Samsung’s new foldables go all-in on AI, but is that enough?

Samsung has launched the latest generation of its foldable phones, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, and as nice as they are, I just can’t help but feel that they’re a little bit boring. 

Smartphones with foldable displays may have been around for a few years now, but they’re still the newest and most exciting form factor on the market. Shouldn’t this be where we see the most innovation in hardware? With the latest Z-series models, announced at Unpacked, Samsung has opted for refinement rather than reinvention, and instead of big hardware changes, most of the new features come via software.

That’s not to say there aren’t hardware changes, they’re just not as big as I’d like. Of course, we get the obligatory upgrade to the latest Qualcomm chip, and the cooling has been beefed up to match. 

More excitingly, the Z Fold 6 finally has a wider outer display to make it feel more like a traditional phone. However, I was disappointed to find out that it has only changed by about a millimetre – it’s still very slim and tall compared to the likes of the Honor Magic V2.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Meanwhile, the Z Flip 6 gets a slightly larger battery, more RAM and a main camera upgrade. It’s now using the same 50Mp unit as the S24. The phones are both more durable, have an IP48 rating for dust and water resistance and there are new colours and aesthetic tweaks, too. It’s all good stuff, but all relatively minor.

As a hardware enthusiast, I was hoping for big camera upgrades, faster charging, larger displays and more, but that’s not the case. Instead, the majority of the focus was placed on Galaxy AI, just as we saw with the Galaxy S24 series at the start of the year.

What’s new with Galaxy AI?

The Galaxy AI features are undeniably handy, I’ve had a lot of experience using them on the Galaxy S24 series, and for the most part, they’re repeated here. I think you’ll particularly enjoy them if you’re a business user or a frequent traveller, as a lot of the features centre around translation, transcription and summarisation.

I love the way interpreter mode has been implemented to use both displays at the same time, it’s a nice creative use of the folding form factor, and it’s available on both the Flip and the Fold. Yeah, you could just flip your phone around to show the other person, but you don’t need to, and that’s pretty cool.

Luke Baker

The Transcript Assist and Browsing Assist features have been optimised to make use of the Z Fold 6’s larger display, too. You’ll now have the option to use a convenient side-by-side view, so you can see all the information at once. 

The Galaxy AI suite includes more than just productivity tools, there are plenty of image manipulation and generative AI features to play with as well. I had a lot of fun with the “Sketch to Image” feature at the press briefing ahead of Unpacked. It allows you to doodle on one of your photos, and then it’ll use generative AI to bring your sketch to life, providing a selection of options.

If you like to frequently change up the look of your phone, there’s plenty of AI baked into the customisation tools, too. There’s everything from AI wallpaper generation to wallpaper suggestions. There also are some really nice-looking interactive wallpaper options, and they can react to touch or movement to create different effects.

Is AI enough to warrant an upgrade?

Samsung’s Galaxy AI features offer plenty to get excited about, especially if you haven’t been able to try them yet, but I have a few concerns.

The first is Samsung’s commitment to software support. The brand offers some of the longest support terms in the business, and it’s a key reason that many people choose Samsung devices. Obviously, that’s a good thing for customers, but it also means these features won’t be exclusive to the Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6.

Samsung hasn’t confirmed this, but we’ve already seen Galaxy AI features that debuted with the S24 series trickle down to the S23 models, Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5. Surely, we’ll be seeing more of the same with this generation.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Then there’s the fact that a lot of these features are powered by Google’s AI services, like Gemini. Again, it’s not inherently a bad thing.

Google’s AI services are very impressive, but while Samsung’s AI offerings are some of the best on the market right now, who’s to say that Google won’t implement similar features into Android natively? Or worse, what if Google just decides to axe some of the features, as it has with so many other projects in the past?

Personally, I think hardware improvements are a more compelling reason to upgrade, and in that regard, Samsung is lagging behind the competition. There’s still plenty of innovation in the foldable space, the Honor Magic V2 is impossibly slim, the Vivo X Fold 3 Pro has wildly good cameras and the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra has a super-sized cover display. Comparatively, Samsung seems to be resting on its laurels.

The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6 are still sure to be good phones, and if you’re keen on AI tools, they undoubtedly have the most robust feature set of the current crop. In 2024, though, the foldable competition is more fierce than ever, and Samsung will need to set up its game if it wants to remain the top choice.