The Google Pixel Fold is one of my favorite phones yet

Google’s Pixel Fold is the company’s first foldable phone. Like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5, the Pixel Fold opens like a book, revealing a tablet-like display on the inside. That display can be used for all sorts of tasks and in all sorts of different configurations for things like taking a photo or watching videos.

I used the Fold for over a week, and if the headline didn’t already give it away, let me be clear: I really, really like the Pixel Fold. Its unique design removes some of the frustrations I have with Samsung’s Z Fold line, although there are some areas of the experience that could be improved. Let’s dig in.

What I liked about it

The front display is nearly perfect

I’ve spent a lot of time using the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Galaxy Z Fold 4, both of which helped Samsung set the bar for what a foldable phone should be and do. But one of my biggest personal gripes about both phones is just how tall and narrow the front display is. It’s a cramped typing experience — one I dislike so much that I almost exclusively use the inside display whenever I need to type.

With the Pixel Fold, however, the 5.8-inch display is a dream to type on and use as you would any smartphone’s display. It’s shorter and wider than most smartphone screens, but that’s a good thing because it allows you to use the phone from the front display, doing anything and everything you want. You don’t have to consciously make the decision about whether or not you have to open it just to reply to a text message or email.

And the beauty is, you have the added benefit of the availability of a much bigger display on the inside when you need it.

Apps, videos and even games all look good on the front display. There’s plenty of color saturation and clarity, along with brightness to see the screen in direct sunlight.

Open it up for a Pixel Tablet mini

Where the Fold really shines for me is when you open it up to reveal the 7.6-inch display. The aspect ratio of the internal display is 6:5, meaning it’s wider than it is tall. That’s the exact opposite of the internal display design of Samsung’s Z Fold lineup, with those displays looking more like you took two standard smartphones and placed them vertically next to each other.

The Pixel Fold, however, is as if you put two smartphones together and turned them into a full screen landscape orientation. And I love it.

Holding the Fold with two hands when it’s open keeps everything on the big screen within easy reach. You’re not left shuffling your grip on either side of the phone in order to reach a button or pull down the quick settings panel like I often am on the Z Fold 4.

And typing on Google’s folding phone just feels natural. After setting up the Fold, I started to reply to an email on the front display when I decided I wanted to open the Fold and see more of the message. After opening the Fold, I immediately began typing on the keyboard without giving it a second thought. It wasn’t until a few sentences later that I realized I didn’t have to figure out how to hold the Fold or adjust it so I could reach the entire keyboard, something that’s common on the Z Fold, especially if you use Samsung’s default keyboard.

Typing aside, using the internal display to multitask and have more than one app open at a time is a familiar experience. Familiar, because it’s the same kind of setup that I grew accustomed to when testing the Pixel Tablet.

The taskbar acts as an app dock where you can place your most used apps and access them with a quick swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Then you can drag-and-drop an app to either side of the screen to use two apps at the same time, with each app looking like its standard smartphone version — which is the same as what it looks like on the front display.

The entire experience is intuitive and easy to use after you’ve gone through the process once, maybe twice.

I’ve seen some debate on whether or not the Fold offers enough in terms of multitasking features. Namely around whether you should be able to use more than two apps at the same time like you can on the Z Fold line. I’m of the belief that two effectively full-size apps are superior to three apps, two of which are tiny. I just never have seen a use or need for three apps on a foldable phone.

The only change I’d love to see Google make to streamline the interface between the front display and the internal screen is to make the taskbar the same size on both. Right now, the internal screen has room for six apps, whereas the front screen can go up to 5. If you place a sixth app on the taskbar, though, it’s only visible when you open the Fold — forcing you to either add a second app icon to your home screen or just not use the sixth spot.

The display itself looks great, regardless of what you’re doing. Whether you’re playing Asphalt 9, browsing the internet in Chrome or looking through your Google Photos library, the screen’s resolution, color reproduction and brightness are spot-on.

