Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Silver medalist

Last year, Alex warned that the competition was catching up with the Galaxy Z Flip 5, and this year, Motorola’s flippable Motorola Razr 50 Ultra has pulled out well and truly in front.

That’s a problem for Samsung, and hopefully, it will be a wake-up call. Because if you’re invested enough to care about the state of foldables, you will know that Samsung has been offering comically slight annual iterations of its smartphones for a while now. That makes it difficult to review the Galaxy Z Flip 6 because as much as I’d love to slam Samsung for offering next to nothing in the way of upgrades, it is still an incredible foldable phone. One of the best. Is it worth the premium price? Absolutely not. But not many foldables are.

It’s fitting that the action of flipping the Galaxy Z Flip 6 open is reminiscent of opening your wallet because that’s exactly what you’ll be doing if you want to buy into the world of foldables. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 is available in two storage options; the cheaper 256GB option will set you back $1,799 outright while the 512GB option will cost you $1,999.

That’s a not insignificant price jump from last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5, which cost $1,649 for the 256GB model and $1,849 for the 512GB option at launch. It’s also more expensive than Motorola’s flippable Razr 50 Ultra, which costs just $1,699 for the 512GB model.

Here’s a look at some more popular  Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 plans on a 36-month payment arrangement:

If you’re spending that much money on the Galaxy Z Flip 6, the unique form factor is what you’re paying for. I'm more of a flipper than a folder. It’s just a more practical design. It’s refreshingly compact and there’s a delightful simplicity to using the Cover Screen; selfies suddenly take full advantage of the main camera, and you can do just enough of your everyday smartphoning without ever opening the display. That’s saved me from a lot of mindless scrolling while using the Z Flip 6.

I also have a soft spot for some of the Z Flip’s gimmicks, such as the interactive wallpaper where little cartoon puppies roll around the display as you twist and turn the device. Simple things.

The Cover Display is the best it’s ever been with the Z Flip 6, of course. It’s brighter and wraps snugly around the dual-lens main camera array but this is one area where Samsung be lacking; as it continues to work towards a full-frame cover display six generations later, the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra has stolen its thunder, offering just that in the same month as the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s release.

It’s a little nuts to think we’re already six generations in with a product that still feels niche and new. Especially when the Galaxy Z Flip 6 doesn’t look six generations separated from the original that was released back in 2020. Still, the small changes, almost invisible to the naked eye, make a huge difference. The hinge is one such development. It’s taken a long while to get here but the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s protected crease is quite the engineering feat. The hinge itself protects both sides when closed but there’s also a small web-like piece of silicon that stretches with the phone as it unfolds, protecting the display’s precarious gap where debris would otherwise enter.

This contributes to the overall IP48 ingress rating. The Galaxy Z Flip 5 was water-resistant but made no promises against dust and dirt with its IPX8 rating. The revised design offers more peace of mind but I would be lying if I didn’t have a mild panic attack every time I pulled the Z Flip 6 out of my pocket. The improved design can’t eliminate the years of fear and trauma that preceded it.

Speaking of slight improvements, the Z Flip’s crease (historically one of its most criticised aspects) is better again but still noticeable. As with previous years, it does get easier to ignore the crease after a few weeks of use but even after two weeks with the Z Flip 6, the crease would occasionally catch me off guard.

Similarly distracting is how certain apps struggle to fit the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s unique aspect ratio. In my experience, it never rendered any single app unusable but there were still many examples of UI elements clipping at the edges of the screen. One example is Marvel Snap, Reviews.org Australia’s mobile game of choice. Character tokens and names which appear in the top left and right corner of the screen were permanently cut off; that didn’t have any impact on the gameplay but it still never failed to bother me whenever I’d open the app.

The Z Flip is too niche for app developers to cater to its bizarre screen size so that’s simply not a problem that’s ever going to go away unless Samsung finds a way to normalise the screen dimensions of the Z Flip when unfolded.

Look, let’s get down to brass tacks, the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s camera is a nice upgrade on the Z Flip 5. It’s not revolutionary by any measure but the bump from a 12MP to a 50MP shooter has improved things notably. Even if the sheer megapixel count doesn’t count for much, several small upgrades (which include 4K video at 60fps) amount to a better overall camera experience. Again, things unique to the Z Flip 6 like using your main shooter as a selfie camera elevate the whole affair even if it isn’t the hottest smartphone camera available.

