The most fun flip phone

Do you remember when flip phones were cool? I do. It was before smartphones. There was just something about flipping your phone open to reveal the display and see who was calling or texting, or to play a game of snake, then flip it closed again when you were done using it. For some reason, this had a feeling of fun that standard candy bar-style phones just couldn’t replicate. Samsung has exemplified that feeling of fun in flip phones with the Galaxy Z Flip 6. Essentially, it’s taken us back to a time when flip phones were cool.

Now, this is my first experience reviewing a foldable smartphone but I have played with past Galaxy Z Flip and Galaxy Z Fold models and other foldable phones before. I can say with certainty that the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is a fun flip phone. I’d even venture to say that it’s the most fun flip phone out there. Beyond its fun capabilities, it’s just a quality-made foldable. Samsung really seems to be coming into its own with folding smartphones. And after using the Galaxy Z Flip 6 for a week it’s easy to see that Samsung has clearly been in the game for several years.

Samsung has made more than a few upgrades to the Flip model since last year. The experience of using this phone for over a week has been great so far and I do really like it. That being said, there’s still room for improvement. You also need to factor in that Samsung is charging $100 more for the Galaxy Z Flip 6 than it did for the Galaxy Z Flip 5. With both the 256GB and 512GB models I might add. Is it worth the extra money? Let’s dive in and take a closer look.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Design and Build Quality

If there’s one thing that Samsung knows how to do it’s design a phone. Of course, it knows how to do plenty of other things well too. What I’m getting at is that Samsung rarely ever has bad phone designs. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is a solid design that I quite like and there are a few reasons for this. Most notably for me, Samsung’s use of a matte finish on the phone compared to last year’s glossy finish is a major step up.

I absolutely loathe fingerprints and smudges on my tech. And it’s impossible to avoid getting them or seeing them on a phone with a glossy finish. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 doesn’t have this issue because the back and even the frame and hinge are all matte. I can’t stress enough how much better this looks. It’s just very clean and very sleek. And I’m honestly hoping that Samsung sticks with this matte finish for future Galaxy Z Flip models.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 also has this “Floating Design” as Samsung calls it. When the phone is folded closed, both the top and bottom parts of the frame appear as if they’re floating due to the black pieces of plastic that encompass the edges of the display. This “floating line” adds some style to the overall design of the device while also helping the phone sit flat when closed.

Speaking of flat, the sides are completely flat this year. That might not seem like a huge deal but it’s a bigger deal than you might think. With the flat sides, you can now lay the phone on its side and it won’t tip over. This might be a pretty niche use case but there are times where I’ve wanted to lay phones on their side for either watching videos or playing games with a Bluetooth controller. And this really does make those things easier.

In terms of build quality, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is very well-made. The hinge definitely feels less prone to wear and tear and there’s a reason for that. Samsung is using a new dual rail hinge. This new hinge both feels more secure than previous versions of the Galaxy Z Flip and it should help with overall phone durability. Samsung says this gives it better shock distribution, though I was hesitant to test and see if that’s accurate as I didn’t really feel like dropping the device.

On the inside, the folding edge is also now more resistant to pressure. I never used past models long enough to encounter any issues here. But I can see where this improved resistance is something you’d want. The aluminum that Samsung used for the frame is also more durable. This results in the phone being more scratch-resistant on the frame and hinge. So you should have less of an issue if you slide it into the same pocket as a key or other objects that might scratch up a phone’s metal frame. Overall, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a really nice design and the build quality is definitely top-notch.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Display

The display is easily one of the most important parts of any phone. Because you’re going to be interacting with it 99.9% of the time you use the phone. So naturally, you want the phone display to be decent. There are some varying levels of this depending on what you’re using the phone for. Obviously, if you play games or watch a lot of videos, movies, TV, or otherwise, the display needs to be nice for the best experience possible.

Even if you’re browsing the web, you don’t want a crappy display as it generally makes the experience worse. Even if you’re just scrolling through socials. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 display is anything but crappy. In fact, it’s pretty good. Even better than I would have hoped really, given that it’s a foldable display and I’ve never really liked foldable displays. This is what surprised me the most when using the phone. I found myself enjoying the act of using it, then folding the screen and putting the phone back in my pocket.

Then there’s the cover display which has proved useful on many occasions, although I still find myself wishing it was easier to enable its full potential. You can add a series of widgets to the cover screen out of the box. But to really make it useful, you need to install Good Lock and then enable any number of Good Lock modules.

