Unfold the future?

Pixel Fold review: The first foldable that actually feels like a tablet

Google takes foldable software to the next level, and it makes a big difference.

Ron Amadeo – Jul 13, 2023 6:45 am | 136

The Pixel Fold's inner display. Credit: Ron Amadeo

After years of rumors and at least one canceled attempt, Google is finally releasing a foldable smartphone. Samsung has been in the foldables business for four years now, and with a ton of Chinese OEMs following in Samsung’s footsteps, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Pixel Fold would simply copy what Samsung is doing. But Google is entering the foldable world with a vision of its own, and it’s one I really like. This is the foldable I have long wished for: a device that’s a phone when folded up and a tablet when unfolded.

The usual Android tablet app selection problems—which are getting better—are still present when in tablet mode. When you do find a tablet app, though, this feels like the first foldable that delivers on the promise of letting you do more on the big screen.

The Pixel Fold hardware also feels shockingly advanced. Google has turned in both the thinnest foldable on the US market and the one with the biggest battery, which is not what you would normally expect from the software company.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that durability is a concern. In fact, I was the first person to break a Pixel Fold. Companies like to talk up the “ultra-thin glass” used as a middle layer in foldable screens, but since you can break it with almost anything, including a scratch, it’s not really protective. The only actual protective layer is a thin plastic sheet.

And at $1,800, the Pixel Fold was always going to be a luxury item instead of a practical workhorse.

The “tablet-first” foldable

What shape should a foldable be? That’s still an open question.

The inner screens are all some kind of rectangle, sure, but the industry hasn’t settled on a standard set of aspect ratios for them. One school of thought says a foldable should be “two normal smartphone screens next to each other,” which prioritizes using split-screen mode. This is where the Galaxy Fold lands, with its 2176×1812 inner display. That’s usually reported as a “6.5” aspect ratio, but you could also call it 21:17, or very close to two normal 21:9 smartphone screens next to each other.

Samsung-style hardware has a certain practicality to it, as the selection of big-screen Android apps is still small. The display on a Samsung-style foldable, being taller than it is wide, tends to keep apps in phone mode. When the phone is closed, you get a phone app; when the phone is open, you get a double-width phone app. Samsung tends to prioritize multitasking with two (or three!) phone apps in a split-screen view. App scaling in Android is complicated, and though there are settings you can change, this is how it works for most apps.

Many of Google’s interfaces go with this 50/50 split, and the left and right sides are often different colors. Credit: Ron Amadeo

Google is going in a totally different direction. The Pixel Fold opens up to a screen that is 1840×2208—wider than it is tall, making it look, feel, and run like a mini-tablet. When you open the device up, apps kick over into a dual-pane interface much more readily than they do on tall devices.

A look at the spec sheet might make you wonder if the screen is just a sideways Galaxy Fold display. That may be true for the hardware, but the software doesn’t work like it does on a Galaxy Fold. The Pixel Fold software package feels like a new, foldable-focused release of Android. We’ve seen bits and pieces of tablet design on a Samsung foldable, but it still feels geared toward multitasking, while the Pixel Fold has a “tablet-first” design for both the hardware and software.

For starters, Google is releasing 40-plus in-house “foldable-optimized” apps along with the Pixel Fold, and many of the heavy hitters, like Google Maps, Gmail, Gboard, and Calendar, look great on this screen, with dual-pane views and controls in all the right spots. A bunch of third parties are releasing foldable apps now, too, including WhatsApp, TikTok, Spotify, Evernote, Dropbox, and Microsoft apps like Office. The core Android OS also feels like it has been given some foldables polish, with the settings, clock, calculator, contacts, and phone apps all getting new interfaces for foldables and a new taskbar showing up throughout the OS.

Google often fails at providing a cohesive ecosystem, either because the software and hardware aren’t on the same schedule or because it gave up on an idea halfway through making it. The Pixel Fold shows surprisingly good coordination across Google’s OS and app selection. There are plenty of things Google could improve, but as a first-generation release, the Pixel Fold is impressive.

The very beautiful hardware

First, let’s talk about the hardware. The Pixel Fold is wonderful to hold. The whole device is either glass or aluminum, with rounded shiny edges all the way around. The thinness makes it feel like a next-generation foldable. At 5.8 mm per half, Google says it’s the thinnest foldable on the market, and that’s definitely true of the US, though some Chinese foldables are thinner. If you plan to carry the phone around in a pocket, thickness is a big deal. The 12.1 mm depth when folded puts the Pixel Fold in line with older smartphones like the iPhone 1 (11.6 mm thick), so it’s perfectly pocketable.