Despite being a headline feature of the Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6, I could happily finish this review without ever mentioning the Galaxy AI features that complement the phone’s photography. Two weeks isn’t a lot of time to know whether or not Samsung’s Galaxy AI features could become an essential assistant when making memories with the onboard camera but in my limited time with the features on hand, I’ve decided that they amount to a fun novelty that I still have no practical use for.

Removing a tree in my backyard with the generative AI tool just replaced it with a much sadder tree. It replaced graffiti on the side of a bridge with… worse graffiti and added the most miserable little cloud to an empty space in the sky next to a parking lot sign I’d snapped. It was fun to see what the AI would conjure up but there wasn’t a single example I would ever choose as a realistic replacement for the photo I’d taken.

Part of this was down to the UI; there’s a difference between the touchscreen gestures available. For example, circling an object in a photo will allow you to remove it entirely (or resize/reposition it) but simply tapping the object will replace it with an alternative. But you don’t have any control over that alternative, Samsung just gives you a few variants of the thing you tapped (e.g. a different tree if you tapped a tree,) and not the freedom to replace it with something else entirely. That’s a bit poxy considering the power of generative AI as we currently know it.

The best use of what Samsung is branding as AI (it’s very loose) is probably the FlexCam with auto zoom. Essentially, you can place the Z Flip 6 on a flat surface with the display folded halfway and step away so you’re included in the selfie and the auto zoom function will do its best to frame the driverless photo perfectly. It’s an imperfect technology that seems to struggle in low light but when it does work it’s close to magic. I guess I’d be more impressed if it weren’t for the iPad’s Center Stage feature, which has been pulling off the same magic trick long before anyone cared to brand it as an AI feature.

Generative AI photo edits are just one part of Samsung’s Artificial Intelligence push and even though they feel forgettable, they’re still more useful than almost any other Galaxy AI feature. Note Assist, a text summary tool, and Interpreter, a live translation tool, are good uses of Galaxy AI that already exist in other Galaxy phones.

The AI writing tools, on the other hand, are an abhorrent waste of time and an insult to the average human’s social skills. I spent more time wrestling with Galaxy AI’s holier-than-thou moral compass than I would just composing the message in the first place and even when I did manage to get it to deliver a coherent response, it flip-flopped between too serious and cringe-heavy “nice guy” humour.

I was lucky enough to be able to test Galaxy AI’s rizz against my soulmate and lifetime partner-in-crime and suffice it to say, it didn’t have the juice. Even its more earnest attempts at flirting were a mess of overly formal banter and odd conversational focal points. My partner likened it to getting chatted up by a guy in line at a Games Workshop but she's far too kind.

Putting all the AI guff aside for a second, the technology under the hood powering all of these moment-to-moment generative images and text is nothing to be sniffed at. At its core, the Gen 3 Snapdragon 8 chipset isn’t the monumental upgrade you would expect from a numbered release but it’s still an impressive little engine to be powering all of that superfluous software stuff while powering what’s otherwise a technically impressive foldable. I refer back to Marvel Snap (the game that broke Reviews.org/au/.) Despite the issues I outlined with the Z Flip 6’s unique shape, the game itself ran at a clip, achieving a fairly consistent 60 frames-per-second even with that game’s memory-intensive animations.

I can’t say for sure if it’s the bigger 4,000mAh battery or the streamlined operations offered by the Gen 3 Snapdragon 8 chipset but one thing is for sure, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has some decent battery life. It’s not going to outlast the Galaxy S24 but credit where it’s due, Samsung has significantly improved the battery life of the Z Flip 6, despite making the Cover Display so much brighter.

One side benefit of being able to perform basic tasks from the Cover Display means you’re not using the Z Flip 6’s full display as often and therefore not spending as much battery life. In one stretch, where I’d used the Z Flip 6 fairly casually as my main driver I almost got through three whole days without needing to charge it. I was also on leave and not actively using my phone as much but that’s still impressive in my books.

On average it was closer to two days of use before needing some juice but on a particularly busy day of phone calls, photography and YouTube, the Z Flip 6 hit 0% before I’d tucked myself in for the night.

The complete battery rundown I performed with the Galaxy Z Flip 6 managed just over 15 hours of continuous video playback. That’s five Oppenheimer viewings on a single charge. Not bad.