Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 review

Android 14, One UI 6.1.1, and Galaxy AI

The Galaxy Z Flip6 runs Android 14, with version 6.1.1 of the in-house One UI being the foldable-specific variety - the ones are at 6.1 now. At the beginning of the year, Samsung announced a 7-year software support policy along the S24 series, and the Flip6 should also be getting up to 7 OS releases and as many years of regular software patches.

We tend to be skeptical of such lofty promises, and we're not sure who'll be making sure Samsung delivers on them in 7 years, plus it's anything but guaranteed that 7-year-old hardware will be able to run whatever software they have at the time with any degree of acceptable smoothness. We'll see about that.

Either way, the Flip's basic operation is the same as on any other high-end Galaxy. One UI has gotten to a point where it's one of the most full-featured and refined takes on Android.

One UI basics on the main screen

The Flip's standout feature is the cover screen, of course, and you can do a lot on it, but not everything. Unlike the Motorola Razrs, which practically run a full-fledged version of Android on the cover, the Flip's cover UI is still limited to a narrow selection of apps and is otherwise widget based. There are plenty of widgets, but that's still widgets.

Of course, notifications show up here, you can have an always-on display, you can operate quick settings - these will greatly reduce the amount of time you need to spend on the main display. You can also do most things in the camera as well. Now, you can have Google Gemini on the cover screen too, because AI.

Cover-screen UI

AI is the buzzword in every keynote now and Samsung is doing its best to stay ahead of the curve on the Galaxies, with Google doing its part too. Grouped under the Galaxy AI umbrella, there's an assortment of features on the Flip6 to help make your life easier or more colorful (or at least that's what we're supposed to believe).

This time around, Samsung has added automatic transcription, translation and summarization features for voice recordings, as well as PDF overlay translation, to the already available Note Assist functionality.

There may not be S Pen support on the Flip, but you can doodle with your fingers as well and Sketch to image is offering you the option to doodle objects on top of images within the Gallery or Notes app and then have AI replace those with actual objects pieces.

Assist this, Assist that

The Interpreter feature for live translation now gets a special conversation mode specifically designed to leverage the foldable form factor of the Z Fold6 and Z Flip6. In this mode, one party in the conversation sees the translation on the main screen while the other one sees the cover screen. Along the same vein, Live Translate is now expanding beyond the default Samsung phone app to a selection of popular third-party apps.

Photo Assist has enhanced AI-powered capabilities for photo editing on top of the existing functionality to adjust image angles, fill in the gaps around the edges, and select and move, resize or remove objects in the frame. Portrait Studio creates various portrait styles, such as 3D cartoon or watercolor.

That's by no means an exhaustive list of the new features, and they come in addition to other pre-existing functionality that we already saw introduced with the Galaxy S24 family. For example, Composer, built into Samsung Keyboard can generate text based on simple keywords, Circle to Search is a system-wide feature for highlighting stuff on the screen to select an object for a web search, and the Google Gemini app is fully integrated into the new Galaxy Z series.

Benchmarks

Unlike the S24s that once again have an Exynos/Snapdragon regional divide, the Galaxy foldables only come in Snapdragon flavor. The Flip6 features the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 'for Galaxy' which is a higher-clocked version of the chipset with slightly higher clock rates that goes by SM8650-AC in Qualcomm nomenclature and isn't really exclusive to Samsung anymore. Either way, it's about as high-end a chip as you can get in the Android space in 2024.

There are two storage versions that we know of for the time being - the base is 256GB, and our review unit is the 512GB variety. The Fold6 has a 1TB option too, but not the Flip. All versions come with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM.

In our benchmarks, the Flip6 wasn't quite up to the standard you'd expect from a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, much less a 'special' one of those. It was a similar story with the Fold6 that wasn't posting quite as high numbers as the S24 Ultra.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful, so we suggest you refer to that one instead.

A clamshell foldable is never going to be easy to cool down and the Flip5's thermal performance was pretty meh. The Flip6 brings a sizeable improvement in the form of a large vapor chamber that's supposedly larger than even the S24 Ultra's.

It's debatable how well it's doing its job though, looking at the results we got from our sustained load testing. We did have a heatwave at the time of testing, though the AC was running fine in the office. The Razr 50 Ultra did slightly better under CPU load, and the two behaved similarly in the GPU test, so it's not like the Galaxy is an outlier.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test