On the surface, Galaxy Z Fold 6 is not much different from Z Fold 5; But these millimeter improvements have had a significant impact on making the phone feel more premium; For example, the device is 1.4 mm shorter, 1 mm wider, and 1.3 mm narrower in closed mode to get away from that elongated and unpleasant form factor; The corners of the device are sharper and flatter inspired by the S24 Ultra design; The bezels around the outer display have become symmetrical, and the phone’s weight has dropped by 14 grams, now only 7 grams more than the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Another change in appearance that has contributed to the beauty of the Z Fold 6 is the matting of the phone frame. This year, Samsung uses a matte design for both of its folding phones, which is probably more compatible with the taste of many users; Of course, to control the weight of the device, Samsung uses aluminum instead of a titanium frame, which apparently has 10% more resistance than the previous generation. Navy, pink, gray, black, and white colors provide users with a variety of options, and the navy model we had for review had a very stylish and beautiful effect.

The biggest and most important changes of Z Fold 6 should not be found in what is visible but in the micro-coarse hammering behind the scenes. In fact, the unsung hero of Samsung’s new foldable is to increase the resistance of the device so that it can have a say in the crowded market of normal phones with high resistance levels and much lower prices.

Samsung says that it has added a new layer of neodymium material to the main screen, which can look soft and flexible like a combination of corn starch and water against finger pressure; But it should be hardened against strong blows to prevent serious damage to the screen; The new double rail hinge, while being narrower, shows better impact resistance, which according to Samsung, is twice as much as the previous generation.

Samsung has also added IP48 certification to its foldables for the first time, which offers a slight resistance to particles of one millimeter and larger than the previous generation’s IPX8; Of course, the dust particles are smaller than one millimeter and you still can’t take your luxury folding car to the beach or desert safely. Like the previous generation, Z Fold 6 can survive water penetration up to one meter for 30 minutes.

The hinge mechanism of Z Fold 6 is designed to keep the screen angle between 45 and 135 degrees, and like the previous generation, it can withstand up to 200,000 arm closures; For comparison, OnePlus guarantees one million wears for its foldable phone. Also, the folding glass panels use the same Gorilla Glass Victus screen protector 2 generations ago, which, according to Samsung, protects the phone against falling from a distance of two meters on surfaces such as asphalt.

With all these words, we expected more from the appearance changes of Galaxy Z Fold 6; Unfortunately, Samsung still insists on the elongated form factor of the Z Fold, while the Pixel Fold and OnePlus Open offer a more reasonable aspect ratio so that working with the phone in closed mode feels more natural and comfortable. Although the indentation in the middle of the screen is less noticeable than before thanks to the extra layer and a more resistant hinge, it still feels uncomfortable when scrolling and watching movies; While the Chinese competitors have solved the problem of the depression in the middle of the screen to a large extent.

The main and external display of Z Fold 6 compared to Z Fold 5 has had minor and almost imperceptible improvements; The maximum brightness under intense light conditions is now about 8% higher than before and the 22.1:9 aspect ratio of the cover display offers a better experience than before and close to Sony Xperia 1 Mark 5; But it is still far from what we have in mind and are used to from a normal phone.

More precisely, the 7.6-inch main display of the Z Fold 6 with a resolution of 2160 x 1856 pixels and an adaptive refresh rate between 1 and 120 Hz is not much different from the previous generation, and with an aspect ratio of 20.9:18 in open mode, it looks almost square. ; The selfie camera under the display is hardly visible and does not cause any disturbance.

As we mentioned earlier, the depression in the middle of the display has been reduced; But it is still noticeable when scrolling and watching videos; Considering that OnePlus and Xiaomi solved the problem of the indentation in the middle of the screen last year, we expected Samsung to catch up with the Chinese competitors this year.

