Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 Review
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6, while an incremental upgrade rather than a groundbreaking one, brings significant refinements over its predecessor that enhance the overall user experience. Key improvements include a larger battery, an enhanced IP rating with dust protection, an upgraded 50 MP primary camera, and the latest Snapdragon SoC. These enhancements, combined with its class-leading performance, make the Z Flip6 a compelling choice. Priced ₹10,000 higher than the Z Flip5, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 is ideal for those seeking a flagship experience with top-tier performance, extended software support, and advanced AI features. It excels in these areas, maintaining a significant lead over competitors. However, the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra and OPPO Find N3 Flip surpass it in cover screen functionality and camera versatility.
Samsung’s foldable technology has set the industry benchmark since the launch of the first Fold in 2019. For a couple of years, Samsung dominated the market with nearly zero competition. While Samsung foldables are still among the best-selling in the market, the foldable smartphone arena is no longer a one-horse race. Other brands are making significant strides, with companies such as OnePlus, Vivo, and Motorola adding their entrants into the foldable market. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 has entered the 2024 foldable market with an array of improvements.
The battery capacity has increased, the IP rating now includes some level of dust protection, the main camera has been upgraded, the phone houses the latest and greatest Snapdragon SoC, and it features a host of new Galaxy AI features. The phone has certainly been refined further, but it doesn’t boast too many generational upgrades. Competition is rife too; Motorola recently disrupted the market with its Motorola Razr 50 Ultra (review), and OPPO has a compelling offering in the OPPO Find N3 Flip (review). Will the Galaxy Z Flip6 stand out among these options, especially considering the price has been increased by ₹10,000? Let’s find out in my detailed review.
The design hasn’t seen any major changes compared to its predecessor, but there have been some subtle improvements. The frame now has a brushed matte finish, reducing the appearance of fingerprints and smudges. The phone is marginally thinner when folded, but the difference is negligible – 14.9 mm on the Z Flip6 versus 15.1 mm on last year’s Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 (review). The weight remains the same at 187 g, which is impressive given the battery capacity has increased from 3,700 mAh to 4,000 mAh.
Samsung has added accent rings around the cameras this time around that are colour-matched to the rear panel of the device, giving it an extra bit of flair. The inner foldable display has a tall aspect ratio, making it difficult to reach the top of the screen one-handed. The buttons are also out of reach, especially for those with shorter fingers. I almost always have to shuffle and adjust my hand’s position to reach the buttons.
One major improvement for me is the appearance of the crease. It doesn’t look as pronounced as in previous generations of Galaxy Flips and I usually can’t notice it when the display is turned on, except in studio lighting. Samsung has also improved the IP rating this time around, finally adding dust resistance to the mix. The Z Flip6 is IP48 rated, meaning dust particles larger than 1 mm cannot get into the innards of the phone. This is a good thing since the Galaxy Z Flip5 had no official protection against dust.
The displays remain largely unchanged on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6; the brightness levels have gone up from 1,750 nits of peak brightness to 2,600 nits, but that’s about it. You get the same 6.7-inch inner LTPO AMOLED display with FHD+ resolution and a 3.4-inch cover AMOLED display with 720 x 748 resolution. The cover display doesn’t have LTPO support and also has a lower resolution compared to the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra.
Additionally, the cover display only supports a 60 Hz refresh rate, whereas the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra has 165 Hz on both the inner and cover displays.
However, these are still gorgeous-looking displays with good colour reproduction and viewing angles. They support HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision, yet HDR content looks rich and vivid in OTT apps such as Netflix and YouTube. Brightness levels are also high enough for comfortable usage in harsh sunlight. I got a reading of 1,368 nits on HBM under direct sunlight, which is great.
The bezels of the inner display are a bit too thick for my liking; Samsung really needs to trim these down. Regarding the functionality of the cover display, there are a lot of widgets you can add to it and you can use Gemini on the cover screen if you wish to, but app functionality is quite limited until you download Good Lock, which allows you to run pretty much any app on the cover screen. It’s a shame it’s not available by default like on the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 may have fallen slightly behind in the cover screen department, but it shines when it comes to performance. It is the most powerful flip foldable available in India, powered by the flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. This is paired with 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 512 GB of UFS 4.0 storage.
When compared to other flip smartphones in the market, such as the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra and the OPPO Find N3 Flip, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 takes the crown in synthetic benchmarks. The phone scores a whopping 1.7 million points in AnTuTu v10 and achieves a fantastic score of 2165 in Single-Core and 6806 in Multi-Core in GeekBench. It also impresses in PCMark Work with a score of 17,739. Whether for productivity tasks or general day-to-day usage, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 is capable of handling them smoothly.
In GPU benchmarks, the Z Flip6 dominates once again, even outperforming its cousin, the Galaxy Z Fold6, in the GFXBench tests. However, the phone does throttle considerably under stressful loads. In the CPU Throttling Test, the Z Flip6 throttled to 69 per cent of its peak performance in just 15 minutes.
