Foldable phones have been around long enough that they’re no longer just a fun little gimmick that draws attention from across the room. Now that foldable phones have proven their staying power, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 still tries to grab attention with a design that looks like it was meant for a CEO’s bag.
It might just be the colorway Samsung sent me to test, but the Galaxy Z Fold 6, with its flat edges and aluminum finish, seems to have taken cues from the iPhone 15 Pro. That makes it an ultra-premium phone—with a price to match—but there’s more under the hood. The Fold 6 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the same one found in the Z Flip 6, making it a powerhouse for everything from gaming to AI workloads.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 – Design and Features
Given its price — $1,899 for the smallest storage model — it’s no surprise that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a beautiful device. With its rounded edges and aluminum back, it doesn’t look like another gimmicky foldable, but more like 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. When folded, the Z Fold 6 has a 6.3-inch 968p display that unfolds to a 7.6-inch display that looks more like a tablet than a smartphone. But even when the phone folds, it’s not too thick, measuring just 0.47 inches. Then when you unfold it, that thickness is reduced to just 0.22 inches without feeling flimsy.
That’s because of the phone’s sturdy build quality. Every aspect of the device, from the back plate to the hinge itself, has been reinforced with aluminum, and after a few weeks with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, I never had much fear of it breaking, even after dropping it off my desk a few times.
Although all that aluminum makes the phone heavy, weighing 239g, it’s actually lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, which tipped the scales at 253g. That’s not a huge difference, but it does mean it’s a little less of a burden on your pockets.
On the side of the phone, you’ll find all the available buttons – a volume rocker and a lock button that doubles as a fingerprint reader. The click feels extremely nice, thanks again to the high-quality aluminum that every part of this phone is made of. The fingerprint reader is also very fast and accurate, though I do miss the in-screen fingerprint reader on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, although I imagine it would be complicated to fit that into a foldable design like this.
On the bottom of the phone, you’ll find the USB-C port next to the speaker. For a phone like this, the speaker is truly 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.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 – Displays
Although the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an extremely powerful phone, the displays on offer are the real reason to get this thing. The Fold 6 has two displays in total, a 6.2-inch sub-display that you use when the phone is folded and a 7.6-inch main display. That might not seem like a huge difference, but the main difference here is the aspect ratio.
The display you use when the phone is folded is a 968 x 2,376 AMOLED screen with a 22:1.9 aspect ratio. It’s much narrower than your standard smartphone display, but it’s still great for scrolling through social media or sending text messages. It helps that the AMOLED panel is extremely bright and colorful, which makes everything you look at on the phone look amazing. The problem comes when you want to watch movies or play games, as the aspect ratio can mess things up.
Luckily, it’s foldable and you can unfold the device to reveal the 7.6-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2160 x 1856 pixels and a 4:3 aspect ratio. This display blew me away when I first used it, as it has the same color depth and brightness as the smaller display, but a much higher resolution. Everything just looks amazing as long as it fits.
There are some things that really shine on this larger display, especially reading comics. I regularly find myself flipping the phone open and opening Marvel Unlimited in my spare time, something I almost never do on a phone just because tablets are so much better for comics. Of course, it is basically a mini tablet.
The problems arise again when you load games or movies with a native 16:9 aspect ratio. By default, many of the games I tried to play on the Fold 6 were stretched to fill the screen. There are some games, like Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, that became almost unusable at a 4:3 aspect ratio because they simply weren’t designed for that type of screen.
You can, however, change the full-screen behavior of individual apps in the settings, but the phone doesn’t make it particularly 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 their devices.
Once you get past those 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 were less of a hassle to get everything to work the way you want it to.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 – Camera
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a triple camera setup on the back, peaking with a 50MP main lens. I spent about two weeks with the Z Fold 6 and managed to take some extremely detailed photos, even at night. And with a 30x digital zoom, I was even able to get detailed shots of water towers on buildings in Manhattan.
You also get two front-facing cameras. kind of. When the phone is folded, there’s a 10MP camera under a notch in the display. But when you unfold the phone, the main display hides a 4MP front-facing camera. The camera you get when you unfold the phone is frankly terrible and you shouldn’t be using it. It’s there so you can take selfies in tablet mode, but you’re better off taking all your selfies with the phone folded.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 – Performance
Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an incredibly powerful phone—but it has to be. Not only is it incredibly expensive, but the ability to switch between two high-resolution displays on the fly requires some processing power.
In Geekbench 6, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 scored 6,157 and 1,765 in the multi-core and single-core tests, respectively. However, considering that the Galaxy Z Flip 6 scored 6,215 and 2,170 in the same tests using the same chipset, the Z Fold 6 seems to be in line with expectations, but the extra cooling enabled by the larger body doesn’t make that much of a difference.
However, compared to its predecessor, the Z Fold 6 is significantly faster: The Z Fold 5 achieved 5,025 points in Geekbench 6, which corresponds to a generational leap in CPU performance of 22%.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 was also a bit slower in GFXBench Aztec Ruins, hitting 53 fps versus the Z Flip 6’s 56 fps. This is within the margin of error, but means you won’t get any extra performance this time around if you opt for the more expensive foldable.
Although it can barely keep up with the cheaper Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, the Z Fold 6 is still an incredibly powerful phone. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can easily run any mobile application currently on the market, including demanding games like Zenless Zone Zero or Wuthering Waves – you just need to change the display settings to make them fit on the huge screen.
