I've had now quite a bit of time with the Z fold 6 using it as my daily phone testing it all out it is slimmer, it is lighter the design is more refined it's got a better build quality to it but has Samsung done enough here. Are they playing it just a little too safe and is the zold 6 here a phone that you should buy I'll let you know in this review and what do we get with our z fold 6 well simply the charging cable and a Sim tray tool that's it we get no case and no charges Samsung has refined this model again that is really the key word it's all about just improving upon tweaking the existing design which is a proven formula for this style of foldable of course you have your book style that opens up like that and then you have your flip vertical style which is going to flip up and this is the horizontal fold which is the style that I do prefer I think it's a better style so capacitive always on fingerprint reader and this does work well but I need to press it in just first and then tap and it unlocks no issues with that at all it does work really well and in a way I like it more than the optical screen fingerprint readers I think where it is in this location is excellent easy to get hold of that easy to adjust the volume and unlocking it yeah very very good so at the front screen if you missed my Hands-On video it's only a 1 mm change here that's all they've managed to tweak out of the screen by just producing those bezels but the height of it that has been reduced so it's a shorter phone the weight has improved it's now 239 grams so that's down 14 grams and you got on the front here Gorilla Glass victus 2 Gorilla Glass victus 2 on the back now this is the pink color although with my lighting It's probably hard to see it has a very very slight shade of pink to it it's not a very strong pink color at all so it's quite a light one which is good I do prefer this and it's a frosted glass back there is no Samsung branding on the back here that is reserved for our spine of it if you're looking at it like a book so we call this a spine to with it and the materials really good so it doesn't this color at least and the white color too would not show up fingerprints really at all on the sides the frame and the back of it on the screens you're still going to see that of course so more squared off now keeping in line with the Samsung Galaxy s24 series down the bottom our type-c Port does support video out it's USB 3.2 and we have the antenna lines there two loud speakers and of course their desktop mode is still present which is one of the best software is the reason really to go for Samsung now and even less now for the hardware compared to the competition but it is still excellent Hardware very good build quality to it so this takes two Nano Sims lsim tray of course no micro SD card support up the top here you can see uh I think three microphones it's definitely not an IR transmitter we get with it and then those cameras unchanged uh they are the same what they've done is just just tweak this ring around it to just size that out make it a little bit bigger so it's a slight change compared to the previous model we have our flash here so excellent build quality they hinge when you do open it up this is the outer of course 6.3 in screen they're using
both of them they Dynamic ltpo AMOLED screens their 2x ones they call them 120 HZ refresh rate variable refresh rate you open it up and you're greeted with that inner screen which looks very good now the hinge great feeling to it so when you open it and you close it it does have a very nice feel to it I like the resistance we get from it the friction when you close it it doesn't feel loose it doesn't feel like it will loosen up it won't spring itself open so you can easily pop it up to use it like a tripod for the rear cameras if you want to do that you've got that option using it in a flex mode so you can type on the keyboard here you still have all of that goodness that we had with the previous models but they've just made it just so much better and it has a really good I think look to it and feel the camera here the end screen one all right still there still present and yes if you look close enough you can see those larger pixels because the pixel density of this area where the 4 megapixel camera is is a a lot uh not as dense should I say as what we have with the main screen so you do notice it a little bit now this is intended for use for really just videos if you want to take good-look photos then you would stick to using the outer screen or you would use just the rear cameras of course for that and you've got a raise lip too with this it's a very small rais lip so it's about uh almost a millimeter and when it's close there is a gap so if you happen to get like a grain of salt in here or some sand if you went to the beach you close that screen it shouldn't be touching that's the idea behind it so it's not going to get all scratched up now they've increased the durability of everything Samsung so this screen here which is 7.6 in it is very flowed of course and 120 HZ it looks really good and as I've said my other videos there's something about foldable phone screens because they don't have that normal protective glass over the top them they got a very fine glass the contrast and those levels of the blacks the colors excellent really really good so this screen Samsung's claim is that it will get itself up to 2600 Nets that's using HDR content and which it does support too so HDR 10 plus that is what it supports and you'll see that with things like for example Netflix is going to support that any other content it'll get that brightness right up for it so the resolution of this screen this is 1856 by 2160 that gives us a PPI of 374 so it's not the densest looking screen that you can find on a folder nor is