The external 6.3-inch screen of the Z-fold with a resolution of 2376 x 968 is slightly different from the image ratio of 23.1:9 and, as before, uses the old panel with an adaptive refresh rate of 120 Hz. Synchronizing the refresh rate between screens makes us have a unified user experience; This is not the case with the Z Flip 6 with a 120 Hz main display and a 60 Hz external display.

Samsung says that this year, the Z Fold’s internal and external display can achieve 2,600 nits of brightness; In the manual brightness mode and when Extra Brightness was on, we obtained the maximum brightness of the main display of 940 nits and the maximum brightness of the cover display of 926 nits, which does not show much improvement compared to the previous generation; But it still appears at the brightness level of flagship phones.

Switching to auto-brightness mode and exposure to harsh lighting conditions, the brightness rises to an impressive 2,000 nits for the main display and 2,150 nits for the cover display, which is closer to what Samsung promises. Also, the highest level of brightness when playing HDR content on the main and external display reaches 2100 nits and 2150 nits, respectively, which is not much different when interacting with SDR content.

The Koreans have apparently made a change in the panel of this year’s phones, which strangely cannot fully cover the wide color space of DCI-P3; This was very shocking to us in our review of the S24 Ultra. Fortunately, Samsung realized the weakness of its screens in the coverage of the color space and has added a slider called Vividness to the Vivid color profile of these phones, by increasing it, we managed to reach the DCI-P3 coverage from about 85% to a reasonable amount of 97%.

Except for this particular case, both the main and external displays of the Z Fold 6 show a good performance in terms of displaying colors; But they do not have the accuracy of normal flagships such as Pixel 8 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The colors on the Z Fold 6 displays in the Natural profile, which covers the sRGB color space, are relatively accurate and neutral; But in the Vivid profile of the DCI-P3 color space, which is more saturated than normal, they have lower accuracy than normal phones and tend to be produced coldly.

I feel that after talking about the form factor and performance of Samsung’s new foldable displays, it’s time to answer the basic question: whether the advantage of the Galaxy Z Fold 6’s large and foldable display, which is the main reason for the device’s astronomical price, really affects the user experience. Does it matter or not?

In our one-week experience with the Galaxy Z Fold 6 in various scenarios, we can say that the tablet nature of the phone makes a noticeable difference when playing games, viewing gallery images, and some multitasking applications; But in watching movies, surfing the web, reading books or writing long texts, it does not have a significant advantage over normal phones.

The reason why watching videos on the Fold’s widescreen isn’t much different than on a regular phone like the S24 Ultra is because most videos have a 16:9 aspect ratio, and when playing on a 21.6:18 screen, there’s a lot of top and bottom. The screen inevitably goes black; An event called “Letterbox”.

However, watching movies on the Z Fold 6 is a lot of fun thanks to the super high-quality stereo speakers. With the Z Fold 6, we watched parts of John Wick and Oppenheimer movies, which made for an epic and exciting experience due to the excellent volume, pounding bass, and clarity of dialogues in busy scenes and the details of the sounds of beatings and explosions. The performance of the speakers in playing music is also excellent, and in addition to the clean production of middle frequencies and bold treble, it showed a very good performance in distortion control.

If we want to talk about the applications of multitasking in Galaxy Z Fold 6 in more detail, apart from the possibility of dividing the screen into multiple windows and opening different applications floating, there is an important feature called Flex Mode, which divides the user interface into two separate parts as soon as the device is folded. .

In Flex Mode, the upper area of ​​the screen is dedicated to the application itself and the lower area is dedicated to some control functions that provide different functions depending on the type of application; For example, in the YouTube application, control buttons are placed at the bottom of the screen so that these floating elements do not disturb the user’s vision while watching the video, and on the other hand, it is easier to move the video forward and backward, which is a positive point.

Currently, some default programs and a limited number of applications support such a mode, which is generally intended for folding devices and not just the Fold series, and Samsung has designed a replacement feature called Flex Mode Panel to fill this void. A condition where the device can be used in a semi-bent state. By activating the Flex Mode Panel, the lower part of the screen turns into a virtual trackpad so that you can work with the Z Fold 6 like a laptop.