There are two main things I don’t care for with this display, and one of them is likely an easy fix by poking around settings and enabling or disabling something. This in particular is the fact that the cover display doesn’t show me notification icons. I only see a little dot off to the side to let me know I have notifications to check. I’m assuming this can be changed. But I haven’t found out how yet. The other issue is the crease in the display. This is the main reason I don’t like foldable displays. Samsung has done an excellent job at making the crease harder to spot. In fact, I can barely see it unless the display is off, or if I’m holding at the right angle to where the light catches it.

Compared to previous models, this is a big improvement. Because now when I’m watching something or playing a game, staring at that crease isn’t going to pull me out of the experience that I’m having. The problem with the crease isn’t that it’s visible, however. It’s that I can feel it. Anytime I’m using the phone in portrait mode and scrolling through X, Reddit, or just reading an article online. Even scrolling through the Play Store or any other site or app. My finger will eventually roll over that crease and it just feels weird to me. Having that as part of the experience is not enjoyable.

Yes, this is subjective. Not everyone is going to care about that particular detail. But I know I’m not the only one that this would bother. To Samsung’s credit, this is one of the few things I haven’t really liked about the device. So even though I don’t care for this aspect of the display, that doesn’t make this a bad phone. But being able to feel the crease is worth noting because there are likely to be other users who want to know about it.

What about the brightness?

OK so the crease isn’t visible and you can feel it, but what about the display brightness? The display on the Galaxy Z Flip 6 gets very bright. I almost never encountered the peak brightness but this is more because I always turn the adaptive brightness off. I like to manually control how bright the screen is. And more often than not, I find that using the adaptive brightness dims the display when I don’t want it to. That being said, the peak brightness is now up to 2,600 nits. That’s a massive leap from the peak of 1,750 nits on the Galaxy Z Flip 5.

I think that’s in part why it’s harder to see the crease on the inner display now. Because the brightness has been boosted. Even if that isn’t the case, the higher brightness is going to make it easier to see things in direct sunlight. Now we also tested the brightness of the display, and we did this by getting a plain white screen and then shining a flashlight on the light sensor that sits above the display. We then take a luminance reader to measure what the brightness is. It didn’t get anywhere near the 2,600 nits but it did get close to the peak brightness of last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5, as we were able to get the screen to about 1,700 nits.

What should really matter though is that you won’t have trouble seeing the display in detail no matter where you are. Using this phone outside wasn’t an issue even with how bright it was outside on a clear sunny day. So you’ll certainly have no issues seeing anything when indoors.

As for the cover display, it’s easy to see in direct sunlight as well. And you should have no problems there either. All-in-all, both displays are pretty good on the brightness front.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Performance

Performance is always a factor I view as extremely important because I like my phones to run smoothly and I play a lot of mobile games. Whether it’s Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, or Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile. These are demanding games that suffer greatly if the phone doesn’t have the performance power to handle them. They’re still playable, but not nearly as enjoyable. Luckily, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is no slouch in the performance department.

Playing any of those games for extended periods felt completely fine and I didn’t encounter any real latency that would impact the play experience. Scrolling around on Reddit or browsing the web was fine too. This is mostly due to the use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform for the chipset, and the 12GB of RAM. These two factors ensure high performance in games and these are some of if not the most demanding mobile games available. So the fact that the phone can run them with good performance says a lot for a phone that isn’t really a “gaming phone.”

Samsung is also now using a vapor chamber inside the Galaxy Z Flip 6 to help with cooling. This is the first time that any Galaxy Z Flip phone has had a vapor chamber. So that’s already a huge improvement for the performance. This helps to make sure the phone doesn’t get too warm and that translates to sustained performance. While I have noticed the phone gets physically warmer while holding it during longer gaming sessions, it never felt too warm to continue holding the phone. So if you like to game, rest assured the Galaxy Z Flip 6 will be comfortable throughout your gaming sessions.

Benchmarks

Just like we do with all of our phone reviews now, we’ve put the Galaxy Z Flip 6 through a series of benchmark tests to show the performance on paper. Keep in mind this is going to differ from what your real-world experiences might be with the performance. But it’s nice to see what sort of performance you can probably expect when using this device. To test the phone, we use two different benchmark apps to see how it handles computing and graphics rendering tasks.

