Hands On With the Samsung Z Fold 6
After spending time with the Flip it was time to move onto the big boy star of the show, the Samsung Z Fold 6.
While the Flip folds a regular phone in half, the Fold doubles the size of your phone out to the size of a tablet. What it loses in cuteness it makes up for in productivity potential.
What you have at first looks just like a standard albeit narrow smartphone with a 6.3-inch HD+ (2376 x 968 120hz) screen. Folding it out reveals a 7.6-inch Dynamic AMOLED flex display with a resolution of 2160 x 1856. Flipping it open lets everyone know “oh this guy means business”.
Day to day usage of It feels legitimately like you get two phones for the price of three. But you get what you pay for, and it the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has the grunt to keep up with whatever you throw at it.
It’s covered in cameras, the main being the rear triple camera which is comprised of a 12MP Ultra-Wide Camera, a 50MP Wide-angle Camera and finally a 10MP Telephoto Camera.
It treats each screen as it’s own thing, so you can have different apps and backgrounds displayed on both, to reflect their different use cases. Samsung also added settings that allows an app to continue to stay open between both screens. So you can snap it closed and have your gmail instantly open on the smaller outer screen if you want.
On the gaming side I could run Genshin at a high framerate at mostly high to medium graphic settings across the board. It looks and plays great.
Having this much screen real estate makes split screen operations an actual viable option. Occasionally I’d have emails and news open on one side while I let a game idle/download in the other. The larger format also made reading things a much more pleasurable experience.
While the fold in the centre of the screen is detectable you’ll often forget it’s there entirely. I was worried that having a dip in the middle of the screen would ruin it’s ability for art and drawing but after spending a few weeks with it I didn’t find it a bother at all.
Unlike most of the Note series of phones Samsung hasn’t sacrificed any of the internal space of the Fold to S Pen storage. That means keeping the pen handy is now a job for the snap on case. The one my review unit kept the pen in an outer slot that bumps out the back. That means when the phone was fully folded out and laid flat on the table the S Pen slot would turn the phone into a seesaw without any additional bracing to stop it from rattling around. Perhaps there are other cases that can solve this issue.
Overall if you’re a digital artist looking for a pocketable solution with a ton of drawing space I can’t really think of anything that could compete with the Fold. With that said the Note series still holds up well in this department so temper your FOMO a little.
Overall it weighs 239 grams, and while it seems thicker than a regular phone when it’s folded up, it was never an issue. If you’re a power user then having a flex screen in your pocket at all times might not be a bad idea at all.