Of course, it is better to keep the similarity to the laptop at the level of a conceptual plan; Because the experience of working with the device in Flex Mode is far from words than you can imagine, and the reason is clear, which is due to the very wide and limited dimensions of the screen in the curved mode. In this situation, if you put the phone on one side and work with the trackpad on the other side, and suppose you are surfing the web, you have to constantly scroll on the page.

In addition, multitasking and moving between open programs in Flex Mode practically loses its function, and for this purpose, it is better to settle for the device’s Unfolded mode. However, as a workaround, when the Flex Panel is enabled, the user interface elements are made smaller so that more of the content can be seen within this area.

The challenges of working with Flex Panel do not end there; For example, the keyboard is not optimized for this mode; That is, while typing, it is not possible to use the trackpad at the same time as the keyboard, and to control the mouse pointer, it is necessary to leave the keyboard; Even though Split Mode is considered in the keyboard; But it is better not to indulge in two-finger typing with Z Flip 6.

Despite the fact that Samsung in terms of the richness of features and optimization of the One UI user interface; Especially in foldable devices, moves ahead of its competitors; in my opinion, the introduction of such important and possibly fateful products solely focused on artificial intelligence, while not focusing on improvements and new capabilities for better multitasking, has fueled the uncertainty of the future of foldable devices to some extent.

With all this said, the One UI 6.1.1 Galaxy Z Fold 6 user interface is exemplary in terms of responsiveness, software optimization, and speed of operation, and rarely bugs, crashes, or visual gaffes, especially when switching between the internal display and the cover and Flex Mode, multitasking and You will experience moving windows floating; In other words, it can be said that such an experience cannot be found in the user interface of other companies’ foldable devices.

We talked about artificial intelligence and in response to the question of to what extent Samsung has used the potential of Z Fold 6 to introduce artificial intelligence capabilities, we have to say that imagine that you have traveled to a country whose language you do not know and now you want the Samsung translator program. Use it called Interpreter to talk to others in [your?] language. In this case, your own sentence will be shown on the internal screen and the translated sentence will be shown to the audience in the form of text and audio from the cover screen.

The Interpreter feature is all that Samsung has used in Galaxy Fold 6 as a showcase to introduce Galaxy AI, which looks attractive and practical at first glance; But really in your own language? no Since Galaxy AI features do not support Farsi, even in your own language you cannot interpret the dream that Koreans have seen for their users, at least for Iranian users it seems.

Therefore, the capabilities of artificial intelligence cannot have a strong role to justify the stubborn and defensible choice of this phone; Because due to the lack of Persian language, practically many of them which are used in everyday use are useless for Iranians.

Live translation of calls and chats of various messengers, converting voice to text in audio files, and summarizing the content of sites and notes in the browser and the Samsung Notes application, are among the features that are not very useful for Iranians, and whether Samsung has a plan to add Farsi or not, is still in the dark. It is ambiguous. On the other hand, according to the company’s official announcement, a number of Galaxy AI features will no longer be available for free after 2025.

Another category of Galaxy AI features, which at least geographically is not limited to a certain range of nationalities and Samsung has given more maneuvers on them, are features based on visual artificial intelligence. A number of these features were available with AI, such as removing or replacing objects and visual distractions, and now an imaginary object can be made to exist by dragging it.

The new function of the Galaxy AI collection called Sketch to Image can be used in three parts; You can call the mentioned tool through the Edge Panel and draw directly on the screen and turn your drawing into a graphic design or real objects or do the same in Samsung Notes.

The accuracy of the process of converting user drawings into real objects depends on the complexity of what you have drawn; After generating the design, you can also view various other proposed examples and choose one from among them. Also, in the gallery, when editing the photo, you can draw the desired objects and add them to the photo. Designs are produced based on the type of photo and adapted to it.

