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.
