Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: Wonderful, but Complicated to Recommend

8.4/ 10
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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6

Pros

• Matte finish
• New main camera is solid
• 7 years of OS updates
• Auto zoom for photos

Cons

• $1,100 starting price
• Cover screen a step down from the internal one
• Wonky way to add apps to cover screen

For better or worse, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 foldable is packed with AI. It can take a rough sketch and turn it into artwork, or help me have a conversation in French or Korean despite me only knowing a few words of either language.

But after testing the Z Flip 6 for 12 days, only one AI feature gave me an “aha” moment: the new autofocus/auto zoom feature. I can prop the phone in a half-open position, like a mini laptop, and use the external cameras to take a photo – this part is nothing new. But here’s where AI enters the picture. Depending on where I’m standing or how many of us are in the shot, the Z Flip 6 will zoom in or out (switching between the main and ultrawide cameras) to get a photo that best suits the moment.

It’s not particularly fast or perfect, but I absolutely dig the results. This might be one of the best implementations of phone camera AI that I’ve experienced – it’s right up there with Best Take on the Pixel 8 series. The auto zoom feature and the Interpreter tool are the only AI features that take advantage of the Z Flip 6’s unique form factor. More of this please, Samsung.

At a time when phone makers like Samsung, Google and Apple push for AI to be the next big thing, it’ll likely be simple, unique use cases like the Z Flip 6’s auto zoom that get people on board – as long as they work mostly as advertised.

What’s funny is that AI upgrades aren’t even the Galaxy Z Flip 6‘s best new features. Samsung’s latest clamshell style foldable has a new 50-megapixel main camera, finally putting it on par with non-folding flagship phone cameras. The hinge is smaller and helps reduce the size of the crease on the internal screen. It has a new chip, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and 12GB of RAM for flagship performance. There’s even a larger battery. For all intents and purposes, the new Z Flip 6 is a Galaxy S24 that can fold in half – which is fantastic.

So the Z Flip 6 should be a slam dunk, right? It would be if it weren’t for two things.

Samsung raised the price from an already hefty $1,000 to $1,100, and that changes the Flip’s value for the worse. The Z Flip is expensive because it folds in half and requires a cutting-edge design to do so. But that’s a departure from Samsung’s previous approach, which involved packing an incredible amount of features in older Flips at a more reasonable price. You may be able to get a good trade-in deal for a discount on the Z Flip 6 – but it’s still $1,100, which makes the phone a premium proposition, well outside of most people’s budgets.

Then there are Samsung’s competitors like Motorola and its new Razr Plus, which also has a new camera, hinge and chip, 12GB of RAM, a larger battery and more AI. It costs $1,000, which is still a lot. But is Samsung’s phone really worth an extra $100? No.

All this makes it hard to appreciate the Galaxy Z Flip 6 for the absolute great phone that it is. And it is indeed an outstanding phone. But so is the Razr Plus, which also costs less.

Watch this: I Spent 24 Hours Testing the Galaxy Z Flip 6 in Paris

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Galaxy Z Flip 6’s design

The Z Flip 6 looks nearly identical to last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5. The glossy back is gone, and in its place is a matte finish that makes the phone look more sophisticated. My review unit is blue on the back with matching highlights around the rings of the cover screen’s cameras. It looks killer and industrial. The Z Flip 6 has a striking Bauhaus-like style that would make Dieter Rams happy. 

When I hold the phone, it feels rigid, solid and like one continuous piece. It has an IP48 rating for dust and water resistance, meaning it can be submerged under 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes. But it’s the first number in that rating that is particularly exciting. The “4” in the IP-rating means that the Flip 6 can resist solid objects greater than one millimeter. So fine particles are still a potential enemy, but it should keep out larger dirt grains. Dust ingress has always been a major weakness for foldable phones, dating back to Samsung’s original foldable. In 2019, the first round of reviewer models for the first Galaxy Z Fold suffered a number of calamities including having dust and particles work their way through the hinge and under the foldable display. How far we’ve come!

