Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 Review: Minor Upgrades and S Pen Integration

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 review: the best folder going is only minor upgrade

Lighter weight, better screens, faster chip and fancy AI features are all welcome, but feel iterative for the price Samsung's most advanced, hi-tech folding phone for 2024 is the Galaxy Z Fold 6, which looks to see off rivals from Google, OnePlus and others with a lighter frame, bigger and better screens, and the fastest chip available for Android. The latest phone-tablet hybrid from the category pioneer is designed to be the ultra-premium device of choice for buyers, but faces stiff competition from several worthy challengers, most of which undercut the South Korean firm on price. The sixth-generation device costs an eye-watering £1,799 (€1,999/$1,899.99/A$2,749), making it more expensive than last year's model and even more than Samsung's top new laptop. Needless to say, the Fold 6 is for the well-heeled only, priced according to the many expensive gadgets it hopes to replace: your tablet, phone and PC. Samsung made big improvements to the physical design of the Fold series with its fifth-generation model last year. The Fold 6 builds on that in small but meaningful ways, including a 14g reduction in weight that makes it only 7g heavier than Samsung's top normal phone, the S24 Ultra. That alone makes it easier to hold and carry in a pocket or bag. The Fold 6's flattened, matt aluminium sides make it easier to open with your thumbs while the wider outside screen feels less cramped than previous versions for messaging and phone-type things. Open the Fold 6 like a book for the 7.6in tablet screen, which is significantly brighter than previous models, making it much easier to read outdoors. HDR films really pop. You can still see the crease under the glare of lights and feel it in the centre where it folds, but it otherwise disappears into the background during use. The Fold 6 has the same top Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and 12GB of RAM as the S24 Ultra and Z Flip 6 and benefits from the power when multitasking. It runs up to eight apps on screen simultaneously without breaking into a sweat and handles AI, games and various apps with aplomb. It thoroughly trounces most competitors on raw power, and is snappy when hooked up to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse for use as Android PC. The battery lasts about 48 hours between charges when using a mix of the outside and inside screens for about seven hours, which is similar to the best regular phones and longer than the main folding competition. Samsung does not provide an expected lifespan for the battery but it should last in excess of 500 full-charge cycles with at least 80% of its original capacity. The phone is generally repairable. Inside screen repairs cost £514. Samsung offers a self-repair programme, as well as Care+ accidental damage insurance that reduces the cost of repairs to £139. The Fold 6 is made from recycled aluminium, cobalt, copper, glass, gold, plastic and rare earth elements. Samsung offers trade-in and recycling schemes for old devices. The company publishes annual sustainability reports but not impact assessments for individual products. The Fold 6 runs One UI 6.1 based on Android 14 and will receive software and security updates for seven years from release, making it one of the longest-supported phones available. One UI is the better than competitors' software at making use of the extra size and flexibility of the folding screen. You can run up to eight apps on-screen at once, utilise various partially folded modes almost like a mini-laptop and many other tools. Whatever you can do with an Android tablet you can do with the Fold and more. It has a similar set of AI features to the S24 series and Flip 6, too, including Google's Gemini AI chatbot and the excellent Circle to Search, voice transcription and translation services, AI summarisation of notes and sites, as well as various proofing, grammar and rewriting tools built into the keyboard. The new photo assist tool is much easier to use on the big screen compared with the Flip 6, allowing you to turn freehand sketches into real-looking objects inserted into your photos, which is lots of fun. The Fold 6 has a similar five-camera setup to the previous two models, including a 4-megapixel selfie camera under the internal screen that is useful only for video calls. On the back is a 50MP main camera, a 12MP ultra wide camera and a 10MP 3x telephoto camera. They shoot great photos in bright light, capture excellent portrait shots and do a solid job in low light. The 3x optical zoom doesn't have much reach compared with newer 4x or 5x zooms, which is disappointing. Despite the phone costing twice the price, the cameras only match those on Samsung's regular S24 models from January. The selfie camera at the top of the outside of the phone is decent, but is bettered by the ability to shoot self-portraits with the main cameras using the cover screen as a viewfinder. That's one of many fun tricks the Fold is capable of, which also include shooting photos while propped up if you show the camera your palm. Overall, the cameras on the Fold are good but not the best on the market for a foldable or regular phone. The Z Fold 6 is the most refined folder yet, and another small step towards the holy grail of being the same as a regular phone when closed but with a tablet on the inside. It is still necessarily a bit thick, but it is just a few grams heavier than Samsung's top regular phone, the S24 Ultra, and the outside screen is now the same width as a small phone such as the iPhone 13 mini. The inside screen is super-bright and smooth, matching top non-folding devices for quality. The crease in the middle is still present but it doesn't get in the way of usage. The materials needed to make the screen fold are still too soft for anything less than careful use and repairs are very expensive if the worst does happen. Samsung's many refinements are welcome but iterative and haven't fundamentally changed the way the device handles over the last two Fold versions, which makes the price hike from the already eye-watering sum even more galling. This is one of the most powerful and adaptable gadgets you can buy. But it is very much still a niche device for the wealthy. Something radical needs to happen to make the tablet-phone hybrid a mainstream option.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is at its best with an S Pen -- but here's why I'm still disappointed