Speaking of drawing, it is not bad to mention that the Galaxy Z Food 6 does not support the regular S Pen that comes with the S series phones; As soon as we tried the Sketch to Image feature with the Galaxy S23 Ultra pen, a warning message was displayed saying that the S Pen Pro or S Pen Fold Edition should be used; Because normal pens damage the Samsung folding screen.

Another feature that has joined the Galaxy AI family is called Portrait Studio, which turns the recorded images of the face into various types of cartoon images and is more fun; The Live effect feature also gives face photos a 3D and animated look.

In the form of Galaxy AI capabilities, Text Composer has been added to the Samsung keyboard, which can be very useful for producing text with different tones from formal to colloquial, and for many applications, from letter writing to captioning for social networks, and in this case, it is exceptionally compatible with the Persian language.

It is true that Galaxy Z Fold 6 is the most advanced Samsung product in terms of display technology; But in the field of photography experience, not only has there been no generational progress; But it has not reached S24 Ultra. Users who intend to buy Z-Fold, fully focused on the foldable screen, will have a satisfactory photography experience; But this experience is not at the level of expectations from Samsung’s most expensive product.

Perhaps the limitations of foldable devices are still the reason for stopping their evolution and the manufacturers are preparing a fundamental revision to be able to remove various limitations; However, controlling their final price for the customer still seems challenging. In any case, the Galaxy Z Fold series comes with the latest flagship chip every year, and in the photos captured with their camera, we see improvements, albeit small, at least thanks to the chip’s more advanced ISP. In the following, we will review the specifications of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 camera together.

The wide-angle camera uses the same 50-megapixel Samsung ISOCELL GN3 sensor that is widely used in products such as the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S23 FE. This 1/1.57-inch sensor with 1.0 µm pixels relies on Tetrapixel technology to combine all four adjacent pixels to capture photos with a higher light absorption rate and 12.5MP resolution. To direct the light to the sensor, there is a lens with a focal length of 23 mm an aperture of f/1.8, and the possibility of optical stabilization.

The ultrawide camera uses Samsung’s 12-megapixel ISOCELL 3KU sensor , the size of each 1/3.2-inch sensor pixel is 1.12 micrometers, and behind a lens with a focal length of 13 mm and an aperture of f/2.2, which covers a 123-degree field of view. Due to the fixed focus range and lack of automatic focus, it is not possible to record macro images with the ultrawide camera.

The telephoto camera uses the same 10MP ISOCELL 3K1 sensor. This 1/3.94-inch sensor uses 1.0 micrometer pixels. Samsung uses it for the telephoto lens with f/2.4 aperture and 69mm focal length with 3x optical zoom in the Z Fold and Galaxy S24. Optical stabilizers and image-gyroscopic electronics have been used to reduce the intensity of vibrations when photographing a distant view.

The high price of the Galaxy Z Fold 6, regardless of its difference, forced us to measure its camera performance compared to the Pixel 8, which has a price below 50 million Tomans and uses an almost similar camera set; Does this foldable phone have a special advantage over a flagship phone with a much lower price or not?

According to the photos below, the Galaxy Z Fold 6’s wide camera can take photos with a wider dynamic range, and the light and dark points of the image have better conditions than the pixel in terms of light balance.

If we want to talk about the details, we have to give the winning card to the Pixel 8 because it pulled out the details from the heart of the image a little better than the Z Fold 6 and we see even less noise in the photos.

In terms of color, the Pixel 8 is in better condition; because it has been able to record colors close to reality; While the colors on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 are somewhat saturated and exaggerated, they may look more attractive and captivating.

Galaxy Z Flip 6 main camera photo gallery

Similar conditions apply to ultrawide camera photos. Z Fold 6 photos have better conditions in terms of dynamic range; But the Pixel 8 has been able to show a better performance than the Galaxy Z Fold 6 without artificializing the photo and making it sharper, giving the audience the feeling of a detailed photo.

