Samsung Galaxy Flip6 review: an evolutionary update with an emphasis on AI

Samsung’s new foldable smartphones have already gone on sale. As always, there are two models. Samsung Galaxy Fold6 in the “book” form factor for users who want to get the most out of the folding design. And the Samsung Galaxy Flip6, which is more of an image model. We have already shared our first impressions of it. Today, we’re going to tell you in more detail what’s interesting about the new Samsung clamshell and what’s new.

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 specifications

Package contents

Traditionally, all Samsung flagships come with a minimum of contents in the box. Namely, the Samsung Galaxy Flip6 itself, a Type-C cable, a tray eject tool, and documentation.

So you’ll have to use an old power supply (if you have one with Type-C) or buy one separately. As always, Samsung offers many interesting accessories for its flagships. First of all, these are protective cases.

Design and ergonomics

The previous Samsung Galaxy Flip5 had quite a few improvements over the Galaxy Flip4. First of all, the external screen is significantly larger. This year’s Samsung Galaxy Flip6 has not so dramatic design improvements. But they are there. First of all, it’s an updated hinge. It made the smartphone thinner when folded and significantly reduced the crease on the screen. It’s still there, but it’s much smaller.

In general, the design is already familiar: when folded, it’s a small square bar that can be easily carried in almost any pocket. When unfolded, it looks like a typical modern Android smartphone. Except with not quite the usual proportions of the screen: it’s a little narrower and taller than conventional monoblocks. The protective edge around the perimeter of the internal screen is still there, but it has become a little neater and narrower.

Samsung switched to relatively flat side bezels in the last generation, as well as completely eliminated the gap between the halves when folded. In the Samsung Galaxy Flip6, the bezel has become even flatter and now uses a matte finish, which makes it look neater and does not collect fingerprints.

When unfolded, the smartphone is only 6.9 mm thick. The volume and power buttons with a built-in fingerprint scanner are located on the right side of the smartphone, where they were before. Due to the design features of the clamshells, they are located a little higher than we would like. When used with the right hand, there are no problems. With the left hand, you have to pull a little with your index finger.

There is a tray on the left side of Samsung Galaxy Flip6. It has room for only one physical SIM card. But this won’t be a problem thanks to eSIM support.

There are two additional microphones on the top. At the bottom are the main external speaker, Type-C connector, and two more microphones.

The hinge cover is also matte and engraved with the Samsung logo.

The outer panels of Samsung Galaxy Flip6 are made of Gorilla Glass Victus 2. Unlike the previous generation, all variants have a matte finish on the back cover. The colors have also been updated. In addition to the neutral light gray, there are blue, yellow, and mint.

The external screen in the Flip line has gradually increased. And starting with the previous generation, it occupies most of the panel. Thanks to this, its functionality has become much wider and it is much more convenient to use. The screen itself has a slightly irregular shape with a cutout for the main dual camera.

Previously, Samsung folding models had IPX8 protection. That is, they were protected from water and could withstand zeroing. With the Samsung Galaxy Flip6, the company decided to clarify that the smartphone has IP48 protection. This means that water protection has not disappeared, but the hinge can be damaged if small solid particles get inside the structure.

Features of use and external display

When folded, the Samsung Galaxy Flip6 has small linear dimensions, although the thickness is slightly larger than that of standard smartphones. But it’s comfortable to carry in your pocket. When unfolded, we have a typical smartphone. But the problem with opening it with one hand is still there, and it applies to all clamshells. There is a risk of damaging the inner screen with your fingernail.

The features of this form factor have long been known. It’s convenient to take photos and selfies in a semi-bent position, and there’s no need for a tripod. The camera can automatically zoom in on objects in the frame (for example, people). This option is also convenient for video calls: you don’t need to hold your smartphone in your hand or look for a stand.

Another interesting feature is the bend mode panel. When the smartphone is partially bent, the application itself will be displayed in the upper half, and the lower half will show a virtual touchpad in some cases, or the corresponding controls (for example, in a player or YouTube).

Now let’s talk a little about the external display. In Samsung Galaxy Flip6, it has a diagonal of 3.4 inches. This is a Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 720×748 pixels (306 PPI). The brightness is slightly lower than that of the internal one, but the picture does not fade in bright sunlight.