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 could have been the perfect stylus phone -- here's why it's not As you may have read in our review of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, the new foldable phone has its upsides and downsides. But one thing the Fold is perfect for is a stylus. The good news is that Samsung will sell you one that's compatible with its foldable in the form of the S Pen. But unfortunately, some key flaws remain that continue to impact using an S Pen with the Z Fold 6. As a result, the combination of this stylus with Samsung's foldable phone continues to feel like an afterthought. I've spent almost two weeks using the Galaxy Z Fold 6 with Samsung's official S Pen Case, the easiest way to get a compatible S Pen with this new foldable (and one of our picks for the best Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 cases). Since I'm a frequent doodler, it's been great having a notebook-sized canvas folded up in my pocket at all times. But it's also brought some long-standing issues into focus that I can only hope the Galaxy Z Fold 7 will finally fix a year from now. Samsung's S Pen styluses are the best you can get on a phone, and arguably are better than even the still-great Apple Pencil for iPads. The physical button on the side is way more reliable than other styluses' tap gestures, too, plus Samsung's use of a soft stylus tip gives you better physical feedback than hard plastic on glass. It's just a shame that to make the S Pen more compact, Samsung has flattened the S Pen's sides, which make it feel a little odd to hold compared to a traditional cylindrical stylus. And there are no remote features since this is a passive stylus without Bluetooth. As well as providing responsive and smooth virtual inking, handwriting-to-text works well enough if you have the space on screen to write and neat-enough handwriting. And if you're artistically inclined then it's great for drawing. The new Sketch to Image feature is quite fun to play with, even if, like me, you're not an artistically talented person. The one physical issue that hurt using styluses with older foldables is the central crease down the main display, which can make drawing across the screen a jumpy experience. But with the Z Fold 6 featuring a more compact hinge, you may feel the crease with the S Pen, but it doesn't interfere with your stroke as you pass over it. So kudos to Samsung for improving that. But using the Galaxy Z Fold 6 with an S Pen without storing the two separately still requires a case, and one that's sold separately at that, which is unfair on the user. Samsung has been innovating with its S Pen case design, with this year's design being the slimmest yet. But the best tablets, including Samsung's own Galaxy Tabs, still offer magnetic attachment points so you can keep stylus and device together. And the Galaxy S24 Ultra comes with a built-in slot for its S Pen. The fact that only the inner screen works with the stylus seems stingy of Samsung too. I'm sure it would cost more to add a second digitizer, but since users are already paying close to $2,000 for the phone and stylus already, you can definitely swallow the cost of this yourself, Samsung. All of this stings more when you consider how limited the other areas of innovation have been. If you're not that fussed about Samsung's Galaxy AI features, or the annual step up in performance due to new chipsets, there's not a huge amount that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 does differently to the Galaxy Z Fold 4 from two years ago. Samsung's needed to overhaul the Galaxy Z Fold for years at this point, stubbornly making small tweaks while its competitors gain and overtake it in the best foldable phones race. The stylus is one of the sole benefits Samsung's foldable can claim exclusively, and yet its development seems to have frozen in place. Implementing an onboard storage option for an S Pen on the Galaxy Z Fold series could be all Samsung would need to do to restake its claim on the top spot, but the phone maker seems reluctant to do so. And so I fear that in a year's time, I may be writing very similar things about the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and its S Pen.