Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 First Impressions

Hand feel has certainly improved and noticeable visual changes are a more symmetrical cover screen with thinner and evenly sized bezels all around. While the cover screen has gone up in size by a millimetre, it’s not something you’ll notice beyond the spec sheet. Crucially though, weight has dropped by more than 10gms and strangely enough, it is tangible. As is the dual-rail hinge design which sits even more flush with the body when fully open now and makes it thinner by a sizeable 5mm when fully shut. The crease… well, it persists but is less perceptible to the finger touch and visible only from certain angles. Improvement? Perhaps. But we feel Samsung could’ve done better, especially after using first-time attempts by OnePlus and Vivo.

There’s no S-Pen included with the package, but the Z Fold 6 gives you more reason to invest in one with its AI-based sketch-to-image feature that converts a lazy doodle into a polished illustration. Like on the S24 Ultra that came earlier in the year, thanks to a 42% faster NPU and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor under the hood, all of the Galaxy AI features have made their way to the new Fold and Flip 6 devices. With some more time optimising this AI, there’s no reason why Samsung won’t roll it out to more recent legacy devices too.

Samsung has made great use of gestures to invoke the two most commonly used AI features by most - circle to search and the integration of Google Gemini, which by the way, beats Apple and its ChatGPT partnership in terms of release date. You swipe up from the bottom panel to bring up the circle-to-search window and from any of the bottom corners to involve Gemini AI assistant. Live Translate, Interpreter, chat assist, call assist, note assist, transcript assist, browsing assist and photo assist all get a generous dose of help from Galaxy AI and to be fair, Samsung offers a transparent way of turning off your request being sent to the cloud. If you choose to, you can limit yourself to using only the features that can be processed on-device. 

One of the most oft-used cases for all the Galaxy AI features will be the ones in the Camera and Photos app. Assist features such as AI erase and generative fill work well for the most part but the new Portrait Studio feature that can convert your face into a Comic, 3D Cartoon, Sketch or Watercolour drawing is wildly inconsistent and mostly, downright inaccurate. They do make for fun early explorations of the AI world but unless you fancy yourself a TinTin haircut, it’s not going to be worthy of a printout or a frame.

Although the cameras remain the same at 50MP+10MP+12MP, the ultrawide boasts of a new sensor that yields better low-light results with a more evenly lit image, less noise and better colour fidelity. Photography is still great if not quite S24 Ultra level, but the ISP is fast and autofocus keeps up as well. There is a bit of red cast on and it doesn’t have a strong grip on exposure, but in well-lit conditions, it won’t give you any reason to complain.

Samsung has taken this opportunity to also increase its water and dust resistance by giving it an IP48 rating but besides the enhanced build quality and new AI features, the 2024 Z Fold 6 doesn’t make a compelling enough reason to switch to foldables if you’re a fence sitter. On the other hand, if you love the form factor of the book-type foldable, the Z Fold 6 is a tangibly easier phone to manage daily compared to its predecessor. The only downside is that both Oppo and Vivo have managed to do this for cheaper.