Moving homes is stressful. I’ve moved more than five times in the past eight years, including local, cross-country, and internationally. Now, I’m helping my mother move. As I’ve been doing so, I’ve noticed that I turn to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 much more frequently.
I love the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, but it’s not the best foldable phone. The OnePlus Open offers a more usable Open Canvas system for multitasking. The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold has better AI features and a better camera. Phones like the Honor Magic V3 and Xiaomi Mix Fold 4 are thinner and lighter.
Yet, I keep returning to Samsung’s flagship, specifically for this move. Here’s why it’s the best phone when you’re moving to a new home.
The S Pen is incredibly helpful
When was the last time you moved? It’s one thing to clear an existing home, but a whole other to move into a new home. My mother’s new house needs some work and changes, adding further stress to coordinating multiple visions for its design.
If your family is like mine, you’ll explain a point in three minutes when one would do. There’s an irony: my writing requires some brevity, but I like to talk a little.
During a 10-minute discussion about extending a utility and mud room, I noticed we were all saying similar things. but struggling to recognize that we were doing so. It then came to me: Even with my sloppy drawing skills, they could easily understand my ideas with a quick sketch. I opened the big display, undocked the S Pen, and fired up the floor plan. In under a minute, we were all on the same page.
I still find it annoying that the S Pen only works on the main display. I understand the reasoning — the bigger the display, the more usable the S Pen — but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The S Pen is perfectly usable on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, so it should be fine on the Z Fold 6 display. Yes, it’s a little narrower than on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold or OnePlus Open, but it should still be usable.
The S Pen isn’t just a benefit of using the Galaxy Z Fold 6. My family all use Samsung phones, and my brother-in-law is the only one with an S Pen in his Galaxy S23 Ultra. My sister can use the S Pen to illustrate her ideas, and it inspired her to make sure her next phone also has the S Pen.
It’s not the only Galaxy Z Fold 6 feature proving to be a blessing.
I finally found a use for Galaxy AI
A big part of moving is the cathartic process of selling or disposing of old possessions. We’ve lived in this family home all my life, and there are many items I have never heard of. How do you price something over 20 years old with no recognizable model number displayed and that’s generic enough to make a manual search tedious?
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It’s simple: you use Circle to Search. Like the S Pen, it’s not exclusive to the Galaxy Z Fold 6 ,but adds to the benefits of using Samsung’s biggest foldable.
Fire up the camera, hold the bottom bar, and draw a circle around or tap on the item. Let Galaxy AI do the heavy lifting and ensure you’re well-priced on everything. I’ve sold hundreds of items on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, and pricing is the hardest part. Too high, and it won’t sell; too low, and you’re giving away money. Circle to Search makes it easy to understand the true value of your items and price them accordingly.
It also helps when you’re looking for inspiration for new furniture. Nothing is worse than finding something you like on a website or feed and crawling through the comments for a link. Similarly, we all know that almost everything is cheaper on the internet than in a retail store, so if you find a great item in a store when you’re browsing, Circle to Search can help you quickly understand the item’s actual value and save you money.
Sketch to Image is also helpful for visualizing an idea. Sometimes, a rudimentary drawing won’t encapsulate an idea, but quickly adding a couch or modern fireplace to an empty wall can be super beneficial. These features aren’t exclusive to Samsung phones, and there are additional features on Pixel phones that would be useful during a move. Moving is so stressful that simplicity is key, and the overall Galaxy Z Fold 6 experience is intuitive enough that it’s actually useful in this scenario.
A big display and a practical camera
I love spreadsheets and apps like Airtable and Notion. Having data you can refer to is a blessing, especially regarding taxes. Knowing the loss or profit on an older item directly affects how much you owe, but tracking this for hundreds of items is a pain.
The big display on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 — and most other foldables — makes it far easier. For over a decade, Samsung has been perfecting multitasking. Although OnePlus’ innovative and unique approach with Open Canvas is more useful in some ways, multitasking in One UI is still the gold standard for most people. In particular, copying data from one app to another is easy, and the split-screen experience is polished.
Most of my tracking has been done in Google Sheets because Android foldable phones still use mobile apps and aren’t truly optimized for the big-screen experience. Airtable would be fantastic, but the mobile app is poor. As Chrome identifies your phone as a mobile user agent — and not a Mac like Safari on the iPad does — you can’t bypass the app through the browser. Even Google Sheets app is less capable than in the browser, and I’ve resorted to using the browser as it is easier to use more features on the big screen.
That’s the tracking and price finding, but the last part is listing the items. This is where the Galaxy Z Fold 6 camera comes in: it won’t win any awards compared to the competition, but it’s more than good enough to take photos of items for sale. Then again, so were foldables from a few years ago, so it’s not exactly groundbreaking. The things that matter are fine: good enough noise reduction, focus and light capture in a poorly lit room, and great photos in good lighting.
The perfect device for moving home
Much of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 experience isn’t unique or different, but the S Pen helps it stand apart. A big-screen foldable wouldn’t be as helpful for this move without all the S Pen features that allow you to express yourself. In many ways, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 offers a perfect blend of features crafted for moving, and it’s the ideal companion for one of the most stressful life events you can undertake.
The S Pen plays a large part, but the Galaxy Z Fold 6 is not the only foldable with Pen support. The Oppo Find N3 — which has identical hardware to the OnePlus Open — also supports a stylus. The S Pen is just one part of an experience that is perfect for some use cases; as it turns out, moving home is one of them, and the Galaxy Z Fold 6 will be the phone I will rely on during this house move.