Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Modest improvements at the cutting edge

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 launches into a foldable market that’s more competitive than ever, but let’s not kid ourselves: Samsung continues to rule this particular roost. Our top two ‘Best foldable phone’ picks for late 2023 and early 2024 were the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and the Galaxy Z Flip 5.

The latter won our hearts by offering an impressively refined compact foldable package, and represented a considerable step up from the Galaxy Z Flip 4 before it. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 doesn’t represent quite the same level of progression, but it does address a couple of the weaker areas whilst nudging the whole package forwards.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: What you need to know

Samsung has barely touched the design of the Galaxy Z Flip 6, retaining the dimensions and the basic compact clamshell mechanics of the Flip 5 before it. It’s reportedly a little tougher than before, though, with a sturdier hinge and an improved IP48 rating. It also retains the same fold-out 6.7in AMOLED display, albeit with a superior peak brightness, and exactly the same 3.4in cover display.

Most of the big improvements pertain to the inside of the phone, with a larger 4,000mAh battery and a faster Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor running with a boosted 12GB of RAM and once again either 256GB or 512GB of internal storage.

Perhaps the most welcome upgrade here is to the main camera, which steps up to a more accomplished 50MP sensor. This is still accompanied by the same 12MP ultra-wide camera as before, as well as a familiar 10MP selfie camera.

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Price and competition

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 starts from £1,049 for the 256GB model. You can upgrade that storage to 512GB for £1,149. That’s exactly the same pricing as last year’s Flip 5, which is good to see – especially with the larger Galaxy Z Fold 6 getting more expensive this year.

It remains a shame that Samsung no longer offers a 128GB option. Prior to last year’s model, this enabled you to pick up a classy foldable phone for (just about) a three figure sum.

Samsung might be the main player in the compact foldable field, but it no longer has the place to itself. Motorola has issued the stiffest competition in recent years, and its current Razr 50 range gives you more options whilst undercutting Samsung on price.

The plain Motorola Razr 50 costs £799, while the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra – which gets close to the Galaxy Z Flip 6 on specs – costs £1,000. Indeed, the Razr 50 Ultra outguns the Flip 6 in certain respects, such as with a larger 4in cover screen and a dedicated telephoto camera. However, it uses an inferior Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor and lacks an ultra-wide camera.

You don’t even need to spend that much if you really want a clamshell phone in your pocket. At the time of writing, the Nubia Flip 5G is available to pre-order, with prices starting from just £499. Its 1.43in circular cover screen and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 processor mark it as fundamentally inferior to the Flip 6, but then we are talking less than half the price.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Design and key features

Where last year’s Flip 5 made some major refinements to the formula, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 doesn’t offer such a dramatic improvement. In fact, its dimensions are identical: 165.1 x 71.9 x 6.9mm when open, with exactly the same weight of 187g.

Samsung has only made some very minor tweaks to the design language here. It doesn’t follow the Galaxy Z Fold 6 in adopting super-pointy corners  – they’re still gently rounded – but it does further flatten the rim. Or at least, that’s the impression it gives.

This more industrial feel is maintained by switching from a shiny finish to matte one. It’s still made of the same Armor Aluminium material, but it looks more like titanium than the Flip 5’s stainless steel style.

The same Gorilla Glass Victus 2 as before covers the front and rear, though Samsung is claiming that the Flip 6 is “the toughest Galaxy Flip phone ever”. This seems to boil down to a re-engineered hinge, which perhaps explains why the Flip 6 is 0.2mm thinner when folded up. It also gets a new IP48 rating, with the added ‘4’ meaning that the Flip 6 is more dust resistant than before. It’s still not up to fending off finer particles, though.

The 3.4in cover display is not there to serve as a full phone display, like the Fold 6 equivalent, but rather to surface basic notifications and widget-like functions without the need to open the phone. Samsung has improved message notifications with AI-based quick responses, but it remains a pretty light and glanceable way to interact with the phone.

You can swipe between a series of screen-filling widgets, or else use the multi-widget screen to add four smaller widgets to the one screen. The ability to watch YouTube or Netflix content on this screen appears to have been ditched, which is no bad thing.

Another feature Samsung is pushing hard with the Flip 6 is its Galaxy AI features, though in practice this is nothing we haven’t seen already in the Galaxy S24 range. Indeed, last year’s Flip 5 also has access to exactly the same suite of AI tools, which includes live translations and transcriptions, message formatting suggestions and a range of photo enhancements. Sketch to image, meanwhile, lets you create weirdly pointless (but still impressive) artwork from crude finger sketches.

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Display

We’ve just touched upon the Flip 6’s 3.4in cover screen, which shows basic notifications and widgets on its limited 720 x 748 panel. What I didn’t mention was that it’s still stuck at a 60Hz refresh rate. Indeed, it falls short of the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra’s 4in 1,272 x 1,080 165Hz cover screen on all counts.

With all that said, the bulk of your screen time will be spent on the 6.7in internal Dynamic AMOLED 2X display, which is as it should be. This is largely the same affair as before, with a 1,080 x 2,640 (FHD+) resolution and an adaptive refresh rate that tops out at 120Hz. Samsung doesn’t let you force the latter to the top setting, likely due to battery life concerns, but it still feels fast and fluid.

