Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 review

Android 14, One UI 6.1.1, and Galaxy AI

The Galaxy Z Fold6 runs Android 14, with Samsung's One UI layer on top, here in v.6.1.1 - the last .1 separates the foldables from the regular models. The S24 series ushered in the company's 7-year software support policy, and the Fold6 should get up to 7 OS releases and as many years of regular software patches.

The question remains: who will be around to call them out on it if they don't deliver, but let's leave that for our future selves (or, more realistically, Reddit). Another questionable bit is how well the device will perform 7 OS updates later - no manufacturer can promise fluid user experience with 7-year old hardware.

When it comes to the basics of One UI, the Fold's version is very much the same as any other high-end Galaxy, so returning users will be in a familiar place. It's a full-featured and polished Android overlay, and an overall very pleasant environment to be in.

One UI basics on the cover screen

The large screen, on the other hand, offers some of the best productivity features you can get on a phone-turns-tablet foldable. We're particularly fond of how intuitive the multi-window implementation is, and you don't need to learn how things are done - it just works as expected. The hand-off from the internal to the cover might require a bit of setup - by default, the phone goes into standby when you close it, but you can dial in per-app behavior and get things working just the way you like it.

Large-screen UI

AI has taken over tech marketing speak, 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 Fold6 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.

Sketch to image, meanwhile, is meant to extend the usefulness of the (optional) S Pen for the Z Fold 6 by offering you the option to sketch rough objects on top of images within the Gallery or Notes app and then have AI replace those doodles with actual art pieces.

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

The Galaxy Z Fold6 is kept going by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it's specifically the SM8650-AC version of Qualcomm's 2024 flagship chip. The AC part (a.k.a. 'for Galaxy', but no longer a Samsung-exclusive) entails some minor clock rate differences for this or that part of the chip, but it's more or less what every high-end Android phone has this year, only slightly more special.

There are three storage versions that we know of for the time being - the base is 256GB, our review unit is the 512GB variety, and there's also a 1TB option. Storage speed for our sample was consistent with the UFS 4.0 standard, as expected. All versions come with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM.

In our benchmark runs, the Fold6 wasn't particularly impressive for its hardware, typically posting slightly lower scores than its flat-screened stablemate, the S24 Ultra itself not a particularly high-scoring example of the platform. The numbers are hardly grounds for complaint; they just show that Samsung isn't keen on prioritizing absolute raw synthetic performance.

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.

Sustained performance out of the Fold wasn't too great, though we'd have been surprised if things were any different. Both the CPU Throttling test and the 3DMark Wild Life stress test returned 60% stability ratings, and while the GPU result is more or less the same across all flagships, bendy or flat, the CPU figure is slightly on the lower side of average.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test