Thanks to its rather large size, some things can be done on it without having to open Samsung Galaxy Flip6. For example, switching music, reading notifications, taking quick pictures, looking at a map, paying with a smartphone in a store, etc. The interface is made in the form of widgets with the same logic as on a regular screen: left and right swipes. There is a curtain with quick switches.

There are ready-made widgets for weather, calendar, Samsung Health, etc. There is also native support for some applications: maps, YouTube, messages, calls. They are activated in the Labs experimental settings menu.

But this doesn’t mean that the restriction is rigid. You can install the Good Lock app with the Multistar add-on module. The corresponding widget is added to the external display, where the necessary applications are added: messengers, mail, browser, etc. Of course, some of them will not be very convenient to work with on such a screen, but it is possible.

Main display

The Samsung Galaxy Flip6 has a 6.7-inch Foldable Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X display with a resolution of 2640×1080 pixels, with a pixel density of about 426 ppi. Samsung claims that the coating has become more durable, but it’s still a film that can be damaged by a fingernail or other hard object, so you should be careful.

They promise a local peak brightness of 2600 cd/m² in automatic mode, and there is support for HDR10+. Dolby Vision is not yet available. The refresh rate is 1-120 Hz. There are many settings available to the user: dark and light display themes with the ability to automatically switch, refresh rate, adaptive color temperature function depending on the ambient light, scaling of the interface, fonts, display modes (saturated with color temperature adjustment and natural), Always on Display, etc.

The main screen has an excellent rich picture with a high level of brightness. The maximum brightness in “Saturated” mode was 763,449 cd/m², which is close to the previous Galaxy Flip5. The color reproduction is quite accurate, the color temperature is between the reference value of 6500K and 7000K. The color gamut is much higher than sRGB.

In Natural mode, the maximum brightness is 743,177 cd/m², but the color accuracy is slightly lower. At the same time, the color gamut is close to sRGB:

Security

There are two quite standard ways to unlock Samsung Galaxy Flip6. The first and most reliable is the fingerprint scanner in the power button. It works instantly, and there were no errors while using the smartphone. It is worth noting that it works both in the open and closed position. For example, you do not need to open your smartphone to use Google Pay. You just need to unlock it with a scanner and attach it to the terminal.

Face recognition works quickly in good lighting conditions. For dark environments, there is a function to increase the screen brightness, although it does not always help. Additional features include the ability to prevent recognition with closed eyes, as well as adding additional views for better recognition.

Performance and software

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 has received the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, or rather a slightly overclocked version of it with the For Galaxy label. As a reminder, this is a 4 nm SoC with one powerful ARM Cortex-X4 core with a frequency of up to 3.39 GHz, three Cortex-A720s at 3.1 GHz, two Cortex-A720s at 2.2 GHz, and two energy-efficient Cortex-A520s at 2.2 GHz. The graphics accelerator is Adreno 750 with a frequency of 1 GHz.

The smartphone has 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and an internal storage of 256 or 512 GB UFS 4.0. In benchmarks, the Samsung Galaxy Flip6 demonstrates quite high performance. Although we expected much higher, given the chipset:

And there is a completely objective reason for this, namely, overheating and reduced performance under load. An evaporation chamber is used to cool the processor. But in foldable smartphones, it’s generally difficult to do effective cooling, so performance can drop by up to 42% under prolonged load:

In everyday tasks, including heavy applications and the camera, the smartphone has no performance problems. But when playing modern games for a long time, after 10-15 minutes, the case becomes noticeably warm, and the frame rate can drop by 5-10 FPS.

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 is equipped with almost all modern wireless interfaces: tri-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/6e, Bluetooth 5.3 with support for AAC, aptX, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, aptX Lossless, LDAC, and NFC codecs. Global positioning systems such as GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS, QZSS and NavIC are supported. And there is support for eSIM, which we have already mentioned.

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 runs on Android 14 with the proprietary One UI 6.1.1 shell. This is a familiar shell from the latest Samsung smartphones, with a quite familiar logic with desktops, a separate application menu, and a curtain with a larger number of switches (compared to stock Android). There are many opportunities to customize the appearance: color schemes, themes, etc. The sidebar has remained virtually unchanged for many years. The application manager has additional features in the form of a semi-transparent display and minimizing the application to an icon.