Google managed to pair this super-thin body with one of the biggest foldable batteries ever, at 4821 mAh. I don’t know when Google became an industry leader in hardware design, but seeing the company with a lead like this is shocking. Google, the Internet and software company, isn’t supposed to win the spec-sheet wars.

The phone is not significantly wider than a Pixel 7 Pro when folded up, so it feels like Google settled on a good size here. Besides the big inner tablet screen, you also get a front screen that feels normal. The 5.8-inch, 2092×1080 OLED in the front has a 17.4:9 aspect ratio, meaning it’s in between an old-school 16:9 phone display and a taller, modern 21:9 display. The Galaxy Fold, which opens in the other direction, has to make do with a 23.1:9 aspect ratio front screen, which is skinnier than normal and can feel cramped. The Pixel Fold feels like a normal phone in phone mode; it’s just super heavy.

One immediate surprise (on the black version, at least) is the return of the Pixel 4’s soft-touch glass back. It has a matte treatment that makes it a bit more grippy and almost soft, but it’s still glass, so it’s very durable, and you can’t scratch it with a fingernail. It also does a good job of hiding fingerprints and doesn’t feel greasy. We loved this treatment on the Pixel 4, and it’s still great here. There were rumors that the Pixel 7 would pick up this style of glass, but it ended up not happening. Hopefully, it will land on the Pixel 8.

The camera bar sticks out, but it gives you a nice place to rest a finger and support the phone. Credit: Ron Amadeo

Unfortunately, every edge of the phone, the hinge spine, and the camera bar are all polished aluminum, which gets greasy and shows fingerprints very easily. This problem also exists on the Pixel 7 Pro. Google already has a way nicer finish figured out: the sandblasted matte aluminum finish on the cheaper Pixel 7. For some reason, that didn’t make it to the more expensive devices.

The camera bar is here, too, and it’s still excellent. The ridge gives you a place to stick your index finger, providing one more point of support than you would otherwise get from a smooth glass back. Camera bumps are usually too far into the corner of a phone to touch naturally, but the horizontal bar that stretches across the back of the Pixel Fold makes it easy to reach. When the phone is closed, the camera bar is still a stable platform while resting on a table, so it’s convenient to poke at. When open, the camera bar only covers half of the “back” now, so it’s unstable, and the device seesaws all over the place when you touch it.

And this phone will need a lot of support, because it is heavy. Its 283 g make it heavier than a 263 g Galaxy Fold 4, and the heft is the first thing you’ll notice when you pick it up. With a best-in-class 4821 mAh battery, though, it seems like all that extra weight is lithium-ion. It would be nice if the Pixel Fold were lighter, but I certainly won’t advocate for less battery life.

The battery life is plenty good in phone mode, but an extended gaming session on the giant 7.6-inch OLED will cook the battery. There’s a reason tablets come with batteries twice this size.

Google is not breaking any new ground when it comes to the foldable display tech—it’s very Samsung-y, with all the same minor issues. (Actually, with the Exynos-derived Google Tensor SoC, you could probably argue that a Google phone has more Samsung parts than a Samsung phone.) You’re getting a flexible OLED with an internal layer of “ultra-thin glass” and then a protective layer of plastic on top.

The internal glass layer adds a certain firmness to the display that you wouldn’t get from plastic alone. The glass isn’t the top layer, as a single scratch to the thin, bendable glass would make it more likely to shatter when folding, so there’s a permanent plastic layer on top. It’s easy to scratch, but the plastic won’t shatter, and it protects the real display from damage.

The big trench running down the center of the display. Credit: Ron Amadeo

The display doesn’t have a hard crease in it, but there is a noticeable trench running down the center. Some lighting conditions really highlight the trench, but it’s easy to forget about when the screen is lit up. The display doesn’t open to a full 180 degrees—you’ll get to about 178 before it stops. It’s weird, and it makes the phone look a bit broken sometimes, but Samsung’s foldables work this way, too. The hinge is a lot like a laptop’s. It’s stiff and isn’t spring-loaded, so it will stay wherever you leave it, allowing for L-shapes, tent shapes, and whatever else you want.

The largish bezels are not a big concern when you have the phone in your hands. The phone would look better if the bezels were smaller, but the bottom bezel does provide some options for holding the device. You can put three fingers on the back and a thumb on the center of the bottom bezel and hold the Pixel Fold the way you would a small paperback book.