The apps we use are Geekbench 6 and 3DMark – specifically 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. I expected the Galaxy Z Flip 6 to shine in both these tests given its chipset and RAM, and I wasn’t disappointed or surprised. We also run our own benchmark test called the CapCut test. This test takes a 1-minute video and we apply a simple animation to it and then export the video at 1080p and 30 frames per second to see how long it takes the phone to export it.

Starting with Geekbench 6, we kick things off by running the phone through the CPU single-core and CPU multi-core tests. We finish things off with the Geekbench GPU test. You can see from the graph below that it performed pretty well in all three of these. We also compared its results against other similar phones like the Galaxy Z Fold 6, Galaxy S24 Ultra, and OnePlus Open as these are all foldable smartphones with similar specs.

Specifically, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 had a single-core CPU score of 1,533, while the multi-core score was 6,000. Meanwhile, the GPU test score was 12,239.

Now for the CapCut test, we added a simple video effect to the same 1-minute video we use for every single phone and tablet review and we exported it at 1080p and 30 frames per second. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 was able to export the video in 10.58 seconds which is pretty good. It’s not the fastest but nowhere near the slowest of any phone we’ve tested either.

For the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, this runs the phone through a 1-minute graphics rendering simulation and then it repeats this process 19 more times. So it’s basically a 20-minute loop. In the end, it gives you a final score based on the sustained performance. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 performed well here too, as expected. In terms of the actual scores, 4,227 for the best loop score and 1,878 for the lowest loop score.

Thermals

With the benchmarks out of the way, it’s time to dive into the thermals. The thermals are another important part of the testing because this is something you’ll encounter in daily use. How warm the phone gets during different activities. We do three different thermal tests to see how warm the phone gets during things that are widely used. For these, we check the temperature using an infrared thermometer. For the first test, we open up Genshin Impact and max the graphics out, then set it to 60 frames per second, and let the game run for about an hour before checking the temperature.

After this test, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 ended up with a temperature of 101.4. Honestly, that’s pretty good after an hour of a graphically demanding game. Especially compared to some of the other phones we’ve tested that get considerably warmer. Next, we check the phone temperature after the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. Here the Galaxy Z Flip 6 ended up with a temperature of 93.3. Lastly, we set up the phone to record 4K video at 60 frames per second and check the temperature at two intervals – after 5 minutes, and again after 10 minutes.

Video recording is a fairly demanding task so we felt this was a good way to test the thermals. After 5 minutes of video recording, the phone ended up with a temperature of 105.2. And after 10 minutes of video recording the phone ended up with a temperature of 107. So interestingly, the video recording is when the phone got the warmest. Which hasn’t been the case with other phones. Across the board though, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 stayed reasonably cool. Case in point, Samsung’s implementation of the vapor chamber seems to be doing a pretty good job here.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Battery Life and Charging

We’re just gonna get right into it and go for the worst part first. Charging speeds have not changed. Last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5 didn’t perform well during our charge testing and we noted that it was still just as bad as previous models. It took a little bit over an hour to charge that phone’s 3,700mAh battery at a max of 25W charging support. Not great. Unfortunately, things haven’t really gotten much better. Samsung did increase the battery capacity to 4,000mAh and that has allowed the phone to get better battery life than last year’s model. We’ll get to that though.

With the larger capacity battery, which is only 300mAh more than the Galaxy Z Flip 5, it now takes a solid hour and a half to charge the Galaxy Z Flip 6 to 100%. One hour and thirty minutes exactly. That is not good for a battery of this size. Not when you have phones that can charge in less than half that time. The main issue is that Samsung is still capping out the wired charging at 25W. For whatever reason, it doesn’t want to increase the charging speeds, and the time it takes to charge up the phone is suffering for it.

Now you could argue that it’s no big deal. Because let’s face it, many people are just going to toss it on the charger at the end of the night and it’ll charge while you sleep. Ok, sure. But what about the people who use their phones a lot throughout the day and may need to charge them before they go to sleep?

Let’s say you get home from work at 6 pm and you want to head out for dinner and drinks with some friends by 7 pm. But wait, your phone is at 3% battery because you used it a lot throughout the day. You’ll need to charge it up. And you want to be sure it doesn’t die on you again so you decide to charge it up to full.

