| 7.6-inch foldable AMOLED | 6.3-inch AMOLED (cover) | Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 | IP48 |
| 4,400mAh | 25W wired charging | 15W wireless charging | 50MP+12MP+10MP |
The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is here, and it starts at ₹1.65 lakh here in India.
If you're considering spending that kind of money on a foldable smartphone, you’ve got to be 100% certain it's worth it.
After all, the cheaper S24 Ultra has better cameras, better battery life, and more features than the Z Fold 6.
But Samsung's Fold series has always been about more than just specs.
The real magic lies in its unique form factor and software optimisation, making it the best phone for productivity on the go. No traditional smartphone can match that.
Let’s begin with trivial things, you know, the kind of stuff that sounds unessential but does make a big impact on the user experience.
For starters, the Fold 6 is a fantastic smartphone for reading documents and PDFs. The wide inner display means that documents fit beautifully on it without the need for zooming in or scrolling side to side.
By extension, this also makes the Fold 6 one of the most brilliant ebook readers around. I know traditional ebook readers are much cheaper, but how many of them fold in half and fit in your pocket?
The Fold 6 is basically a mini tablet in your pocket, so productivity geeks will love it for sure.
You can open up to 3 apps simultaneously on it. In fact, you can simply drag and drop stuff across multiple apps, like you would on a PC, making everything less cumbersome. The app dock at the bottom ensures that switching between apps is a lot more seamless as well.
By the way, many apps refuse to open in multi-window format, but Samsung has a solution for it. Just go to labs and enable ‘multi-window for all apps’ and boom, it fixes everything. Just OneUI things.
Then there's Samsung Dex, which turns this device into a bonafide desktop replacement. With a wireless connection to a monitor and the addition of a keyboard and mouse, you've got a fully-fledged PC experience. It's like having a phone, tablet, and computer all rolled into one.
The width of the foldable display also means that browsers show a desktop-like interface, with tabs clearly visible on top.
Then, if you use the Samsung browser instead of Chrome, you can also use Galaxy AI to summarise web pages for you so that you can quickly sift through the information.
Talking of AI, here is a major ace up this smartphone’s sleeve. If you travel a lot, Samsung’s AI translator works in an amazing way on the Fold 6 because it can utilise both displays simultaneously. So, the other speaker won't just hear the translated text but can also read it. How awesome is that?
But, I must mention that currently, this is only useful if you travel abroad because the only supported Indian language on it is Hindi. Adding support for more Indian languages would make the Fold 6 a fantastic companion for domestic travel.
Talking of travel, if you are into vlogging, the Fold 6 might be one of the best smartphone cameras for you. You can basically use its rear camera system to shoot stable and high-quality videos of yourself. In fact, you can use the ultrawide camera to fit so much more into the frame.
Although I must point out that a flip-style foldable is better suited for this purpose because it’s easier to grip.
Now, let’s talk about the fun stuff. Samsung’s next-gen generative AI features on the Fold 6. Using this, you can roughly draw a horrible drawing on top of an image, and the AI interprets it and creates and integrates the object in real time in that image.
This feature will come to other Galaxy phones soon via an update, but the big inner display of the Fold 6 makes scribbling on an image easier.
But, if you want to be more precise with it, you have to opt for the optional S Pen.
The S Pen enhances the productivity potential of this phone a lot, but it is frustrating that it is still an additional accessory on such an expensive device.
In fact, Samsung has been embedding the S Pen into its phones since 2011, and I’m not ready to believe that this company cannot figure out how to do the same on its foldable smartphone.
So, all the potentially unique use cases aside, how’s the Fold 6 as a high-end smartphone?
To begin with, while the Fold 6 is mostly an incremental upgrade over the Fold 5, its design is vastly different. It doesn't look like a big change on paper, but the in-hand feel of the Fold 6 and Fold 5 are worlds apart.
This phone now has squared-off corners, just like the S24 Ultra. Basically, two of the most expensive Samsung phones now have a boxy design.
Then, at 239 grams and 12.1mm, the Fold 6 is also lighter and thinner than its predecessor.
More importantly, the aspect ratio on the Fold 6 is now approximately 22:9. This makes it a little wider than the Fold 5, which has two benefits: the cover display is now not awkwardly narrow and is easier to use, while the inner display is slightly wider as well.
Despite these differences, the inner display remains the same in size at 7.6 inches, while the outer display is up by 0.1 inches at 6.3 inches. Both are LTPO AMOLED panels with a 120Hz refresh rate.
Moving on, the Fold 6 is the first foldable with an IP48 rating, which means it has resistance for not just water but also dust particles. So, theoretically, this phone is less prone to a squeaky hinge. The phone also gets Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection on the cover display and the matte glass back.
But, as with all foldables, the long-term durability of the main foldable display remains questionable. So, yeah, these phones anyway require more care than a standard smartphone.
Anyway, the phone obviously has the standard yearly chipset upgrade. It is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, instead of the 8 Gen 2 on its predecessor. You also get 12GB of RAM as standard. This, when combined with the feature-rich One UI 6, makes the Fold 6 quite enjoyable to use.
A great thing is that this smartphone is also covered under Samsung’s extended software support. So, it will get updates till Android 21, quite crazy.
Moving on, the battery capacity on this device is 4,400mAh, which is not bad, but it has been the same since the Fold 3! Plus, both the OnePlus Open and Vivo X Fold 3 Pro offer bigger batteries on their foldables.
Fortunately, Samsung’s optimizations ensure that the battery life isn't bad by any means with a screen time of around 5.5 to 6 hours. But, a phone that’s built for productivity deserves a larger battery. It also deserves faster charging than just 25W wired and 15W wireless.
Please watch the video to see camera samples.
The Fold 6’s camera system is quite good, but it is not what you’d expect for the price.
The rear camera system on the Fold 6 includes a 50MP main, 12MP ultrawide, and a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom. The main and telephoto cameras are lifted directly from the S24 and S24+, while the ultrawide is a slightly upgraded sensor.
In typical Samsung fashion, daytime shots from all sensors are pleasingly vivid with a nice saturation boost. Low-light photos have low noise and bright colours too, but the overall detail and highlight control isn’t quite flagship-worthy.
This is especially true for the telephoto camera, which often refuses to fire up in low light, leading to low-quality cropped photos from the main sensor.
This camera system, however, does take impressively stable videos with an ample amount of detail.
You also get a 10MP selfie camera in the cover display that takes good selfies.
However, the second, so-called invisible selfie camera inside the main display has not gotten any upgrade since the Fold 3, so its results are quite unsatisfactory.
So yea, that’s the Galaxy Z Fold 6. It is a thoroughly refined version of the Fold 5.
However, since Samsung is no longer the only brand that globally sells a large-format foldable phone, I did expect more advancements in the camera and battery department.
But that being said, Samsung is still the only Android phone company with a brand value strong enough to command ₹1.65 lakh.
So, I'm sure a lot of people will indeed prefer the Fold 6 over its Chinese rivals. And as I mentioned in the beginning of this video, the Z Fold 6 is the best phone for productivity on the go.