It’s not the most fun, but reliability goes a long way.

Look, fun is fun and all, but sometimes boring is better.

A flip phone dripping with nostalgia that comes in bold colors and lets you run apps all willy-nilly on the cover screen? With inviting wallpapers and playful UI touches? That’s fun. It’s also not the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6. But while I thoroughly enjoyed using the Motorola Razr Plus — the fun flip phone — reliability wins out in the end.

Samsung’s newest clamshell-style foldable is a light update on last year’s model. It costs $1,099, which is a hundred dollars more than last year but also just what flagship phones cost these days. The inner and outer screens get a little brighter in direct sunlight, there’s a slightly bigger battery, and there’s an upgraded main camera, plus the latest Qualcomm chipset, naturally.

That paragraph could describe any number of new Android phones this year. And in the case of the Z Flip 6, that’s actually a good indication of how far Samsung’s flip phone has come. Last year’s update from a small cover screen to the current 3.4-inch OLED took the Flip series from “eh, it’s kinda cool” to “okay this is something.” It’s a far cry from Samsung’s earliest attempts.

But the Z Flip 6 hasn’t totally reached parity with slab phones; it’s certainly not the most fun flip phone. Sure, it’s the best Samsung flip phone — I just wish it would borrow a few ideas from some of the competition.

If I’d never picked up the Motorola Razr Plus, I’d think the Z Flip 6’s outer screen was pretty darn good. But the Razr’s bigger, higher-res screen wraps all the way around the punchouts for the lenses and flash. It makes the Flip 6’s cover screen, which keeps well away from that whole area, look stodgy and cramped by comparison.

And not to get too caught up about wallpapers, but Samsung’s best idea about new wallpapers for the outer screen is… a donut that bounces around when your phone moves? There’s so much more fun stuff you could do with this! Moto’s wallpapers are colorful and inviting, there’s an adorable turntable that spins when you’re playing audio, and I swear one of the background options is blurple. The Z Flip 6 comes with a proper always-on display this time around, but it lacks the sense of fun that I’d expect from a flip phone. Motorola has a mode that turns the whole phone into a retro flip phone, for Pete’s sake. Let’s live a little.

The Flip 6’s cover screen is a little more customizable than last year’s, which limited you to swiping through a bunch of full-screen widgets. Now, it’s more like a traditional home screen. You can still opt for a full-screen widget or add multiple smaller widgets to the same panel. The result feels much more streamlined; I don’t have to dedicate a whole panel to a timer; I can just add it as a smaller widget on a screen with weather info and my calendar.

And as much as I loved the playfulness of Motorola’s cover screen treatment, Samsung’s widgets are more reliable. Specifically, the Spotify panel on the Razr Plus cover screen often needs to refresh before it’ll actually work. The Spotify controls on the Z Flip 6 work flawlessly. Fun only goes so far.

Still, Motorola’s method for approving apps to run on the cover screen is much better than Samsung’s. Out of the box, Samsung will only allow you to run a handful of full apps on the small screen. To add any others, you need to go through a convoluted process: downloading Good Lock and another module from the Galaxy Store and then adding a launcher as a cover screen widget. Motorola doesn’t require any of that futzing about.

This is worth complaining about because I still think that being able to run a full app on the outer screen is one of the best things about a folding phone. Is it an ideal experience opening Strava on a tiny square? No! But I can tap, like, two things to start recording a bike ride without having to come face-to-face with everything else on my phone. It’s glorious.

Typing out messages on the small screen’s keyboard is still a little ridiculous, but it’s another feature I appreciate about a flip phone even if it is an objectively worse user experience. It’s perfect for when I’m in the middle of something and want to send a short response to a text. As an alternative to tapping on those tiny keys, Samsung uses AI to suggest some responses based on previous messages in your thread. Like a lot of generative AI, the responses seem almost normal but are never quite right.

This is the part of the review where I’d normally tell you about a lot of other stuff, like performance and display quality, but you know what? It’s all fine. It’s 2024, and it’s hard to buy a bad phone at the flagship level. The inner screen? Fine. The crease is still there, but you don’t really see it when you’re looking at the phone straight-on, and it never bothered me much. Processing speed? Connectivity? Mouthfeel? Kidding about that last one. But they’re all fine.

Even battery life is fine, which is an achievement compared to the flip phones of just a few years ago. The Z Flip 6 will manage a full day of heavy use, but you’ll be cruising down to the single digits by bedtime. There are lots of other $1,000 phones with better battery life, starting with Samsung’s own Galaxy S24 Plus. If top-notch battery life is a priority, then a flip phone may not be for you.