it the largest we've got other foldables that are just over 8 in now however you're not going to see pixels at all with it it's a very nice screen so you do have your full screen gestures of course you can use the menu buttons you've got shortcuts down the bottom here if you want those but I can press here and hide them okay that's an option with the software which is 1ui 6.1 based off Android 14 and you can continue with apps on the cover screen if you set that up there's a lot of tweaks and things with the software that I can go over here but to keep the video timed down I'm not going to go really into too much depth here because it's very similar in fact the same really with the Z fold 5 a lot of these things so about the screen here what is the inner screen light when you use it in bright light so out on direct sunlight here in Spain very hot Bright Day the heat was affecting the screen brightness now I did notice it dimmed down very quickly it didn't take long to get a little warm and you could still make out the screen as you can see now but I do wish it was a little brighter for a little longer too because I'd only been using it for about 10 minutes I shot some video and whatnot and a few photos and I just noticed that both of the screens started to get a little dull you can see now the outer screen that inir sunline walking along here in one of the main roads in Paris is working just fine with the maps it didn't seem to d as quick as the inner screen the foldable screen does the screen is 2.7 mm wider and yes it still has a crease you can see it you can feel it when I run my finger over it just a little it's not that noticeable it's only when I hold it at these certain angles because when you're using it like you would a fo like this do you see it now not really and after a while you kind of just ignore it you don't really think about it and it doesn't bother me anymore there I don't have the exact stylist for it because because it doesn't come with it and I didn't get that from Samsung but I do have one ordered and that may be featured later on in some of my other reviews but I do have the folder Edition S Pen which is going to work just fine on it so this is one of the reasons to go for I believe the key reason to go for the zold 6 and any of the Z folds is there optimization of the UI the software what we get with multitasking and the stylus even though it doesn't work on the outer screen it works really well on this and it works even over the crease there's no problem with that at all it won't make a funny line or stop working now the AI features Galaxy a they've added quite a few things you've got that Circle to search what we saw before with the s24 series uh you do have your typical stuff like right on the screen and smart select and what I want is this sketch to image this is using AI to generate an image so draw something so what I will draw and let's see if it is going to recognize this uh I will do a very quick sketch very poorly done at that of this is meant to be a cat uh not a great picture okay let's just draw some cat ears in here and will it see this as being a cat well that's supposed to be four legs and let's do that's tail okay that's a shock sketch I know good thing I'm not an artist and this is not an artistic Channel otherwise that would be an embarrassment so you can see it takes a little while to discover what it's going to do oh whoa okay that's actually pretty good they looks so much better than what I just did and it's given it a a very artistic flare so you can see the different versions of it I quite like this one because the eyes uh and the colors on it so that's good you can have a lot of fun with this and what it is able to do generating certain images and this there's lots of things you can do with the AI another is what they've added to the gallery I know a lot of people are talking about this but and there's other videos so what I'll do is find okay let's see if I can remove something here with this image so I'll click on that which is our galaxy Ai and tap or Draw I want to remove that okay I need to hold it down so I can move it if I wanted to but I want to get rid of it completely what about that can I get rid of this tap okay well I can just move it if I wanted to but I'll see I want to get rid of those two things and maybe this thing in the background there too all right that now it should if this is going to work I won't edit it out if it doesn't cuz it's a good test it should be able to remove those three objects I selected in my photo that I thought was shouldn't have been there okay imagine this is a great portrait O Okay it didn't quite get rid of them did it especially this one maybe I needed to have tapped in and moved all right I can view the original okay it's just kind of removed it a little so it's slightly better but I really wanted to get rid of it so it's not 100% foolproof it would probably work on some other photos a little bit better there and one of the other ones that I do like it's just discard that is one of the features is the video so let's have a look at one of my video samples uh where are we okay so video where I was testing it out there should be one here in Paris can I start panning around you'll see that I can slow this down as I tap and hold here we go so this is the video I can turn this into slowmo so I can press right here and see now as that lady's walking see how that's now in slow motion and I can save this this is kind of a cool feature I think especially someone that does well a lot of video work that I can now save this as a slow-mo clip that was never a slowmo clip so it's the AI is added in all those extra frames so you can slide it in without making it look all stuttery and dropping frames like crazy one of my favorite things is the multitasking on foldable