Updated May 26: article originally posted May 25.
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6 will launch shortly, and the latest details on the foldable smartphone will excite the community.
Update: Sunday May 26: The Galaxy Z Fold 6 may not be the only Z Fold model we will see this year. Noted industry analyst Ross Young of Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) has highlighted the potential for a thinner model of the Z Fold 6 to be released in the last quarter of the year:
“Hearing about a Samsung Fold 6 Slim, Q4’24, bigger display than the Fold 6. Price [is] probably similar to the Fold 6. No pen input.”
Although the Galaxy Z Fold 6 is expected to be the only Fold model revealed at the Galaxy Unpacked event this summer, Samsung has been testing two variants of the model with details on a cheaper Z Fold 6 Fan Edition and a more powerful and luxurious Z Fold 6 Ultra; both models were popular with the community.
The consensus is for a single Galaxy Z Fold 6 to launch at the upcoming event, but Young’s comment has brought the idea of a variant with a thinner Galaxy Z Fold 6 back into the spotlight; this would see the S-Pen and associated digitizer removed from the display, along with several internal changes to reduce the dimensions.
Notably, a refreshed Galaxy Z Fold launched in early Q4 would allow Samsung to promote a brand new premium smartphone against Apple’s iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro handsets, which will launch in September.
A new report from The Elec highlights Samsung’s decision to continue using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series in the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, maintaining the status quo from previous Z Fold models.
This confirmation follows sightings of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 hardware on the popular online benchmarking service Geekbench. At that point, it was just a single variant of the handset destined for a specific network, but it was running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. Many in Samsung’s community hoped this would be not just a single data point but a sign that the Z Fold 6 would be exclusively powered by the Snapdragon chipset.
Samsung moved back to a mix of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset and the in-house Samsung Exynos chipset on 2024’s Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+, although the premium Galaxy S24 Ultra was exclusively powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the same chipset that The Elec expects to power the Galaxy Z Fold 6 range.
The community will be delighted with this news. While the Exynos has better battery endurance, Snapdragon performance is stronger—around six percent ahead of the Exynos in terms of CPU performance and twenty percent ahead with 3D performance. That’s a trade-off that the community has expressed a desire for over many years of Galaxy releases, with one poll on SamMobile putting support for Snapdragon over Exynos at 83 percent.
Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy Z Fold 6 at a Paris-bound Galaxy Unpacked event in early July, ahead of its sponsorship of the Summer Olympics in France.
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