Well, you’ll be waiting till 7:30 to head out the door. While the charging speeds aren’t great, I am happy to report that the battery life isn’t that bad. In fact it’s good. Not the best battery life we’ve ever seen on a phone. But pretty good. On one of my heavier-use days where I ended up playing about 5 hours and 25 minutes of Genshin Impact and watching close to 3 hours of YouTube videos, I ended up with a total of 8 hours and 19 minutes of screen on time. Pretty good if you ask me. I’m just going to chalk this up to the efficient power use of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for the most part.

Ultimately, the battery life is pretty good. It could be better, but it’s good. In most cases, this will be plenty of time for people. Especially those who use their phones less. So it kind of makes up for the ungodly long charging speeds. Not fully though. Here’s to hoping Samsung ups the charging speeds of its future Galaxy Z Flip phones. Especially when this model costs $100 more than it did last year and has a starting price of $1,100.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Software

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is packed with all kinds of neat software features. Some of them are tried and true staples that have been in Samsung phones for years now. While others like all the Galaxy AI stuff, is fairly new. In fact let’s dig into the Galaxy AI stuff first since this it’s getting a big push from Samsung. If you dig into the settings and go to the Galaxy AI menu, you’ll see all the stuff it can do for you to make things easier. There are call assist features, chat assist features, an interpreter for language translation, note assist, transcript assist, browsing assist, photo assist, drawing assist, health assist, and even an AI wallpaper generator just like in Google’s latest Pixel phones.

Quite simply put, AI is everywhere in this phone. Let’s not forget the circle to search and the photo AI stuff in the camera software. These things debuted on the Galaxy S24 series and they’ve made their way into Samsung’s new foldables. These work just the same as they do on the other phones. You can circle things on-screen to find more information. Pretty self-explanatory. In my experience, it worked well. Not any better or worse than it did on the Pixel 8.

As for the AI camera features, you have a feature similar to Google’s Magic Eraser and a few other things. All of which seemed to work well too. One neat feature that I wasn’t used to since this is the first Samsung phone I’ve reviewed, was the AR Zone. This lets you layer animated emojis on top of real-world objects like your face. You can also do AR doodles and there’s a quick measure feature as well. The AR Emoji camera in particular can be a fun feature to mess around with. I tested it out with an animated frog emoji that not only made my head and face look like a giant frog but the mouth and eyes move too.

This is probably not something you would use a ton (or maybe it is), but it was a pretty neat thing to see. It adds an element of excitement to the camera that you don’t get from a lot of phones out there.

Now in terms of software versions, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is running on Android 14 with One UI 6.1.1. It’s a bit newer than what the Galaxy S24 series had. However, there doesn’t appear to be much difference as we noted in our Galaxy Z Fold 6 review. One feature that I thought was really cool was the Portrait Studio option. This is part of the photo assist Galaxy AI feature. If you go into the Gallery app, you can tap on a photo of a person and then tap the generative AI button to edit it. You can then select Portrait Studio to turn that picture into more of a drawing. You have a few different options including comic book, sketch, 3D cartoon, and watercolor. It seems to do a pretty good job.

The chat assist is another Galaxy AI feature that I used quite a bit and I liked this a lot more than anything else. Not that the other features were bad, it’s just the thing that seemed the most useful to me as I’m always chatting with friends. I used it a couple of times to help me compose messages and overall it did a decent job with that too. You can also use the chat assist to translate messages but I never really ended up needing that. I did however use it most often for adding in suggested replies in ongoing conversations. And this is what I think people will end up using the most.

There’s also the AI wallpaper generator and this works as you probably suspect. In fact it’s pretty similar to the one on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. You have a phrase, then you select two different words out of that phrase and it’ll generate a wallpaper based on what you select. The words you pick are static so you can’t select which word in the phrase to replace. But of the two that you do get to swap out, there’s a wide variety of options for different words. It takes a few seconds for the AI to generate something and then it spits out a few different choices for you. Pretty standard if you’ve used Google’s version.

Outside of the AI, the software is pretty similar to the Galaxy S24 series. Everything runs pretty well and the software experience is smooth. My only gripe is that I just don’t like the One UI app drawer. I very much dislike the left-to-right app drawer swiping which is how the phone comes out of the box. What’s more, is that nothing is organized at all, so I can’t just scroll to find what I need in alphabetical order. It’s a minor issue. But it’s probably the one thing about the software that I would change. That and the fact that the power button defaults to Bixby instead of powering the phone off when you hold it down.