Getting sand in your crease will really ruin your day — and the same goes for a folding phone. The Flip 6 comes with an IP48 rating, meaning it’s fully water resistant but lord help you if that hinge sucks up a grain of sand. That “4” looks a lot better than the Razr Plus’ nonexistent dust rating, but it just means the phone is protected against foreign objects bigger than 1mm. That said, I’ve been pretty rough with my Z Flip 6 review unit over the past week. It’s survived being thrown into the bottom of some dusty bags, but I can’t say how well it would stand up to years of that kind of abuse.

Flip phone cameras are still catching up to slab phones, too. This year, Samsung has addressed that by upgrading the Z Flip 6 to a 50-megapixel main camera sensor. Image quality looks about as good as any flagship phone, though there’s no telephoto lens if you want to get closer to your subject — just digital zoom and a secondary ultrawide camera. Motorola went the opposite direction with the Razr Plus, trading its ultrawide for a 2x tele lens. That’s a nice move in theory if you like shooting portraits more than sweeping landscapes, but Motorola’s overall image processing isn’t as good as Samsung’s. Samsung phones really do take the best portrait photos, and the Z Flip 6 is no exception.

Samsung is working hard to sell the idea that flip phones work just as well as any other phone, and didn’t you see those Olympians taking pictures with one? Don’t you want that, too? But while there are things I love about the Z Flip 6, it’s still not a phone I would recommend to just anyone. Day-to-day durability is fine, but how it holds up against dust in the long run is still unclear. There’s a 12-month warranty on the Z Flip 6 when you buy it from Samsung in the US, but that doesn’t cover damage caused by dust exposure.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 makes sense if you really want the benefits of the cover screen — less so if you just find the novelty appealing. You can easily find better battery life and cameras from a garden-variety slab phone. The Moto Razr Plus is more fun. But if you are sold on the idea of the flip phone, Samsung’s slow and steady approach is your best bet.

I find that outer screen incredibly useful, and while Samsung’s take on the UI lacks a little imagination, it works consistently, unlike Moto’s. Likewise, Samsung’s track record for software support is excellent: flagship phones get timely updates, and the Z Flip 6 will keep getting OS upgrades for seven years. Motorola makes a charming flip phone, but it comes with just four years of software support, and new OS updates can be slow to arrive.

Software updates, reliability, and camera processing: not the most fun stuff. But in this case, boring might just be better.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The past few months have made one thing crystal clear: phones remain undefeated.

The AI gadgets that were supposed to save us from our phones have arrived woefully underbaked — whatever illusions we might have held that the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 were going to offer any kind of salve for the constant rug burn of dealing with our personal tech is gone. Hot Gadget Spring is over and developer season is upon us, starting with Google I/O this coming Tuesday.

It also happens to be a pivotal time for Android. I/O comes on the heels of a major re-org that put the Android team together with Google’s hardware team for the first time. The directive is clear: to run full speed ahead and put more AI in more things. Not preferring Google’s own products was a foundational principle of Android, though that model started shifting years ago as hardware and software teams collaborated more closely. Now, the wall is gone and the AI era is here. And if the past 12 months have been any indication, it’s going to be a little messy.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

So far, despite Samsung and Google’s best efforts, AI on smartphones has really only amounted to a handful of party tricks. You can turn a picture of a lamp into a different lamp, summarize meeting notes with varying degrees of success, and circle something on your screen to search for it. Handy, sure, but far from a cohesive vision of our AI future. But Android has the key to one important door that could bring more of these features together: Gemini.

Gemini launched as an AI-fueled alternative to the standard Google Assistant a little over three months ago, and it didn’t feel quite ready yet. On day one, it couldn’t access your calendar or set a reminder — not super helpful. Google has added those functions since then, but it still doesn’t support third-party media apps like Spotify. Google Assistant has supported Spotify for most of the last decade.

But the more I come back to Gemini, the more I can see how it’s going to change how I use my phone. It can memorize a dinner recipe and talk me through the steps as I’m cooking. It can understand when I’m asking the wrong question and give me the answer to the one I’m looking for instead (figs are the fruit that have dead wasp parts in them; not dates, as I learned). It can tell me which Paw Patrol toy I’m holding, for Pete’s sake.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Again, though — party tricks. Gemini’s real utility will arrive when it can integrate more easily across the Android ecosystem; when it’s built into your earbuds, your watch, and into the very operating system itself.

