Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 Review

Foldable phones have been around long enough that they’re no longer just a fun little gimmick that draws stares from across the room. However, now that foldables have proved their staying power, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is trying to turn heads anyway with a design that looks like it’s meant to be in the pocket of a CEO.

It may just be the colorway Samsung sent me for review, but the Galaxy Z Fold 6, with its flat edges and aluminum finish, seems to have taken a note from the iPhone 15 Pro. This makes it an ultra-premium phone – with a price to match – but there’s more beneath the cover. The Fold 6 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the same as the Z Flip 6, which makes it a powerhouse for everything from gaming to AI workloads.

With how expensive it is – $1,899 for the smallest-storage model – it’s no surprise the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a gorgeous gadget. With its squared-off edges and aluminum back, this doesn’t look like yet another gimmicky foldable, but rather a serious alternative to a traditional phone like the Galaxy S24 Ultra or iPhone 15.

But the Galaxy Z Fold 6 isn’t a traditional phone. While it’s folded up, the Z Fold 6 sports a 6.3 inch 968p display, unfolding to a full 7.6 inch display that’s more akin to a tablet than a smartphone. But even though the phone folds in on itself, it’s not too thick, measuring just 0.47 inches. Then, when you unfold it, that thickness is trimmed down to just 0.22 inches, and without feeling flimsy.

That’s thanks to the rigid build quality of the phone. Every aspect of the device, from the backplate to the hinge itself has been reinforced with aluminum, and after a couple of weeks with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, I’ve never been too worried about it breaking, even after falling off of my desk a couple of times.

While all this aluminum makes for a hefty phone, weighing in at 239g, it’s actually lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, which came in at 253g. That’s not much of a difference, but it does mean it’ll weigh down your pockets a little less.

On the side of the phone, you’ll find all the buttons on offer – a volume rocker and a lock button that doubles as a fingerprint reader. These feel extremely satisfying to click in, thanks again to the premium aluminum that every part of this phone is made of. The fingerprint reader is very fast and accurate, too, however I do miss the in-screen fingerprint reader of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, though I imagine that’d be complicated to work into a foldable design like this.

On the bottom of the phone, you’ll also find the USB-C port, along with the speaker. For a phone like this, the speaker is actually incredible. It gets loud enough to fill a room, and it doesn’t sound like the bass was left at home. Instead, you can hear every element of a song you’re listening to, even if it lacks some of the finer details you’d get from a good pair of headphones.

While the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an extremely powerful phone, the real reason to get this thing is the displays on offer. The Fold 6 has two displays in total, a 6.2-inch sub display that you’ll use when the phone is folded up, and a 7.6-inch main display. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but the key difference here is the aspect ratio.

The display you’ll be using when the phone is folded up is a 968 x 2,376 AMOLED screen, making for a 22:1.9 aspect ratio. It’s much narrower than your standard smartphone display, but it is still excellent for scrolling social media or sending text messages. It helps that the AMOLED panel is extremely bright and colorful, which makes anything you look at on the phone look awesome. The problem comes in when you want to watch movies or play games, as the aspect ratio can mess things up.

Luckily, it’s a foldable, and you can unfold the device to reveal the 7.6 inch AMOLED display, with a resolution of 2,160 x 1,856, making for a 4:3 aspect ratio. This display was jaw dropping the first time I used it, as it has the same color depth and brightness of the smaller display, but with a much higher resolution. Everything simply looks awesome, as long as it fits.

There are some things that truly shine on this larger display, reading comics being chief among them. I regularly find myself unfolding the phone and opening Marvel Unlimited in my downtime, something I almost never do on a phone, just because tablets are so much better for comics. Of course, this is basically a mini tablet after all.

The problems arise, again, once you’re loading up games or movies with a native 16:9 aspect ratio. By default a lot of the games I tried playing on the Fold 6 defaulted to stretching out to fill the screen. There are some games, like Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, that became nearly unusable at a 4:3 aspect ratio, as it simply wasn’t designed for this type of screen.

You can go in the settings, however, and change the full screen behavior of individual apps, but the phone doesn’t make it super obvious that this is an option. I had to dig around in the display settings to find it, which is fine for me, but could be seriously annoying if you’re not the type to tinker with your devices.

Once you get past these bugbears, however, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 has one of the most beautiful displays I’ve ever used in a phone. If only it was less of a pain to get everything running the way you want it to.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a triple-camera design for its rear shooter, peaking with its 50MP main lens. I’ve spent about two weeks with the Z Fold 6, and I’ve managed to get some extremely detailed photos, even at night. And with a digital 30x zoom, I was even able to get detailed shots of water towers on top of buildings in Manhattan.

You get two front-facing cameras too, kind of. When the phone is folded up, there’s a 10 MP shooter under a cutout in the display. However, when you unfold the phone, the main display is hiding a 4MP front-facing camera. The camera you get when the phone is unfolded is frankly terrible and you shouldn’t use it. It’s there so you can get selfies when in tablet mode, but you’re better off getting all of your selfies with the phone folded.

Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an incredibly powerful phone – but it kind of has to be. Not only is it incredibly expensive, but the ability to swap between two high-resolution displays at the drop of a hat needs a certain amount of processing horsepower.

In Geekbench 6, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 scored 6,157 points and 1,765 points in the multi-core and single-core tests, respectively. Considering the Galaxy Z Flip 6 scored 6,215 and 2,170 points in the same tests with the same chipset, however, it seems like the Z Fold 6 falls within expectations, but the extra cooling that the larger chassis allows doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Compared to its predecessor, though, the Z Fold 6 is significantly faster, with the Z Fold 5 scoring 5,025 points in Geekbench 6, making for a 22% generational leap in CPU performance.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 was also a bit slower in the GFXBench Aztec Ruins, scoring 53 fps to the Z Flip 6’s 56 fps. This is within the margin of error, but it does mean you’re not getting extra performance by springing for the more expensive foldable this time around.

While it is just keeping up with the more affordable Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, the Z Fold 6 is still an incredibly powerful phone. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is easily able to power any mobile application on the market right now, including demanding games like Zenless Zone Zero or Wuthering Waves – you’ll just have to mess with the display settings to stop them from stretching to fit the massive display.