One significant improvement this time around is a higher peak brightness of 2,600 cd/m2, up from 1,750 cd/m2 in the Flip 5. That figure relates to limited HDR video playback scenarios. In my tests, with auto brightness turned off, it hit a top brightness of 429 cd/m2, which is about the same as the Flip 5. It’s adequate, but falls well short of the regular Galaxy S24.

Samsung supplies two display modes, Vivid and Natural. The default Vivid mode isn’t as obnoxiously punchy as many others of its kind, though the more muted Natural remains more realistic in general use. In this latter mode, I recorded the screen hitting 95.9% sRGB gamut coverage against a volume of 98.5%, with a Delta E score of 1.91. That’s in the same sort of region that the Flip 5 managed, making this a decent, if not top tier, display.

Indeed, the main thing holding the Flip 6’s main screen back is its very foldable nature. There’s still a noticeable crease down the middle – something Motorola has all but solved – while the obligatory screen protector (Samsung literally instructs you not to remove it) still looks like a naff after-market solution.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Performance and battery life

Samsung has made the requisite improvements to keep the Galaxy Z Flip 6 near the top of the performance pile. It runs on a slightly overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, just like the Galaxy S24 Ultra and certain regional variants of the Galaxy S24, and comes with a bumper 12GB of RAM.

In our CPU benchmark tests it beats the Flip 5 on multi-core performance, as you might expect, but it also falls well short of both the Snapdragon-packing Galaxy S24 Ultra and the Exynos 2400-powered Galaxy S24.

I received some confusingly variable GPU benchmark results too. Across three separate run-throughs of our usual four GFX Bench tests it scored better than the Flip 5 in two and worse in the others, but the identity of those tests shifted from run to run. Only on a fourth run-through (which we’ve published here) did it score much on three of the four benchmarks, and it still fell way short of the Galaxy S24 family.

Is this a pre-release quirk that can be ironed out with a day one update? Or, more worryingly, is the Flip 6 simply tending to bump into its thermal limit and being throttled more aggressively? There’s already less room for cooling here than a regular phone, and Samsung has also squeezed a larger battery into the same form factor this time around.

As this suggests, benchmarks can be a fairly crude measuring stick. In the hand, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 runs extremely smoothly. It opens from sleep and boots into the camera app nice and snappily, and runs the graphically demanding Genshin Impact well on maxed out settings.

As I’ve just mentioned, Samsung has equipped the Flip 6 with a larger battery this time around, stepping up from the Flip 5’s slightly weedy 3,700mAh to the Galaxy S24-matching 4,000mAh. This yields comfortable all-day battery life, getting through a day with five hours of screen time and still having 30% left in the tank. In our looping video battery test, the Flip 6 lasted 24hrs 21mins, which is about two hours longer than the Flip 5.

Charging remains the same slow 25W wired and 15W wireless provision, with no charger included in the box. Using a 30W Samsung wired charger, a 30 minute charge got the phone from empty to 55%.

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Cameras

While the Galaxy Z Flip 5 represented a considerable advancement over the Flip 4 in many respects, we had a few grumbles over its unchanged camera set-up. Thankfully, for the Flip 6, Samsung has given its ageing 12MP main camera the heave-ho, replacing it with the same 50MP main camera as the Galaxy S24.

That’s no great shakes in normal phone terms – the Galaxy S24 camera set-up was hardly fresh – but it represents real progress in a compact foldable scene that isn’t renowned for its strong photographic offerings. It means that the Flip 6 takes good quality day time shots, rich in colour and with ample contrast.

This upgraded sensor also produces night shots (aided by OIS) that are mostly clear and crisp, without resorting to that hyperreal, over-brightened look that plagues many manufacturers.

Samsung hasn’t done anything with the 12MP ultra-wide camera, but it continues to supply decent landscape shots that stay impressively true to the superior main sensor’s tone.

With no autofocus and a relative dearth of pixels, Samsung’s 10MP selfie camera could do with some work. The company’s image processing turns out natural enough skin tones, and refrains from blowing out highlights, but you’re better served making use of that cover display to place the main camera on selfie duty. You can even use the hinge to prop the camera in position, if you have an appropriate flat surface to hand.

There’s still no 8K video recording here, which is odd considering the Galaxy Z Fold 6 supports it. Even so, the 4K/60fps footage I captured was clear and smooth.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review: Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 remains a fine compact foldable phone, but it doesn’t represent the huge step forward that the Flip 5 did. Its design and displays are very familiar indeed, while a noticeable display crease and relatively unremarkable cover screen don’t look great stacked up against the cheaper Motorola Razr 50 Ultra.

With that said, battery life has improved, and the Flip 6’s new 50MP camera is a much needed upgrade. Throw in decent performance (despite some slight inconsistencies), and the Flip 6 is another safe pick if you’re after a classy but compact foldable in 2024. The competition is heating up though, and Samsung can’t afford to rest on its laurels with its next flipping foldable.