Regarding the colors, it can be said that the Pixel 8 records more realistic images.

Galaxy Z Flip 6 ultra-wide camera photo gallery

The telephoto camera of the Galaxy Z Flip 6 performs well in daylight and captures noise-free photos. The contrast of telephoto camera photos is slightly lower than wide and ultrawide; But in terms of color, dynamic range, and details, it will not disappoint you at all; Especially when you are photographing a specific subject (such as cats) at a not too far distance.

With a telephoto camera, you can take much more interesting portrait images than with a wide-angle camera. According to the photos below, you can understand the importance of this camera in terms of being close to reality.

Portrait photo of the main camera

Galaxy Z Flip 6 telephoto camera photo gallery

The performance of the Galaxy Z Flip 6 cameras at night is also generally satisfactory. There is no news of noise and pseudo-like effects that enter the photo due to excessive processing or the high exposure time and the details; They are especially well depicted in the wide-angle camera.

Some image processing effects or loss of detail may be seen in places where there is focus of light; But regarding the photos of the telephoto camera, I have to shorten my position a little, because due to the smaller size of the sensor, it becomes a little more difficult to record an accurate and clear photo, and the phone becomes the hands of the algorithms.

Despite the fact that Galaxy Z Fold 6 does not show much progress in terms of software, camera, and of course the use of the potential of the folding screen compared to the previous generation, we must admit that it still offers the most complete user experience from a folding phone with a focus on multitasking and should not be Let’s not forget that an important part of this achievement, in addition to the software, will be owed to its hardware collection.

This year, Samsung has considered a customized version of the most powerful Android chip for its foldable flagship. The SD 8 Gen 3 chip with the For Galaxy extension beats at the heart of Z Fold 6 so that even the most demanding users can be comfortable with Z Fold 6’s performance.

The version of SD 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy has differences in the frequency of the CPU cores from the normal version of the chip, but in terms of the arrangement of the cores, it does not change and performs its processing tasks with the same combination of 1+3+2+2. The high-power core in the For Galaxy version works with a higher frequency of 90 MHz, and the low-power and middle cores work with a lower frequency of 100 MHz.

Since artificial intelligence also plays a prominent role in the user experience of the Z Fold 6, Qualcomm’s chip seems to be a very worthy choice for Samsung’s foldable; Because SD 8 Gen 3 uses a combination of CPU, GPU, and NPU for artificial intelligence processing, and devices equipped with this chip can handle a significant amount of AI-related tasks offline.

Taking a superficial look at the benchmark results, we realize that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 has nothing less than other Android flagships in terms of processing power; So even if we don’t consider the other weak points of the new Fold, we can say that at least in terms of performance we are on the side of a worthy flagship. However, Galaxy S24 Ultra is still Samsung’s strongest flagship, and Z Fold 6 is not going to shake this position.

Samsung says that this year it has improved the cooling system of the Z Fold 6 and equipped its new foldable with a larger vapor chamber. Considering the slimmer phone and the challenges it can put in the way of cooling the device, Samsung’s attention to the cooling system seems quite logical.

The result of Samsung’s arrangements for the cooling system can be clearly seen in the execution of heavy processes such as games. Games such as Call of Duty: Mobile and Real Racing 3 even on the latest graphics settings do not cause any problems for the Z Fold 6 and run at the highest frame rate. The Genshin Impact game experience also happens with the most graphic details, smoothly and without any slowness, and in terms of temperature, it does not cause any problems for the phone body.

The game Call of Duty Warzone, which at least in the current versions, poses a great challenge to the most powerful smartphones, also became a problem for the Z Fold 6. If your expectations are high and you want to run the game on the highest possible graphics settings, not only will you not get a good experience from the game (the number we reported in the table), but the device will heat up (in areas close to the camera and on the display, about 43 to 45 degrees Celsius).