Android’s success in the AI era rides on those integrations. ChatGPT can’t read your emails or your calendars as readily as Gemini; it doesn’t have easy access to a history of every place you’ve visited in the past decade. Those are real advantages, and Google needs every advantage right now. We’ve seen plenty of signals that Apple plans to unveil a much smarter Siri at WWDC this year. Microsoft and OpenAI aren’t sitting still either. Google needs to lean into its advantages to deliver AI that’s more than a party trick — even if it’s a little un-Android-like.

The past few months have made one thing crystal clear: phones remain undefeated.

The AI gadgets that were supposed to save us from our phones have arrived woefully underbaked — whatever illusions we might have held that the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 were going to offer any kind of salve for the constant rug burn of dealing with our personal tech is gone. Hot Gadget Spring is over and developer season is upon us, starting with Google I/O this coming Tuesday.

It also happens to be a pivotal time for Android. I/O comes on the heels of a major re-org that put the Android team together with Google’s hardware team for the first time. The directive is clear: to run full speed ahead and put more AI in more things. Not preferring Google’s own products was a foundational principle of Android, though that model started shifting years ago as hardware and software teams collaborated more closely. Now, the wall is gone and the AI era is here. And if the past 12 months have been any indication, it’s going to be a little messy.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

So far, despite Samsung and Google’s best efforts, AI on smartphones has really only amounted to a handful of party tricks. You can turn a picture of a lamp into a different lamp, summarize meeting notes with varying degrees of success, and circle something on your screen to search for it. Handy, sure, but far from a cohesive vision of our AI future. But Android has the key to one important door that could bring more of these features together: Gemini.

Gemini launched as an AI-fueled alternative to the standard Google Assistant a little over three months ago, and it didn’t feel quite ready yet. On day one, it couldn’t access your calendar or set a reminder — not super helpful. Google has added those functions since then, but it still doesn’t support third-party media apps like Spotify. Google Assistant has supported Spotify for most of the last decade.

But the more I come back to Gemini, the more I can see how it’s going to change how I use my phone. It can memorize a dinner recipe and talk me through the steps as I’m cooking. It can understand when I’m asking the wrong question and give me the answer to the one I’m looking for instead (figs are the fruit that have dead wasp parts in them; not dates, as I learned). It can tell me which Paw Patrol toy I’m holding, for Pete’s sake.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Again, though — party tricks. Gemini’s real utility will arrive when it can integrate more easily across the Android ecosystem; when it’s built into your earbuds, your watch, and into the very operating system itself.

Android’s success in the AI era rides on those integrations. ChatGPT can’t read your emails or your calendars as readily as Gemini; it doesn’t have easy access to a history of every place you’ve visited in the past decade. Those are real advantages, and Google needs every advantage right now. We’ve seen plenty of signals that Apple plans to unveil a much smarter Siri at WWDC this year. Microsoft and OpenAI aren’t sitting still either. Google needs to lean into its advantages to deliver AI that’s more than a party trick — even if it’s a little un-Android-like.

At any given time, there are between five and eight phones on my desk. And by “my desk,” I mean any combination of tables and countertops throughout my house. So when I watched the Humane AI Pin reviews start pouring in last week, I did what any logical person would do: grab the closest phone and try to turn it into my own AI wearable.

Humane would like you to believe that its AI Pin represents consumer tech at its most cutting edge. The reviews and the guts of the pin say otherwise: it uses a Snapdragon processor from four years ago and seems to run a custom version of Android 12.

“It’s a midrange Android phone!” I declared at our next team meeting, waving around a midrange Android phone for effect. “You could just download Gemini and stick this to your shirt!” Simple. Trivial. Give me 10 minutes, and I’ll have a more powerful AI gadget whipped up, I said.

Hardware is hard, y’all.

Ideally, I wanted an outward-facing camera and a decent voice assistant I could use hands-free. An iPhone in a shirt pocket was an intriguing solution but a nonstarter because a) none of my shirts have pockets, and b) Siri is just not that smart. Thus, my earliest prototype was a Motorola Razr Plus clamped to the neckline of my shirt. This, unsurprisingly, did not work but for reasons I did not anticipate.

First off, you can’t download Gemini from the Play Store on a folding phone. That was news to me. But even once I’d sideloaded it and set it as the default assistant, I ran into another barrier: it’s really hard to use a voice assistant from the cover screen of a flip phone. The Razr wants you to flip the phone open before you can do anything aside from get its attention with “Hey Google.”