devices this is why I'm So Into foldables because it's like you've got two screens with you depending on the orientation of the screen it will be a screen that is either like a cell phon a typical cell phone say 21 by9 aspect a little bit wider either side or if I was to hold it up in portrait there you'll see that we then do have the equivalent of like having two phone screens right here which uh I think is very handy so here I have Google Play open I've got my gallery so I can go through and look at all my different images do all that on the fly perhaps I could be doing a bit of work editing a document file and bring up one of the emails on the other side it's all possible there you can resize things now I won't go into this in a lot of detail because it's something that's been there for a while we know all really about this I'm going to bring up Chrome if I wanted to and you can also bring this up you can hold down and you just this is how you can easily drop them wherever you want okay I didn't have to have it set up either side I can have one at the bottom one at the top and this works better I think for websites when you go through scrolling and looking at different things and then again I can bring bring up whatever I want here in the other screen and you have your quick little toggles on the side too for anything I wanted to launch really quickly so for multitasking these are king that's foldable devices and the zold 6 doesn't skimp on that it is the same experience which is the absolute best when it comes to multitasking performance in general has been just so smooth so quick no lag Gallery especially it is quick very fast you don't see any caching of the images and it is fully featured this has to be one of the best gallery apps that I have ever tested out in a phone now bloat wear let's talk about some more serious things so when you first power it on do you have junky applications is it full of them well there's only a few I would classify uh Facebook possibly and this is just to me personally a lot of people say no I use Facebook I love it Spotify also use but what they have not done is just full this full of like 20 or 15 different applications that you're probably not going to use which other brands out there not mentioning any names do do and that's a lot of the Chinese Brands they love to do that so bloatware is very minimal with Samsung so that is good to see now battery life no changes unfortunately because it's still the 4,400 mAh battery still 25 W charging this is some areas that I think Samsung really missed an opportunity I mean I feel like that it's one of those things that I was assuming coming into all of this to test it out early that it would have had a larger battery so it'll run with this fixed test mind you at a fixed brightness it Loops until it gets to 20% 8 hours and 37 minutes is this a record no is it better than the zold 5 barely it's barely better than its predecessors very very minor Improvement we're talking like you can perhaps play a video for maybe 30 40 minutes longer that's really it so just be safe to say if you're coming from a zold 5 the battery life is going to be really identical for you unfortunately so charge time this is where they are falling behind big time here so 1 hour and 16 minutes is horrendously slow compared to the competition there is competition out there that can fully charge their foldables in around 25 minutes uh most of them are at least under around about 30 minutes so that's well behind Samsung really needs to up the game on this one storage speeds very quick we are getting over 4,000 reads right almost 3,000 very good randoms you're going to notice no slowdown at all so it's ufs 4.0 spec and I do have 512 GB as for and22 the score came out to be a little bit slower than I expected now they have done quite a bit of work to The Thermals on the Samsung and proving The Vapor chamber size is now 60% larger compared to the zold 5 however the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a bit of a hot chip in my experience now having covered what have I covered now I don't know about over 10 phones uh they all seem to get quite hot unless they're called by a fan they're going to throttle and that is what was happening so it throttled down the performance almost hared and you'll see here on the little test this is with Wildlife that it starts to throttle quite heavily about the 2minute mark which is very early and this really continues on making no improvements and staying steady at least at least it doesn't really go below that with the performance so that means that when you push it really hard we are talking about performance that is similar to the previous generation so it's just the short burst you're going to see that and I'll get on to gaming soon too with a demanding game ginin impact to talk a bit more about that thermals well it did get it get did get up to 40 ° C which that's fine okay it gets warm to the touch it's good okay I have seen a lot hotter than this from the competitors who push their thermals a lot higher don't throttle the chipset as much so if you are worried about performance and you've got a previous gen one especially from say the zold 5 you're not really gaining much at all I would perhaps wait for the Z fold 7 to come out with a new chip to see a real jumping performance but as it is for everyone needs the performance we have in the 12 GB of RAM across all models is sufficient it's very fast very quick it's only when you game and if you are into demanding games games that are really console level which this is because it's multiplatform this is Gen Shan impact it looks stunning on the screen very very good and it does fit and adapt to the aspect ratio perfectly there's no Borders or anything like that now the performance very very good I've