Pixel-quality cameras on a foldable? I’m here for it

The Galaxy Z Fold lineup has made a name for itself, literally, by being a foldable phone. But one area where it’s always struggled is with its camera performance. Arguably, with the Z Fold 4, Samsung finally gave the Z Fold line cameras that are on par with the latest S series of phones.

Google didn’t skimp with the Pixel Fold’s cameras, though, and I can’t get enough of it. In fact, my family can’t either. Over the last week, anytime they’ve wanted a picture, I have been specifically told to use the Fold and not my iPhone.

Between the clarity and image quality and the ability to zoom up to 20x and still get a clear shot, the Pixel Fold’s cameras do not disappoint.

The Fold has a total of five cameras. There’s one above each display and two on the back. The front camera is 9.5 megapixels, while the inner camera is 8 megapixels. Both those cameras are just okay and not something you’re really going to want to use to take selfies.

The rear-facing cameras, however, are fantastic. There’s a 48-megapixel main camera, a 10.8-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 10.8-megapixel telephoto camera. The telephoto lens supports 5X optical zoom or up to 20x Super Res Zoom.

The Fold supports all the camera features Google’s Pixel line is known for, like Long Exposure, Night Sight, Portrait Mode and Photo Unblur.

One of the reasons you’ll want to skip on using the front or inner cameras for selfies is that you can use the rear cameras to take a selfie just by unfolding the screen, opening the camera app and activating Rear Camera Selfie mode. Once enabled, you’ll point the rear cameras at you and then use the front screen as a viewfinder to frame the picture.

And with the Fold’s ability to partially bend the display, you can use Tabletop Camera mode as a built-in tripod to take long-exposure shots or hands-free group photos.

Reliable performance and battery life

Inside the Pixel Fold is Google’s Tensor G2 processor, 12GB of memory, 256GB or 512GB of storage and a 4,821mAh battery.

Over the last 10 days or so, I’ve done anything and everything I could think of to test the Fold’s performance — from using two apps at once while streaming music, to editing Excel spreadsheets and viewing work documents.

Not once did I feel as if the Pixel Fold was underperforming and running out of power. The Fold and its Tensor G2 chip kept up with me, and the same can be said about the abundance of memory it used to keep apps open and in recent memory.

Here’s how the Pixel Fold compares to the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and the newer Z Fold 5 when using the Geekbench 6 benchmarking app. Samsung’s foldables beat the Pixel Fold pretty handily on paper, particularly on multi-core scores that gauge a phone’s ability to handle especially demanding tasks.

As I’ve learned since Google moved away from Qualcomm’s own processors and started using its in-house Tensor chips, benchmark scores don’t tell the entire story for Pixel phone (and now tablet) performance. In daily use, the Pixel Fold, just like the Pixel 7 Pro, does everything I need it to do without issue.

The first day or two of battery life with the Pixel Fold had me a little nervous. I ran the battery down below 10% with average use, and that was concerning. But since then, I’ve had between four and five hours of screen-on time and consistently ended the day with 30% or more battery.

Google’s official battery estimate is 24 hours, and I can confidently say that the Fold hits that mark — again, after the initial day or two of setup.

On our battery test, which consists of playing a 4K video on a loop at 50% brightness, the Fold’s battery gave out after 10 hours and 56 minutes. That’s roughly two hours less than what we got from the Galaxy Z Fold 4, and nearly four hours behind the impressive 14 hours and 47 minutes we saw from the Z Fold 5.

Again, real-world usage for me has been good enough to get through entire days of use.

What I didn’t like about it

App compatibility is off to a good start, but …

Google has done a great job of updating its own apps for the Pixel Fold’s larger display and even getting some big third-party app developers on board. But I wish more apps had been updated for launch.

I get it. App developers don’t want to invest time and resources into updating their apps for a platform that may or may not have a lot of users in the near future.

But the experience for some of the third-party apps on the Fold’s internal display isn’t great. Some apps, like Instagram, perfectly fit one side of the screen, as if you’re using it in split screen mode. You can double-tap on the blank side of the screen to move the app to the middle of the Fold and tap again to move it completely to the other side. It works and makes sense.