Integrated into the side power button is the fingerprint reader. It’s workable, but I’m not a huge fan of it. It only scans the tiniest sliver of your finger, and it’s up to you during the fingerprint registration process to ensure good coverage. I’ve had to delete and re-register a finger because I was getting too many misses from the first registration. The old trick of registering the same finger multiple times helps, too.

An in-screen fingerprint reader would feel more convenient since the dead center of the display feels more accessible than the side of the device. For some reason, most foldable phones go with a side fingerprint reader. Maybe it’s because it’s accessible from both screens via only one component, but the phone has five cameras, so duplicate components shouldn’t be a problem. I’d prefer two in-screen fingerprint readers, as we saw on the Vivo X Fold.

Android for Foldables makes a lot of progress

The Pixel Fold has new software almost everywhere. I’m sure some of it was tucked away in Android 12L, or maybe Android 13, but this is the first time most of it has been active and visible on a real device, and it represents a big change. Naturally, all the tablet interfaces are two panels, and most of them take a 50-50 approach on the Pixel Fold, putting the split right down the middle of the display crease.

Google likes to make the left and right sides slightly different colors, which is interesting and looks good. It’s a bit like celebrating the crease in the middle of the screen rather than trying to hide it. The extra-wide, side-by-side screens give off major Microsoft Surface Duo vibes, just without the janky software.

As I wrote in our Oppo Find N2 review, Android still needs some work when it comes to fully supporting multi-screen Android devices—right now, both screens are forced to share most of the same display settings, and that can cause problems if you don’t design your device around that limitation. Unlike Oppo’s device, the Pixel Fold uses two displays of similar densities, so sharing settings is not a big deal. One improvement to multi-screen support is the ability to set auto-rotate individually on both screens. In the quick settings tile, you’ll see “Auto-rotate, Off / folded,” or “Auto-rotate, Off / unfolded” depending on what mode you’re in, and the settings for each mode will only stick with that mode.

There are a few oddities with the software. First, while you can switch from phone to tablet with the app transitioning to a bigger layout, you can’t seamlessly go in the other direction. It’s not that the app doesn’t support switching back to phone mode—it does—it’s just that the Pixel Fold always instantly locks when you close it. Most other foldables have some kind of grace period where closing the phone only locks it after a few seconds, so you can close the phone, tap the front screen, and keep going. If you try that on a Pixel Fold, you’ll always be interrupted by a lock screen.

This pillar box design is… interesting. Credit: Ron Amadeo

There’s a lot of variability in how your apps will look and work on the Pixel Fold. Ideally, you’ll get a tablet/foldable app with a two-pane interface, but third-party apps will often present a stretched-out phone app. I’m not really sure why, but for some apps, you’ll get a pillar-box layout, with two black bars to the left and right of the app. This looks awkward, but it keeps apps at a reasonable width. You can double-tap on the left or right pillar box to move the app over in that direction, changing from a centered layout to something biased toward that side.

You can’t turn this off for apps that trigger it, and you can’t enable it for apps it doesn’t work on. If you turn the phone sideways so you’re in the same vertical aspect ratio as a Galaxy Fold, you’ll get a normal, full-screen layout. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen with too many apps.

Split-screen mode is here, of course, but it’s not like the Galaxy Fold’s complicated split-screen system (Samsung’s usual “more is more” design philosophy allows for three split-screen apps and a floating window). Google keeps it simple and does a regular side-by-side app view. Everything fits and looks good, and I never felt the need to cram even more stuff onto the screen. While in the normal horizontal view, apps are displayed side-by-side; turning the inner screen 90 degrees results in a top and bottom layout. When the display is almost two 21:9 smartphone displays next to each other in vertical mode, I would expect two vertical split-screen views, but that’s not what you get.

The transient taskbar will bring up the default launcher’s bottom row of icons, plus an app-drawer button, but it’s hard to remember it exists. Credit: Ron Amadeo

I was looking forward to seeing the iPad-style taskbar on the Pixel Fold—an always-on bar at the bottom of the screen that contains a row of app icons, but Google changed how things work just this January with the “transient taskbar.” This taskbar isn’t on the screen all the time; instead, it only temporarily pops up with a “slow swipe” up from the bottom of the screen. Piling an extra feature onto the swipe-up gesture is a bit strange, as the gesture now has three functions. A quick swipe up brings up the home screen, a “swipe up and hold” shows recent apps, and a slow swipe up shows the transient taskbar. That’s way too many functions for one gesture.

