Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 Review: Slipping Behind

Alex Choros

Updated 16 January 2025

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6

Our verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 is still one of the best devices in the foldable market, but it’s no longer the best flip phone. The camera and battery improvements on last year’s model, although minimal, still make a great phone even better. Old issues, like the display crease, are noticeably better but not gone completely. These few drawbacks would stand out less in a year where the competition wasn’t as strong; as Motorola’s Razr 50 Ultra becomes the flippable phone to back, the Z Flip6 has been demoted to second-best.

From $1,099.99 at release

What we love

Cover display is a joy to use
Practical form factor
Better camera and battery

What could be improved

Crease is still distracting
Galaxy AI is a novelty at best
Cover display more limited than competition

The essentials

Performance

Great! Same powerful chipset as the premium Z Fold 6.

Battery

Much better! Casual usage and taking advantage of the cover display extended battery life to nearly two full days.

Screen

Brighter, more useful cover display and a better internal screen that still has a noticeable crease.

Camera

Decent! Improved main shooter offers high-quality photos and selfies from the same camera. Not the best but okay for the price.

See Galaxy Z Flip6 plans

Much like its tablet-style sibling, the Galaxy Z Fold6, Samsung’s popular Z Flip6 maintains its status as one of the best foldable (or flippable) smartphones on the market. But too many small iterations and not enough innovation have left room for competitors to outgrow it.

Most notable amongst the competition is the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra, which doesn’t restrict which apps you can use on its cover display. Games, emails, Facebook, it’s all fair game for the Razr 50 Ultra’s cover display. Some apps work better than others on such a small screen, mind you, but that’s to be expected.

Samsung, on the other hand, likes to control the cover screen experience, allowing limited features and a select range of apps on the Galaxy Z Flip6’s cover display.

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What we like about the Galaxy Z Flip6

Despite the competition heating up, there are still plenty of reasons to consider the Galaxy Z Flip6 over the competition. For example, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is the exact same you’ll find in the more expensive Z Fold6. It’s currently the fastest chipset found in a foldable flip phone.

As far as that performance goes, I’ve got no complaints. I fell off the wagon during this review and downloaded Marvel Snap again. The game’s flashy card animations and compounding visual effects in particularly racy matches flew by without a hitch. I also only realized after the fact that I never had any issues with the handset overheating, even after long stints of clearing house in Marvel Snap.

Let’s talk more about its unique design. Over the years, I’ve slowly become a believer that the flippable form is way more practical than the foldable form of more expensive handsets. Making a big phone small is better than making a big phone bigger.

A testament to the phone’s attractive form factor is the comments I received from teacher friends, who pointed out how handy it would be to have a phone like this they could clip to a lanyard, a sentiment that I’m sure would extend to healthcare workers.

The more humble folded state is how the Z Flip6 spends most of its time, even more so this year thanks to a brighter and improved cover display. That’s the smaller 3.4-inch display you’ll use when the Z Flip6 is folded shut. Without ever unfolding your phone, you can access music controls, respond to messages with quick responses, use the calculator, switch on the flashlight and more.

I got a lot of joy from using the cover display for the basics: answering calls, responding to texts with smart replies, and taking selfies with the main camera array (which has also been upgraded with a 50MP sensor) without ever opening the handset.

That new 50MP camera is a nice upgrade too. One unique benefit of the foldable flip phone is the fact that the main camera can pull double-duty. Not only does it operate as the main shooter for the Z Flip 6, but the high-quality cam also becomes your selfie shooter when folded, meaning you can get the same quality on selfies as you do with regular snaps. Mind you, there is a serviceable 10MP selfie camera on the inside of the Z Flip 6, but considering you can make video calls and take full advantage of the camera while folded, I rarely found a use for it.

Galaxy Z Flip 6 camera samples

Check out these camera samples taken on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6. Click or tap on any photo to see a larger version.

Making the cover display my default way of using the handset allowed me to avoid a lot of the usual distractions that come with unlocking any other phone. I categorically spent significantly less time mindlessly browsing social media, and even found myself far less tempted to check in on Slack and my inbox outside of work hours. A healthy development in my books. It also helped me conserve battery.