But let me reiterate: There’s a dust resistance rating! Aside from last year’s Motorola Razr Plus and the Galaxy Z Fold 6, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is the only other foldable phone I know of that is rated for dust resistance. Does that mean you can take this phone with you to build a sand castle at the beach? Well, probably not. 

Galaxy Z Flip 6’s displays

The internal display measures 6.7 inches and supports a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, just like last year’s phone. Perhaps the biggest improvement is that the main screen now reaches a peak brightness of 2,600 nits, compared to the 1,750 nits of the Z Flip 5’s internal display. This came in handy testing the phone on bright sunny July days as I could see everything on the screen.

The main display’s slender aspect ratio did take a little getting used to, especially the keyboard’s narrow keys. If you’re into watching movies, like me, then this aspect ratio is pretty killer for films shot in a movie theater aspect ratio, like Civil War or Furiosa. The tall slender screen also works great for multitasking with one app on the top half of the screen and a second app on the bottom.

The Z Flip 6 has a 3.4-inch cover screen with that trademark Samsung folder file tab cutout for the cameras. It’s small, but there are widgets and playful wallpapers optimized for it. With some chicanery, you can run pretty much any Android app you want on it, although I wish this ability was set up out of the box like on the Razr Plus.

I still think the Razr Plus’ 4-inch cover screen and software is better overall. The larger screen, sharper resolution and higher refresh rate go miles in making it more comfortable to use than the Flip 6. This is an area where Samsung comes up short. Making the cover screen easier to interact with and having it set up by default to run most Android apps would help to make it useful in more situations. Also, it feels odd going from the internal display’s 120Hz to the cover screen’s 60Hz.

Galaxy Z Flip 6’s cameras

The Z Flip 6 has the same 10-megapixel selfie camera as last year’s Z Flip 5. The external 12-megapixel ultrawide has an upgraded sensor, and there’s a new 50-megapixel main camera that’s similar to the one on the Galaxy S24 – which is similar to the one on the S23 and S22 before it. This is the best flip phone camera I’ve used, but non-flip phones like the Pixel 8 Pro and Galaxy S24 Ultra are still much better in terms of dynamic range and overall quality.

Images from the main camera have sharp details, though some textures such as leaves look crispy from excess sharpening.

This is not a dependable “freeze the action” kind of camera, especially when it’s dark. Instead, this is a “good enough to post to IG and TikTok” camera.

Some photos, like the one below of CNET video producer Jide Akinrinade, show the literal marks of processing. Notice the strange mark in the sky to the right of the lights on his camera. And just above that, take a close look at the “cloud cutout” around the edge of the trees.

I don’t think this matters a ton if you’re viewing photos on social media or in a text message thread. But if you’re looking for some keepers to print out and hang on the wall, you’ll instantly see that the processing and noise-reduction, which in my experience gave some photos almost an airbrushed look.

I am a big fan of Samsung’s ultrawide cameras. The lens offers this sweet spot that makes subjects look dramatic without skewing too much into fisheye territory.

But there’s still room for improvement. Ultrawide images from the Z Flip 6 look decent but are soft and look processed, especially when it comes to details and textures like clouds.

Galaxy AI

The Z Flip 6 is packed to the gills with AI features, but I’m not going to discuss them at length here. For more details, check out my in-depth experience testing Galaxy AI during a day in Paris. But I do want to share a few thoughts.

The ability to draw on a photo and turn your sketch into a realistic-looking object or animal is wild.

I wish I could use it to draw mustaches or eye patches on friend’s faces because otherwise, I’m just not sure when I’d use this feature. But maybe I’ll have a second career adding random AI-generated cats to photos?

The Interpreter app on the Flip 6 has a mode which uses both screens to show each speaker what the other is saying in their own language, and it’s very useful. The translation seems accurate, but not perfect. I tried it from English to Korean and English to French.