The taskbar is hard-coded to Google’s home screen app, the Pixel Launcher. It will still show up if you have a third-party launcher set as the default, but the taskbar mirrors the bottom row of icons in the Pixel Launcher, and you can’t edit it directly. The Launcher also shows up in the “recent apps” screen below all your app thumbnails. You can drag icons out of the taskbar and over to the edge of the screen to enter split-screen mode, but you can’t do the same with recent apps thumbnails. That’s strange, especially because these items are on the same screen.

I found the transient taskbar hard to use. I couldn’t remember what was on it because I couldn’t see it, so I didn’t use it much. It’s also fighting an uphill battle against years of muscle memory saying that you go to the home screen when you want to launch something. Finally, the taskbar is only available on the inner screen, not the front screen, which is weird, considering that the front screen has more vertical real estate to fit something like that.

You can’t keep the taskbar pinned to the screen at all times, but that might change in the future. Mishaal Rahman has spotted an option for “taskbar pinning” in Android 14, and that would be great to have. You can get most of the way there by turning off gesture navigation, which necessitates having a permanent bottom bar for the “back,” “home,” and “recents” buttons, and that bar will also have the taskbar buttons. The downside is that you can’t use gestures anymore.

Android’s best tablet layout (underneath all the *Tron* laser beams) was the first one in Android 3.0 Honeycomb. It combined the navigation bar and status bars, so you had navigation buttons on the bottom left and notifications on the bottom right. A modern version could show taskbar icons instead of navigation buttons. Credit: Ron Amadeo

But if Google wants to provide a good Android experience on tablets and foldables, it needs to get away from the whole “bar” idea. The taskbar, the status bar, various tab bars and title bars in apps—they all make sense on a tall, skinny phone, but that sort of design doesn’t work well on wider, height-limited tablets. So many things, like the status bar, present too much empty space in tablet mode, and they only exist because Google keeps relying on UI elements that were designed for phones. Similarly, the bottom gesture navigation bar always shows a big horizontal strip of nothing.

While a dramatic navigation and status bar redesign is definitely needed, Android already has a feature that could mitigate the bar problem. Google just doesn’t use it. You can turn the status and navigation bar transparent whenever you want as an app developer, and most Google apps just neglect to do that. For example, the feature looks great in Google Maps because the map draws across the entire screen, even behind the navigation and status bar. Most Google apps just present big, awkward solid-color strips of nothing. The feature shouldn’t even be optional—it should be automatically enabled for everything.

Google had the right idea back in 2011 with Android 3.0 Honeycomb, where the navigation bar and status bar were merged into one bottom bar, just like the Windows taskbar. That was abandoned only when Google started winding down tablet design in general, and it’s time to bring it back. There’s no reason for phones and tablets to have the same general UI.

Pixel Launcher: The worst part of Pixel phones, now mandatory

Believe it or not, the Pixel Launcher, the home screen app that comes with Pixel phones, is the biggest negative of the Pixel Fold. It’s been awful for a long time, but it’s usually not worth complaining about because it’s easy to replace the home screen app on Android. No traditional launcher apps support foldables, though, so you’re kind of stuck with Google’s unconfigurable, consumer-hostile home screen app on the Pixel Fold. Since the home screen is the primary interface of the phone, this is a big problem.

The Pixel Launcher’s “At a Glance” widget is secretly a giant, and I hate it. Credit: Ron Amadeo

The Pixel Launcher takes what started as a user-configurable home screen and locks it down, hard-coding widgets into the home screen that you can’t change. The biggest culprit is something we’ve complained about before, Google’s “At A Glance’ widget. This is a tiny little block of text—right now, mine says, “Wed, June 21, 61F”—but for some reason, the widget stretches across the entire screen horizontally and takes up two rows of space vertically. There would be space for eight icons in its place, but you can’t remove it. It’s a widget, and Google has a whole framework for adding and removing widgets, but for some reason, it decided to hard-code this one into the Pixel Launcher.

Why is Google so obsessed with this widget? It has a bunch of features that never seem to work, like displaying package delivery alerts (presumably pulled from your email?). But it mostly just shows the date and current weather. The Pixel Launcher also has a second hard-coded widget: the Google Search bar at the bottom. While the search bar is annoying, it’s at least understandable, as it makes Google a ton of money, and searching is a primary feature of a smartphone. The “At A Glance” widget doesn’t serve anybody.