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Running Gemini in Chrome on the cover screen actually got me closer to what I was looking for. But trying to tap buttons on the screen to trigger the assistant wasn’t working very well, and neither was operating Google Lens out of the corner of my eye. Also, Gemini misread “recycle” on a tube of toothpaste as “becicle,” which it confidently told me was an old-timey word for eyeglasses. It is not!

Prototype two was the same Razr flip phone running ChatGPT in conversation mode on the cover screen. This meant the app was constantly running and always listening, so it wasn’t practical. But I gave it a shot anyway, and it was a strange experience talking to an AI chatbot that I couldn’t see.

ChatGPT is a decent conversationalist, but we ran out of things to talk about pretty quickly once I’d exhausted my chatbot go-to’s: dinner recipes and plant care tips. I want an AI that can do things for me, not just brainstorm stir-fry ingredients.

I ditched the foldable concept and picked up a Pixel 8 and a Pixel Watch 2 instead. I set up Gemini as the default assistant on the phone and figured that would somehow apply to the watch, too. Wrong. I had one more card to play, though: a good old pair of wireless earbuds. Life on the cutting edge of technology, baby.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

You know what, though? It kind of worked. I had to leave Gemini open and running on my phone since Google doesn’t fully support Gemini Assistant on headphones. But I took a picture of a Blue Apron recipe I was making for dinner, told Gemini to remember it, and left my phone on the counter. As I moved around the kitchen, I asked Gemini questions I’d normally have to peek back at the recipe to answer like “How long do I roast the vegetables for?” and “How do I prep the fish?” It gave me the right answers every time.

What was more impressive is that I could ask it tangential questions. It helped me use pantry ingredients to recreate a seasoning mix I didn’t have on hand. I asked why the recipe might have me divide the sauce into two portions, and it gave me a plausible answer. And it did something the Humane pin can’t do yet: set a timer.

It wasn’t perfect. First, I had to unplug the Google Home puck sitting on the counter because it kept trying to butt in. Gemini also told me that it couldn’t play an album on Spotify, something that that Google Home speaker has been doing for the better part of a decade. The watch came in handy for that, at least.

What started as a goofy stunt has convinced me of two things: I really do think we’re going to use AI to get more things done in the future, and also, the future of AI gadgets is just phones. It’s phones!

I love a gadget, but guys, I lived through the era of camera companies trying to convince us that we all needed to carry a compact camera and our phones everywhere. Phones won. Phones already come with powerful processors, decent heat dissipation, and sophisticated wireless connectivity. An AI gadget that operates independently from your phone has to figure all of that out.

And you know what looks a lot less doofy than a pin with a laser on your chest? Earbuds. People willingly wear them throughout the day right now. And the doofy factor definitely matters when it comes to wearables. I’m having a hard time seeing how a separate gadget can beat the humble phone plus a pair of earbuds or something like the Meta Ray Bans. Maybe there’s room in our lives and our pockets for dedicated AI hardware — the gadget lover in me is all for it. But I think it’s more likely that we have all of the ingredients we need to make good AI hardware right in front of us.

Right now, you need a Galaxy S24 phone to use the very latest AI features from Samsung, but that’s changing next month. In late March, Samsung will extend Galaxy AI features to the S23 series — including the S23 FE — as well as recent foldables and tablets as part of the One UI 6.1 update. It’s all free for now, but after 2025 you might have to pay up.

The Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5 are slated to get the update, as well as the Galaxy Tab S9, S9 Plus, and S9 Ultra. If Samsung wants to ship Galaxy AI to 100 million phones this year like it says it will, that’s a solid start. The One UI 6.1 update will include the much-touted AI features on the S24 series, including live translation capabilities, generative photo and video editing, and Google’s Circle to Search feature. This suite of features includes a mix of on- and off-device processing, just like it does on the S24 series.

Image: Samsung

An older phone learning new tricks is unequivocally a good thing, even if Galaxy AI is a little bit of a mixed bag right now. But my overall impression is that these features do occasionally come in handy, and when they go sideways they’re mostly harmless. One UI 6.1 will also include a handful of useful non-AI updates, such as lockscreen widgets and the new, unified Quick Share.

If you’d like to upgrade to One UI 6.1 but want to avoid the AI features, you can always turn them off. That’s one easy way to avoid ever coming face to face with something like Pillow Arm.