The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is not the type of a phone you would expect to outlast traditional handsets. After all, it sports a huge 7.6-inch OLED display, compared to 6.8 to 6.9 inches for the biggest slab-style, non-folding flagships.
And yet I was pretty surprised by the results in the Tom's Guide battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over 5G (in this case T-Mobile) with the display set to 150 nits of screen brightness. And the reason I'm surprised is because I was expecting much better results due to the system-on-chip that powers the Fold 6.
Across four tests the Galaxy Z Fold 6 averaged 10 hours and 35 minutes, which is not bad. This runtime beats the Google Pixel Fold (10:21), but it falls behind the OnePlus Open (11:31), which has a bigger battery than Samsung's foldable.
More important, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 averaged a longer 11 hours and 15 minutes. To be fair, the Z Fold 6's highest result on our testing was 11:13, but that's still on a par with last year's model.
By contrast, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra lasted an average of 16 hours, putting it on our list of the best phone battery life . The devices that make this list all last 13 hours or longer in our testing. To put the S24 Ultra's performance in context, the Galaxy S23 Ultra hit 12:22, so that's a huge improvement for the newer Samsung model.
At the time, I thought the battery life improvement for the S24 Ultra was due to its more efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. This is the same chip inside the Galaxy Z Fold 6, which Qualcomm says can add up to 10% more power savings. But that didn't make that much difference for the Z Fold 6.
So why didn't the Galaxy Z Fold 6 deliver a jump in endurance like the S24 Ultra? It's hard to say, as they are different types of phones. Both the Z Fold 6 and Z Fold 5 have the same battery capacity, so that should not have been a factor in results from one generation to the next.
In daily use, I found the Z Fold 6 to deliver fairly strong battery life. With mixed usage, the battery indicator typically drops to the 20% to 25% range by 8 p.m., which is when I reach for a charger anyway. But I would certainly wish for more staying power on those days where I'm traveling or just constantly using Slack.
So the bottom line is that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 battery life results are fairly good. They're just not as good as I was expecting given the precedent the S24 Ultra set.
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