Combined with the bigger 4,000mAh battery and less time spent with the phone completely open, I managed almost three days of charge. Mind you this was across a couple of days of leave where I was naturally using my phone less to begin with, but I was still impressed to wake up on that third day with a little juice still in the tank.

More regular usage typically got me through two work days, normally needing a charge on the second night before bed. A complete video playback battery rundown saw the battery go from 100% to 0% in just over 10 hours. That’s a decent innings for any phone but especially one as compact as this.

What we dislike about the Galaxy Z Flip6

Compared with last year’s Z Flip5, the Z Flip 6 is more expensive at $1,099.99 for the 256GB model and $1,219.99 for the 512GB model.

That price hike is a little harder to swallow this year, with so few improvements to warrant the upgrade, let alone a higher cost. But then again, Samsung hardly stands out in that regard, with near unilateral pricing increases across the smartphone market.

Samsung has gone a few years without making any major changes to its foldable and flippable phones but this year it’s hard not to feel like it leaned too much on Galaxy AI to sell its new phones. It’s a bit annoying, really, because these features aren’t actually exclusive to any of the newer handsets. There are also other problems Samsung could have spent more time trying to improve if it weren’t so fixated on AI. The crease, for example, is a slight improvement on years’ past but still a major distraction when using the phone unfolded and the cover display, while brighter, is still smaller and not as useful as the cover display of the Razr 50 Ultra.

There are a lot of reasons to love the Galaxy Z Flip6, but Galaxy AI simply isn’t one of them. Unfortunately, I don’t see the Galaxy’s current version of a generative AI assistant really becoming an essential part of the Samsung smartphone experience.

Some of the Galaxy AI photo editing features are fun for a day or two, but ultimately, it’s not a very powerful tool considering what we know about the technology and what it’s capable of.

Removing a picture in my house simply replaced it with an empty picture frame, for example. Who is that for? How does that make for a better picture? I spent more time laughing at Galaxy AI’s silly solutions than I did actually making any productive edits.

The generative AI photo edits don’t have the most obvious UI but essentially, circling an object in a photo will let you move it, resize it or remove it completely. Tapping an object, on the other hand, will offer up a small selection of alternatives to replace it with. But not any old thing, typically just other variants of the object that already exists in the photo.

You can also draw things into pictures, but given the Z Flip6’s small display, I only ever managed to get it to recognize the most basic shapes, like a fish or a cloud. Simply typing in your generative AI image edits (like “put a fancy party hat on the cat”) would be so much easier.

Messing around with Galaxy AI can be fun, but after two weeks with the features on hand, there’s not one that I would use on a daily basis or for anything other than to goof around.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6—final thoughts

While there are a few meaningful upgrades to the camera and battery of the Galaxy Z Flip6, Samsung is banking on its new Galaxy AI features to sell new phones. The issue is, those features aren’t exclusive to any one Galaxy smartphone and they certainly don’t add anything unique to the Z Flip6.

Motorola has caught up and perhaps even surpassed the Z Flip6 with its flippable Razr 50 Ultra, which is cheaper than the Z Flip6 and offers a less obvious display crease and a more useful cover display.

That’s not to say the Galaxy Z Flip6 isn’t a great device. I loved every minute of my time with the funny little flip phone. Its vibrant and functional cover display helped me reduce my screen time by allowing me to access the essentials without ever opening the phone.

Galaxy AI guff aside, the few improvements that are here, a better camera, bigger battery and improved performance and cooling, all amount to a nice little upgrade all things considered. Just maybe not one worth throwing out your old phone for.

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Alex Choros

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Alex Choros is the Managing Editor of WhistleOut Australia and an award-winning journalist. He's been writing about consumer technology for over a decade and is an expert on the Australian telco sector, to the point where he knows far too many phone and internet plans by heart. In addition to leading the WhistleOut editorial team, Alex is responsible for ruining the office Sonos with his troubled taste in music.

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