One consequence that I didn’t think about when using Interpreter mode is that the translation’s lack of perfection could make a speaker feel self-conscious, or even embarrassed. When I used this mode to order coffee in Paris, the phone’s translation was good but got words and phrases slightly wrong. For example, instead of translating a phrase to “yes, no problem,” it said “agree on problems.”

The French speaker apologized, saying it was her accent that may have caused the translation to be off. While she didn’t seem too stressed about it, the last thing I want is to make someone else feel embarrassed because AI couldn’t understand exactly what they were saying.

Then there’s portrait studio, which turns a picture of a person into artwork. It’s silly and fun, and the results are far from accurate. Again, I’m not sure when I’d use this. 

All this to say while AI-powered tools like Circle To Search and auto zoom are nifty, they shouldn’t be the main reason to get the Z Flip 6 — or any Samsung phone, for that matter.

Galaxy Z Flip 6 performance and battery

Lastly, let’s talk about performance and battery life. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB of RAM make the Z Flip 6 peppy, fast and fun to use. Even demanding tasks like 4K video recording or playing video games like Genshin Impact didn’t seem to stress the phone. The Z Flip 6 has a built-in vapor chamber cooling system for the first time, which no doubt helps keep things from getting hot (remember, this is a super tiny, thin foldable phone). It did occasionally get warm, but nothing I’d worry about.

Benchmark test results for the CPU in Geekbench 6 place the Z Flip 6 right up there with other Galaxy S24 phones and the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro, while outpacing the Motorola Razr Plus. In a graphics test using 3D Mark’s Wild Life Extreme, the Z Flip 6 scored well, just behind the S24 series but ahead of last year’s S23 series and the new Motorola Razr Plus.

That cooling system along with a larger 4,000-mAh battery has meant that the Z Flip 6 is an all-day phone. Over the 12 days I’ve used it, the Z Flip 6 finished the day with 10 to 15% of a charge left. And I got that result on days where I had the screen cranked to full brightness and was shooting tons of photos and videos.

In CNET’s 45-minute battery endurance test (which involves having a video call, playing a video game, scrolling social media and streaming a video) the Z Flip 6’s battery dropped by 12%. That’s more than the 10% both the new Razr Plus and the Z Flip 5 lost in the same test. In CNET’s three-hour video-streaming test, the Z Flip 6 dropped 19%, which is nearly identical to the Z Flip 5’s result of 20% in the same test. It’s also more than the 16% the Razr Plus lost.

Galaxy Z Flip 6 final thoughts

Ultimately, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is a wonderful phone. The fact that Samsung offers seven years of OS and security software upgrades is amazing – that’s more than double the three years Motorola promises for the Razr Plus. And if I were just judging the two phones on this one criteria, the Z Flip 6 would be my pick, hands down.

But the truth is Motorola made a number of smarter compromises to keep the Razr Plus’ price at a grand, like using the less power-hungry Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 chip while expanding the cover screen’s size and capabilities. If the Z Flip 6 and Razr Plus were the same price, it would be harder to choose between the two. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t get a Z Flip 6. It’s just to say you have other options that are just as compelling.

How we test phones

Every phone tested by CNET’s reviews team was used in the real world. We test a phone’s features, play games and take photos. We examine the display to see if it’s bright, sharp and vibrant. We analyze the design and build to see how it is to hold and whether it has an IP rating for water resistance. We push the processor’s performance to the extremes using standardized benchmark tools like Geekbench and 3DMark, along with our own anecdotal observations navigating the interface, recording high-resolution videos and playing graphically intense games at high refresh rates.

All the cameras are tested in a variety of conditions from bright sunlight to dark indoor scenes. We try out special features like night mode and portrait mode and compare our findings against similarly priced competing phones. We also check out the battery life by using it daily as well as running a series of battery drain tests.

We take into account additional features like support for 5G, satellite connectivity, fingerprint and face sensors, stylus support, fast charging speeds and foldable displays, among others that can be useful. We balance all of this against the price to give you the verdict on whether that phone, whatever price it is, actually represents good value. While these tests may not always be reflected in CNET’s initial review, we conduct follow-up and long-term testing in most circumstances.