Price: £1,749 from fave.co/3D5LiR3
Google’s folding phone has been a long time coming. Rumours that the company was developing one began several years back and in a surprise revelation during a recent Made by Google podcast episode, the world found out that the Pixel Fold wasn’t the first.
A previous design hadn’t made the grade and was cancelled because it wasn’t good enough. The Pixel Fold, then, must have passed muster and it’s taking the fight to various rivals but mainly Samsung. The South Korean company has a big lead on Google, having released its first Galaxy Fold in 2019 and is on track to launch its fifth-generation foldable phone soon.
The history lesson is relevant here because the Pixel Fold doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And while there’s a lot to like about the phone, there’s some frustration too – some of which might be fixed in software updates. Then there’s also the price, which isn’t a million miles away from £2,000.
DESIGN
Quite obviously, the Pixel Fold is the type of folding phone which aims to be a tablet replacement rather than the ‘flip’ style which takes a normal phone and folds it in half. And this makes the Pixel Fold a big, heavy phone. It’s 12.1mm thick (not including the camera bump) and 80mm wide. At 140mm tall, it’s shorter than many phones but at 284g, quite a lot heavier – 20g heavier than the Galaxy Z Fold4.
And everyone I handed the Pixel Fold to commented on the weight first. But, as with any folding phone, it also has a huge wow factor. Pictured here is the Obsidian colour but you can also get it in Porcelain.
Opening it up to reveal the 7.6in internal screen will usually elicit a ‘wow’ or a gasp because, even now in 2023, not that many people have seen a phone that folds in half.
The crease doesn’t ever go away, but a lot of the time the brightness of the screen hides it. It’s even more hidden if you’re running one app on each side of the screen.
Where the Fold differs from its rivals – notably the Samsung Galaxy