But then there are some apps like Facebook that take up three-fourths of the display and are just downright awkward and weird to use. If you rotate the Fold, apps like Facebook will then take up the entire screen. It’s a weird workaround, but it does “fix” the issue.

You never really know what you’re going to get when you open an app made by someone other than Google. Apple Music, for example, works just fine. An Apple app supports Google’s latest device, but Facebook doesn’t. Wild times we live in.

I’m not sure what Google can do to force developers to update their apps to work properly on the Fold, outside of requiring it to publish an app in the Play Store. Hopefully, over time, more developers spend the time it takes to make their apps compatible with the Fold.

Face Unlock for both screens please

There are a few different ways you can go about unlocking the Fold. There’s the fingerprint sensor on the right edge of the device that works fast and reliably, and when you’re using the outside display you can use Pixel Face Unlock with the front-facing camera to quickly unlock the phone. However, Face Unlock isn’t an option with the internal display and its front-facing camera.

Even though the phone makes it very clear that’s how Face Unlock will work when you set it up, I can’t tell you how many times I stared at the internal screen, waiting for it to unlock and take me to the last app I was in or to the home screen, only to realize after a few seconds of waiting that I needed to use the fingerprint reader.

It’s a weird disconnect in the unlocking experience that after all this time, my brain still hasn’t adjusted to it. The easy solution, of course, is for Google to add Face Unlock to the bigger display.

It doesn’t open flat

I’ve routinely debated with myself whether or not the Fold is completely opening so that the display is flat. And the conclusion I’ve come to is this: When you initially open the Fold, the hinge and screen still have a slight bend. You have to slightly push the two sides of the screen once more to get it to fully open flat.

I asked Google about this and was reassured that the Fold “can open to 180 degrees,” and indeed it does, but not without a little bit of work to get it there.

I’m guessing here, but I think the not-quite-flat default for the hinge is to protect the display — and more specifically, the crease in the display — from cracking when opened flat. By making it a two-step effort, the stress on the crease in the screen (where foldable displays most often break) is reduced.

It’s a minor gripe, I admit. But it was something I noticed right away after setting it up and thought worth mentioning.

Early questions about durability

The build quality of the Pixel Fold is fine. It doesn’t feel like a toy, but it also doesn’t have that same premium feeling that Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4 has. The Z Fold 4 feels like it can withstand daily use and the occasional drop, whereas the Fold is so thin that it feels like if you’re too rough with it, you’re likely to break it. I’ve been using one of Google’s official Fold cases on mine the entire time to help with that, and it’s done a fine job; I strongly recommend you do the same.

Something to keep an eye on while deciding whether or not to buy the Pixel Fold yourself, or while waiting for your preorder to arrive, is the number of stories, threads and complaints about issues with the Fold’s internal display.

So far, there seems to be a few early adopters on Reddit who have had issues with the internal display breaking with very little reported use. Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo’s review Fold broke after four days of “light” use. That’s not uncommon for new foldable phones, and even Samsung has been through its fair share of growing pains with foldables.

I don’t think there’s a widespread issue — my review sample is just fine so far (knock on wood) — but it’s worth noting. More importantly, paying attention to how Google responds to the customers who have early issues is what you should be watching. Does Google replace the device with no questions asked? Or do they make customers jump through hoops to prove the damage wasn’t accidental? That’s what’s really important here.

How it compares

Bottom line

The Pixel Fold is one of the best first-generation devices Google has launched. From performance to the overall experience, there’s a lot to like. The landscape-like orientation of the internal display is sure to be a turnoff for some, and if that’s you, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5 is the better pick.

And because this is a first-generation device, the Pixel Fold has a long runway ahead of it where Google will take lessons learned and continue to improve the overall experience — such as app compatibility and more foldable features, like the upcoming translation mode that takes advantage of both displays.

If you’re looking for a foldable smartphone that’s not made by Samsung, and you don’t mind some of the growing pains that are part of a first-generation product, the Pixel Fold is a fine choice.