It’s great for watching content and even better for editing spreadsheets, browsing websites, reading eBooks and for the odd gaming session.
Used outdoors, the screen benefits from a boosted 2600nits peak brightness that makes it easier to see, even in direct sunlight. The ever-handy Flex mode lets you fold the screen 90 degrees and set the Fold6 down on a flat surface for watching videos, making video calls or typing laptop-style. The experience is somewhat initially marred by the still noticeable crease at the point where the screen folds, slightly less so than the previous generation but more pronounced than the competition.
Performance
Expectedly, the Fold6 arrives packing heat by way of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chipset, 12GB of memory and 256GB and upwards (up to 1TB) of storage, plus a larger vapor chamber that aids heat dissipation during intense activities like gaming.
Multitasking on the inner display is a joy to use, with the phone happily running three apps at the same time, with a fourth via a floating window if needed. Battery life is middling with the Fold6’s 4,400mAh cell, and one would have liked to see a larger capacity battery or faster than 25W charging speeds.
Software experience
As good as OneUI 6.1.1 is on the Z Fold6, the real story this time around is the heavy sprinkling of Galaxy AI across image editing, photos, drawing, messaging and translation services. You may be familiar with Circle to Search and Chat Assist, and now there’s Note Assist to transcribe, summarize and even translate meeting notes.
Fold the phone into flex mode, and the Interpreter app uses the cover screen to show the translated language to the person in front of you, all the while keeping your native language on the main screen.
There’s no S Pen included in the package (a pity, really, given the price), but the Z Fold6 gives you more reason to pick one up beyond the obvious use cases of doodling and quick notes. That reason is the new “Sketch to Image" feature, which lets you sketch/draw on top of an existing photo, and Galaxy AI understands your potentially terrible attempts at drawing and converts it into correctly scaled photo-realistic objects inserted into the scene. Drawing rabbit ears on my kid’s head, inserting the sun into overcast photos during the recent rains and adding jewelry digitally onto images of my significant other – the results were shockingly good on most attempts, so much so you appreciate having Samsung label it with an "AI-generated content" watermark.
Cameras
Where the Fold6 falls short is in its camera upgrades, with much of the camera package inherited from the Z Fold5. You get a 50-megapixel primary, a 12-megapixel ultrawide and a 10-megapixel 3x optical zoom shooter on the rear, aside from a 4-megapixel under display and a 10-megapixel selfie shooter on the inner and outer screens. Sure, boots in computational photography help across the board, but the upgrades are marginal, generation on generation, and fall a bit behind the likes of the OnePlus Open and the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro.
Verdict
For a phone that retails at a higher price point than its predecessor, with a 1TB variant that hits the stratospheric ₹2-lakh mark, it’s comparisons on camera and battery/charging, not to mention price, that take the shine off the Z Fold6’s refinements in design, durability, display and software.
It’s a very good book style foldable, without a doubt among the best engineered of foldables, and you couldn’t go wrong picking one up. It’s just that with the increased competition, you’d want the OG foldable to unequivocally reclaim its spot at the top. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 falls just short of that.
Tushar Kanwar, a tech columnist and commentator, posts @2shar.
