Samsung’s Galaxy Flip 6: Flipping brilliant

Flip-phones have a reputation for being the phones your grandparents own. This is because they’re simple “dumbphones”, and their lack of fancy pants smartphone features means there’s less to confuse non-tech-savvy oldies.

Samsung’s Galaxy Flip takes this notion of flip phones being dumb devices and flips it (see what I did there?) on its head. In the same super compact, pocket-friendly form factor, you get all the smartphone functionality you’ll ever need and even better, the Galaxy Flip unfolds to give you a standard slab-like smartphone form factor.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 phone might look a lot like the Galaxy Flip 5, but it’s been given a bunch of nifty, not-so-obvious, but seriously useful upgrades. These translate into a more powerful (and battery-friendly) CPU, more RAM and improved cameras. On top of this, you also get an impressive seven years of software upgrades, which means that the $2099 you’re shelling out now for the Flip 6 is a good long-term investment.

When I say the Flip 6 looks a lot like the Flip 5, I’m not kidding. Looks-wise, they’re practically identical. They both weigh in at 187g and measure 165 high x 71.9 wide x 6.86mm deep when unfolded. They’re also both 85 x 71.9mm when closed. That said, the Flip 6 is a hair (0.2mm) slimmer. Either way, the Flip 6 is a super compact smartphone that’ll take up hardly any space in your pocket or purse.

There are a few subtle cosmetic flourishes with the Flip 6. These take the form of coloured rings around the camera lens (which are the same colour as the rear panel). There’s also a matte (add more grippy) finish on its rear. Otherwise, the Flip 6 has a nearly identical control layout as the Flip 5, with the volume control and fingerprint sensor/power control in the same place as last year’s model. As with the Flip 5, the Flip 6 uses nano SIM and supports eSIMs, which are handy if you’re travelling and want an easy way to avoid roaming fees.

The rear and front of the Flip 6 are covered in Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which Samsung says is tough enough to make scratches and cracks unlikely. The chassis is hewn out of what Samsung calls Armor Aluminium, which is 10 per cent stronger than what was used on the Flip 5. The other big concern with any folding device is durability. The Flip 6 has an IP48 rating, so it has dust protection and can take a dunking.

In addition to improved durability, its build quality is top-notch. Samsung says the Flip 6 should handle 200,000 instances of being flipped open. I’m fairly confident that this will be borne out over time, as its hinge mechanism feels super sturdy. Flipping it open resulted in no flex or play in the two halves.

The Flip 6’s 3.4-inch front screen has a 720 by 748 resolution with a 60Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 1,600 nits, making it usable outdoors on one of those ultra-rare sunny Wellington days. While you can install widgets on the front screen, I found myself opting to open the Flip to make use of its more roomy 6.7-inch display, which has a 2,640 by 1,080 resolution and an adaptive refresh rate which ranges from a battery-friendly 1Hz through to a silky smooth 120Hz. It’s also much brighter than the Flip 5, cranking out 2,600 nits. Being AMOLED, colours on both screens popped. Another display upgrade on the inner screen is a greatly diminished crease. While you can still see it when the display isn’t powered up, it vanishes when the display is on.

Under the hood, it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB of RAM. You can choose between 256 GB and 512GB of storage, which is more than enough for most users. Sadly, a microSD card slot is conspicuous in its absence.

More powerful silicon running at fast-clocked speeds usually means more heat. To this end, Samsung has included vapour chamber cooling in the Flip 6. This should (in theory) see it running demanding apps with less overheating and less hardware throttling. In use, it felt very responsive, and lags, stutters and running hot were non-issues,  even with demanding game titles (that said, it did warm up sometimes with heavy multi-tasking).

With the Flip 6 freshly charged, I ran a looped HD video test to check out its battery life. Its 4,000mAh battery managed to last for 16 hours and 17 minutes, meaning with typical use, you should get a full day’s battery life and a good chunk of spare charge before it demands quality time with a wall socket.

While it supports 25W fast charging and 15W wireless charging, I’d have liked to see the same 45W wired charging support baked into the Galaxy S24+/S24 Ultra. Either way, it took just one hour and 19 minutes to go from 0% to fully juiced up using a wired connection, which still isn’t too shabby. On the wireless connectivity front, you’re also spoiled for choice. In addition to full 5G support on the cellular front, you also get super-fast Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and NFC.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera with a 123-degree field of view and a 10MP f/2.2 selfie camera. However, the star of the show is its 50MP f/1.8 main sensor, which sports dual-pixel autofocus and optical image stabilisation (OIS). Being a Samsung shooter, photos packed plenty of detail, even if their colours were a tad oversaturated.

While a 50MP sensor sounds impressive, it uses pixel binning to take pictures at 12MP. Either way, even though some oversaturation was noticeable, the colours were accurate. Combining the cameras with Samsung’s excellent camera app gave pleasing results, and it was almost impossible to shoot a bad photo.

In addition to solid photos, video can be captured at 4K/60fps, and the excellent OIS system makes camera shake much less of an issue, even when walking and filming. I particularly liked the Camcorder Mode, where I folded the Flip at a 90-degree angle, making it feel like a super compact old-school camcorder.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 runs Android 14 with Samsung’s One UI 6.1.1, which has a suite of useful (and fun) AI tools. Using AI, taking notes and transcribing meetings is a doddle, and even more useful, AI can be used to summarise long-winded websites/emails or translate them into English/or into another language. Sketch To Image allows you to draw on photos and have AI render your scribbles into a convincing part of the photos. Then there’s also the Portrait Studio feature, which can convert portrait shots into Comic, 3D Cartoon, Watercolour and Sketch styles. Most useful, however, is call assist, which can translate phone conversations in real-time, which could prove to be a real boon when travelling.

Samsung has pulled off that difficult trick of crafting a new Flip foldy phone by making the Flip 6 a solid update over the Flip 5. While they’ve kept all the bits I liked with the Flip 5, they’ve added enough compelling stuff to make the Flip 6 a serious contender for anyone looking to upgrade to a super compact device with the usability of a much larger slab phone. Add a bunch of fun and useful AI features plus decent cameras, and there’s lots to like, which is why the Flip 6 earns a well-deserved gold.

https://www.samsung.com/nz/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip6/buy/