Samsung focuses on its Galaxy AI platform, which the company introduced together with the flagship Galaxy S24 line. It offers a lot of features: real-time translation of phone calls, Chat Assist, automatic text formatting, generation of short summaries from large texts, wallpaper generation, sketch-based image generation, improvements in camera operation, and the ability to search for objects on the screen in Google.

In theory, all of this can be processed on the Samsung Galaxy Flip6 without access to the network. But unfortunately, in Ukraine, only everything related to images and the camera can work offline. For offline text and voice processing, Samsung’s Big Language Models are used, which do not support the Ukrainian language. Therefore, in these matters, you can only rely on Google’s capabilities, which, of course, require a network connection.

Sound

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 supports stereo sound playback, with the earpiece speaker acting as the second speaker. The balance between the speakers is good, the difference is minimal. The sound is loud and quite good, although there are models that sound more interesting. In particular, the top-of-the-line Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra monoblock has a slightly larger volume margin and more hints of low frequencies.

The smartphone supports Dolby Atmos virtual surround sound. There is an equalizer with ready-made and manual settings, as well as the Adapt Sound function. It is designed to adjust the volume to the age of the listener.

Cameras

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 cameras have changed slightly compared to the previous model. First of all, this concerns the main camera, which received a new module with a resolution of 50 MP, f/1.8 aperture, 23 mm EPS, pixel size 1.0 µm. There is phase detection autofocus and optical stabilization. The maximum video resolution is 4K 60 FPS. It is claimed that due to the increased resolution, the camera can take photos with a zoom without degradation in quality.

The ultra-wide-angle module has not changed. As before, it has a resolution of 12 MP, f/2.2 aperture and a viewing angle of 123˚. Samsung still leaves autofocus to the ultra-wide-angle camera in the Galaxy S24 Ultra. Although there are many more affordable smartphones that have an “ultra-wide” camera with autofocus. The video resolution is similar to the main camera, 4K 60 FPS. The front camera is also inherited from the previous model: 10 MP, f/2.2, 1.22µm.

The camera app is quite familiar to Samsung smartphones. The viewfinder screen has all the basic settings, including flash, aspect ratio, timer, resolution, frame rate, video stabilization, and more. You can switch between shooting modes with horizontal swipes. Additional controls include a button for taking a picture with the main camera when the smartphone is folded.

Photos taken with the main camera of Samsung Galaxy Flip6 in good light are of excellent quality. Detailed, with close to natural color reproduction and good work with dark areas. In night mode, the detail remains at a good level, but the colors are no longer quite true to life and sometimes lighter than they should be.

Samsung promises 2x zoom from the main camera without losing quality. The photos are mostly of good quality, but in low light, the detail is reduced in some places and digital noise appears:

The Samsung Galaxy Flip6 ‘s ultra-wide-angle camera has generally lower detail and a narrower dynamic range, and in some cases the image is a bit blurry around the edges. But this is generally true of the vast majority of modern ultra-wide-angle cameras.

The Samsung Galaxy Flip6 shoots great video in 4K 60 FPS, the image is clear and smooth. There is no shaking and no pronounced jelly effect, which is usually present when electronic stabilization is not very good:

The ultra-wide-angle also shoots video well, with good detail and no shake:

Battery life

Samsung Galaxy Flip6 is equipped with a 4000 mAh battery, which is 300 mAh more than the previous generation. However, the difference is very small and you shouldn’t expect a significant increase in battery life. In the battery test, the smartphone lasted 13 hours and 5 minutes at a fixed low screen brightness of 200 cd/m². In real conditions with a low load, the smartphone lasts for a day. If you actively use the camera, make a lot of calls, or play mobile games, you’ll need to charge your smartphone in the evening.

Battery life is generally not a strong point of foldable smartphones. But there is progress: a couple of generations ago, Flip had to be charged at the end of the day. Now the situation is much better. Unfortunately, the charging speed hasn’t changed. The smartphone supports 25W charging with a cable and 15W wireless charging. There is also support for 4.5W reverse charging.