got it on the top level and that means that it's the highest visuals with 60 frames per second and it is working fine it is good you don't really see any slowdown until you get into certain areas and after you game for a reasonable amount so with 3D Mark stress test that I did run it took 2 minutes to throttle when you game it'll take a little bit longer and you notice the heat building up around here where it does get a little warm to the touch but it is nothing alarming it's not to the point where I feel like I need to break out a thermal probe it's all acceptable temperature es and pretty standard for the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 but boy do these games look absolutely stunning on this screen now I believe that the speaker Hardware is exactly the same compared to the previous models which isn't a good thing or a bad thing these are good speakers they're fine they sound all right now they are located here at the Top If I am holding it uh in landscape like such and we've got the camera modules down here so this is if you're going to be gaming the way to hold it I thing like this so you're not blocking the speakers which are here and here up at the top so what I'll do now is play this track I'm going to swing my mic around aim it at it so you can never listen to what the speakers do sound like at 100% volume they got a bit of Base to them loudness is good really no complaints from me they are good [Music] speakers super [Music] okay and looking at our cameras now with our zold 6 this is our outer screen camera 10 megapixels we've got electronic image stabilization 4K 30 4K 60 is what you can treat with this next to of course you can see just there the Eiffel towel I'm kind of blocking it a little bit this quality is fine I think it's not bad at all but it's exactly the same as what we have with the zold 5 this is our Ultra wide which is 12 megapixels we have electronic image stabilization it is very steady very smooth audio quality excellent with Samsung's microphones I've got a lot of traffic noise that you're probably gearing around me so that's normal but still these mics are excellent I think they're better than the iPhone's microphones this is L1 times so the main camera 50 megapixels with Optical image stabilization very steady good looking footage and now three times optical zoom camera and this has Optical image stabilization with some electronic being applied now zoom in to this is now five times digital so you can get in pretty close there but the quality does start to degrade of course take this up to now the maximum which is 12 times digital Zoom see a lot of cellular cell phone antennas on top of the eiffle tower which is pretty normal since it's so high this spot for them really and I'll bring that back to now the one 's camera so video quality decent what about Stills so the ultra wide I believe has changed the sensor it looks a little better and it can shoot 4K 60 zoom camera three times same as the zold 5 portraits is still looking good it takes reasonably good photos I think there's nothing wrong with them at all they're perfectly fine that's three times optical zoom this is another one time shot this was on the plane flying back and I think it handled that just fine portraits are looking good good stitching the we weakness like the zold 5 and previous models is indoors indoor portraits as I zoom in you can see there's a lot of noise there's grain so this is one area of weakness and I hope they can improve the cameras using better sensors later on in the next Edition so indoors here little bit of noise low light fine for a foldable but is it the best no this is not Flagship level is it acceptable I think so but again I feel that they should have done a little more this final shot of act to Triumph that's a three times Optical shot and if the subject is well lit it will still come out well so acceptable cameras but they could have done a little more so the question that I popped at the start of the video was should you buy the zold 6 if you're new to foldables but you're part of Samsung's ecosystem you have say an A series or an older S Series Galaxy S Series phone from them definitely go for them you're going to be very familiar with their software the UI one UI and it's well optimized performance is great if you have a z fold three and Below it's a big upgrade for you if you got the four not so much and if You' got the zold 5 um I don't think it's really enough to entice people over because really it's more or less the same phone but refined like I said with the s24 series here we get okay the changes are welcomed the slightly larger 2.7mm in in a screen the 1 mm larger on the outside
you don't notice that no added stylus support and I really can't cannot believe that they didn't give this a larger battery they would have had to have changed everything of course to make it a bit larger a bit wider and faster charging times is the big one for me I feel like Samsung's getting a little complacent they're playing it a little too safe perhaps they have something in store for us perhaps there is going to be a larger model coming at the end of the year or the next fold series I really do hope so and when you look at the competitors out there from China they are doing it better Hardware wise better cameras larger batteries faster charging times B larger in screens thinner lighter you name it but they all fall down in one area so far and that's software that's the only real Edge that Samsung now has with foldables I feel is their software is still the best still the most polished and offers the best kind of multitasking experience options features and their desktop mode still fantastic and great to have so those are my thoughts my review here of the Samsung Galaxy Z fold 6 thanks a lot for watching!
2024-07-20