To have the smoothest possible game experience, we set the graphics settings to the game’s default preset named Smoother Gameplay. In this case, the phone does not heat up and the game can be played with a stable frame rate of 60 frames per second. Of course, in these settings, the game’s graphics are not impressive at all.

With all the interpretations and regardless of performance discussions, we must not forget that thanks to the large screen and a lot of space under the user’s hands, playing on the Z Fold 6 even in the worst conditions offers an enjoyable and unrepeatable experience.

Besides the games, the performance stability test can also be a suitable meter and criterion to measure the optimal performance and operation of the cooling system. In the graph obtained from the stress test, you can see that despite the sharp drop in the score in the initial rounds of the test (due to high processing pressure and the phone overheating), the Z Fold 6 has relatively stable performance in the later rounds of the test and does not experience sudden ups and downs. In terms of points, the Z Fold 6 is slightly lower than the iPhone 15 Pro Max and its fellow Galaxy family, the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

The Z Fold 6’s hardware improvements end there, and other complementary parts, namely RAM, storage, and battery, remain unchanged. Samsung launches the Galaxy Z Fold 6 with the same configurations as last year’s model, namely 12 GB of RAM storage space of 256 and 512 GB and 1 TB of UFS 4.0. Naturally, in none of the configurations, the user will not feel any discomfort about running different programs at the same time, especially during multitasking.

The 4400 mAh battery of the Z Fold 5 is also used in the new generation, and unfortunately, Samsung still insists on the 25-watt charging speed. Support for wireless charging at a speed of 15 W and reverse charging at 4.5 W are other specifications that we should know about Z Fold 6.

In order to have a better view of the difference in charging between the large internal display and the smaller external display on the Samsung Fold, we ran the usual Zoomit tests on both displays separately. Relying on the main screen of the Z Fold 6 and in Zomit standard tests (display brightness of 200 nits and cutting off all the phone’s communication features), you can get about 25 hours of video playback and about 11 hours of daily use. Although the charge on the main display has not improved compared to the previous generation, it is quite sufficient for a normal working day.

Read More: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 review, price and specifications

If we only consider a user with a 6.2-inch external screen, the charging time will be around 40 hours in video playback and around 16 hours in daily use, which is compared to the previous generation and other smartphones of the same category (whose screen dimensions cover the screen). fold is also bigger) shows a noticeable advantage.

Galaxy Z Fold 6 with a more stylish form factor and higher resistance, up-to-date processor, and artificial intelligence capabilities is undoubtedly the best Korean foldable, but Samsung’s failure in terms of charging speed and especially design has made it no longer the only or even 100% best choice in the foldable market; For example, OnePlus Open and Mix Fold 3 both support 67W charging and have almost solved the problem of indentation in the middle of the screen; But the charging speed of Z Fold 6 reaches 25W and the indentation of its screen is still visible.

Samsung is ahead of the competition in terms of the user interface, software updates,s and camera performance; But it has maintained this gap for at least three generations, and it is not unlikely that the new generation of OnePlus, Xiaomi, or Google foldables will surpass Samsung in such cases.

Generational progress is no longer a criterion for foldable with a not-so-justifiable price; Because Samsung’s challenge is not limited to the emergence of new competitors in this still-deserted market. 6 generations have passed since the production of Galaxy Z Fold, But its sales are only 1.5% of the total market of sold phones. Since there are still no attractive and innovative applications that use the full potential of the dual display, it is unlikely that the Z Fold 6 will be able to persuade more users to buy hybrid phones.

As long as the basic problems of foldables are not completely resolved and their price is not economically justified, it is difficult to recommend their purchase to ordinary users. For now, the only advantage of these phones is the classy factor and larger screen for multitasking applications; However, those people who really need multitasking, with the same budget, can think of other tempting options; For example, a Galaxy S24 Ultra has faster charging speed, stronger cameras and higher resistance, next to a Galaxy Tab S9 or MacBook Air M3 tablet that does not have a magic screen and does not fit in a pocket; But they are highly portable and provide the user with more workspace.