Overall, though, the software is decent and pretty snappy. It’s what Samsung fans will know and love and what Samsung newcomers will probably grow to love.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Camera

I want to say that at first, I was pretty underwhelmed by the camera. I thought it would take better pictures than it did initially. But the more that I used it and the more types of pictures I got, the more I started to see that it actually produces some pretty good quality images. This is a good thing since the camera is probably one of the few big features of this phone that Samsung has highlighted a lot. In particular, it seems to take really good quality pictures of food.

In fact, Samsung even has a food photo setting under the “more” menu in the camera app. I ended up having a Bahn Mi sandwich for dinner recently at a local bar and the photo came out way better than I was expecting (the sandwich was pretty good too). So if you’re someone who likes taking a lot of pictures of food to share on Instagram or just with friends, you’ll enjoy this camera feature. It’s also worth noting that you can easily flop back and forth between the 12MP and 50MP camera lenses. You just have to know where that button is and that it’s actually there in the first place.

I also found that using the regular photo mode, the camera had more trouble than I was expecting with focusing on the right subject. I ended up just using the Pro Photo mode for most of the shots I took. This lets you manually adjust pretty much everything. From exposure to white balance to the focus.

It’s really easy to play around with these values and get a good shot and I think I like it a lot better than the standard photo mode. What I liked especially was the manual focus option in the Pro Photo mode. As soon as you tap the manual focus, a little bar appears to the right that you can drag up and down to focus on the subject. That’s not the neat part though. The neat part is that when your subject is in focus fully, there will be a bright green highlight around the subject.

If you play around with this a bit you’ll become familiar with how bright it gets when the subject is in complete focus. So you’ll always know when you have the perfect shot. I thought this was pretty cool because I’ve never seen that before in any other camera apps I’ve used on any other phone.

In terms of image quality things looked pretty good, although some images did seem to come out with a fair bit of saturation. That being said, this is pretty common with Samsung phones. So I wasn’t too surprised. I was hoping that the phone’s zoom capabilities would be a little bit stronger, but even at 10x zoom in the standard photo mode, it was impressive to see how close the camera got to the building I was shooting a picture of.

The picture quality wasn’t great at that zoom level, but I suppose if you’re shooting something from far away you’re not necessarily looking for detail. It’s a phone camera after all. And we need to temper our expectations.

Another really cool feature is the camcorder grip. I didn’t really use this because I just never found something worth video recording. But if you shoot a lot of videos with your phone, this is a pretty awesome way to do it. For camcorder grip, you simply start video recording and then flex the phone so the camera is facing your subject. You can then hold the bottom half of the phone just like you would hold a camcorder. The other neat part of this feature is that Samsung developed a zoom slider for the bottom half of the display that you can reach with your thumb. Making it possible to easily zoom in or out if needed.

For the most part, I still think I prefer the Google Pixel 8 camera. But Samsung has impressed me here with the Galaxy Z Flip 6.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6?

I think if you like flip phones and you like smartphones, this is a solid buy. There are real benefits to having a smartphone that folds in half like a flip phone. For me, the main benefit is that it’s easier to fit in my pocket. For you, it might just be the utility of it all. The phone is essentially its own kickstand. Just flex the screen so it’s upright and facing you, and set the phone on a flat surface. Now you have an easy way to watch videos or set the phone up for photos or video recording. No kickstand is needed.

This is a pretty neat thing and I can see the use cases of it. However, there are some things that need improvement. The charging speed could be an issue for some users. Not to mention, this phone starts at $1,100. And that price is going to be a hard pill to swallow. Being that it was starting at $1,000 last year. The other thing to keep in mind is that even if the price increase doesn’t bother you, $1,100 is still a lot for a phone.

Cost aside, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on here. The pocketability, the pretty good camera, the pretty good battery life. All of it works great to deliver a well-rounded user experience. One that I think many people will love. Especially if they’re into foldables. So, to make it short, yes, I think this phone is worth buying. For the right person. It’s a fun experience. And I think especially if you’re someone who creates content for online audiences, this is probably one of the best choices for you.

You should buy the Galaxy Z Flip 6 if:

• You want a phone that folds into a smaller form factor for pocketability
• You’re looking for something that has lots of AI features
• You can get a good price on it
• You want to try a foldable smartphone

You shouldn’t buy the Galaxy Z Flip 6 if:

• You want a phone that charges faster
• You’re looking to spend less
• You already own the Galaxy Z Flip 5