When performing intensive tasks such as playing games or rendering videos, you may notice the phone slowing down slightly due to throttling after a certain period. This was evident while playing Genshin Impact, where the phone’s frame rates started dipping after half an hour of gameplay. However, surface temperatures didn’t rise too much mainly due to the new vapour chamber cooling system on the Z Flip6.
As for the UI, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 comes with Android 14 out of the box, with One UI 6.1.1 on top. The phone will receive seven years of OS and security updates, which is category-leading. One UI is a joy to use; it is extremely refined and packed with useful features. Bloatware is kept to a minimum, though it’s not as trimmed down as Motorola’s Hello UI, NothingOS, or stock Android.
The 2024 Samsung Unpacked Event not only unveiled new foldables and smartwatches but also expanded its Galaxy AI portfolio with a suite of new AI features. The new features consist of automatic transcription, translation, and summarisation for voice recordings, as well as PDF overlay translation. There’s a Sketch to Image feature that lets you draw objects on images within the Gallery or in the Notes app, which AI can then replace with actual objects.
Portrait Studio is a fun one that creates various portrait styles like 3D cartoon or watercolour, adding a creative touch to your photos. Samsung has also improved the Interpreter feature for live translation. This feature now includes a special conversation mode tailored for the foldable form factor. In this mode, each party in the conversation can see the translation on different screens – one on the main screen and the other on the cover screen.
Composer, integrated into the Samsung Keyboard, can now generate text based on simple keywords. Circle to Search is a system-wide feature that allows you to highlight any part of the screen to search for an object online.
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip6 is packed with AI features aimed at enhancing user experience and productivity; it is one of the most feature-packed AI phones you can get in the foldable smartphone market.
Aside from testing out the new AI features, we also ran our usual slew of AI benchmarks to gauge the device’s NPU capabilities. The phone’s AI benchmark scores were much higher than its biggest competitor, the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra. In fact, the Z Flip6 got an overall Digit AI-Q score of 85 while the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra only got a score of 32, which highlights the disparity between the two phones and the Z Flip6’s on-device AI processing chops.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 sees a substantial upgrade in the camera department. A new 50 MP f/1.8 primary camera replaces the old 12 MP unit that was present on its predecessor. The 12 MP ultrawide camera and the 10 MP selfie camera are carried over from the Z Flip5 though, so no changes there.
The upgraded 50 MP camera clicks binned 12 MP images by default which produces realistic colours, excellent detail, and good contrast. The oversharpening issue that was present on the Z Flip5 has been resolved here. The dynamic range is very impressive, and the Z Flip6 manages to control highlights and shadows particularly well even in tricky lighting situations.
Portrait photography has improved too, with lesser smoothening of facial textures, more accurate skin tones, and good edge detection. The 12 MP ultrawide camera is decent, there are still some remnants of the oversharpening issue from last year, but this mostly happens in low light.
As for low-light photography from the main camera, it is quite good. There is some noise in darker areas, but the detail, dynamic range, and colours are on point. Additionally, lens flare is also largely under control.
The 10 MP selfie camera does a decent job in daylight but outputs soft photos in low light; you would be better off using the 50 MP shooter as a selfie camera on the cover screen since it is capable of clicking much more detailed selfies. You can also switch to the ultrawide camera to click groupfies!
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 houses a larger 4,000 mAh battery bringing it on par with the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra, however, the OPPO Find N3 Flip still has a larger 4,300 mAh cell. Still, the battery endurance is quite good, I got a screen-on time of 7-8 hours on most days, which is pretty decent for a flip-style foldable given the lack of space for a larger battery.
In our 4K video loop test, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 lasted a respectable 14.5 hours which is a decent jump compared to the Galaxy Z Flip5 which lasted only 12 hours and 38 minutes in the same test.
The charging speeds remain as labouriously slow as ever though. The phone supports 25 W wired charging, 15 W wireless charging, and 4.5 W reverse wireless charging. The Z Flip6 tops up from 0-100 per cent in 1 hour and 41 minutes, which is sluggish in comparison to the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra which does the same in just 48 minutes.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6, while an incremental upgrade rather than a groundbreaking one, brings significant refinements over its predecessor that enhance the overall user experience. Key improvements include a larger battery, an enhanced IP rating with dust protection, an upgraded 50 MP primary camera, and the latest Snapdragon SoC. These enhancements, combined with its class-leading performance, make the Z Flip6 a compelling choice. Priced ₹10,000 higher than the Z Flip5, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 is ideal for those seeking a flagship experience with top-tier performance, extended software support, and advanced AI features. It excels in these areas, maintaining a significant lead over competitors.
However, the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra and OPPO Find N3 Flip surpass it in cover screen functionality and camera versatility. Samsung needs to address the cover screen in future iterations to maintain its competitive edge. Despite this, the Galaxy Z Flip6 remains one of the best foldable smartphones available in the Indian market today, offering a premium experience that justifies the price hike for many users.