Part of the reason you’re stuck with the Pixel Launcher on the Pixel Fold is the complicated dual-screen setup. When closed, the Pixel Launcher shows one home screen page, and when open, it shows two home screens side by side. This is great—you definitely wouldn’t want any other solution, like having a single panel stretched across two screens—but “foldable awareness” is not something that exists in any third-party launcher.

A third-party launcher, like Nova Launcher, will just give you a single-panel setup that you somehow have to make work across both screens, and that won’t be pretty or usable. With the Galaxy Fold in its fourth generation—that’s four years now—and no third-party home screen developer having taken up the task of making a launcher suitable for foldables, your best bet might be to go old school and root the phone to install a modded Pixel Launcher.

The Pixel Launcher does not allow you to make great use of the home screen space. (This is on the “small” display setting and the maximum 5×5 grid.) Credit: Ron Amadeo

Part of the appeal of a bigger home screen is the possibility of packing in more widgets that can be seen when the phone is opened up, but the Pixel Launcher doesn’t let you make great use of the available space. Besides losing the top 20 percent of the left screen to the “At a Glance” widget, the Pixel launcher has all sorts of areas where you can’t put anything.

The “dock” at the bottom is also strange. When the phone is closed, besides the hard-coded search bar, the dock shows four (or five, depending on your settings) icons, and when the phone is open, it shows six icons. Those last one or two icons are impossible to see in phone mode. Normally, the home screen has pages, and you can swipe the pages over, but the dock doesn’t swipe, so those extra icons just live in phone purgatory.

Limiting the bottom dock to six icons in tablet mode is also strange because the whole tablet home screen is 10 or eight icon-spots wide, so there are dead spaces to the left and right of the dock in tablet mode. The same goes for the Google Search bar. I have 2×2 blocks of dead space to the left and right of the dock.

The Pixel Launcher needs serious work to be more customizable. I would like to see the ability to remove everything so the entire screen can be used. I want more options for the home screen grid and margins around the screen, which would allow the launcher to better adapt to varying screen sizes. Google is currently locking people into the default home screen and neglecting it at the same time.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel as productive on the Pixel Fold as I do on a regular phone. I don’t have room for the icons and widgets I normally use, so I have to swipe around more to see everything.

The foldable interface, lightning round

Let’s take a whirlwind tour of some of the new and interesting foldable layouts. First up: Gmail. The Gmail inbox should be the standard for all apps on a foldable. There’s a list of mail on the left half of the screen and a view of each message on the right side.

Again, horizontal bars seem like a huge waste of space on a device like this, even when they only stretch across 50 percent of the display. Unfortunately, Gmail puts three horizontal bars above your message, which seems excessive. You have one half-empty bar with four icons, a second bar with the subject and a star icon, then a third bar with the sender and reply buttons. The reply buttons are also duplicated in a fourth bar at the bottom of the message. This could be toned down a bit.

Gmail is one of many Google apps that should have a transparent navigation bar, but it doesn’t. It’s confusing that the main inbox view stops before the bottom of the screen, but that’s the navigation bar area.

The Gmail compose screen is another example of horizontal bars run amok. It says “Compose” and then has a bunch of blank space between that and the “Attach” and “Send” buttons. Any other interface would probably be more appropriate. Keep in mind that a compose screen needs room for an on-screen keyboard, so any design should be very conservative with the vertical space it takes up. This bar makes the UI absolutely claustrophobic because it takes up so much space. You also can’t scroll it out of the way. It’s worth mentioning that my keyboard settings—tall with a number row—don’t help, but this is how I like to use my keyboard.

The new split keyboard is great. It takes some getting used to, but it’s super comfortable to type on with just your thumbs. You also get options for a floating keyboard (for swiping) or the regular-old full-width keyboard, which is surprisingly usable. I give Gmail a solid “B.” That’s right—we’re grading some of these.

Next up: the Play Store. You can’t fool me, Google! This is just the phone app with a single vertical tab bar bolted onto the side of it. Those giant thumbnails are ridiculous, as they were scaled for a phone width and are just blown up to fit on a wide-screen foldable. The “Top Charts” screenshot is so bad that it looks like a rendering bug, with absolutely nothing on the right half of the screen. Most of the app-browsing interfaces look similar. Then there’s the “manage apps” screen, which is just a stretched-out phone interface with no changes.

The navigation bar should be transparent here, but it isn’t. The Play Store takes things up another notch, though: The navigation bar isn’t even color-matched! The app is white, and the navigation bar is green (or whatever your accent color is), and it looks awful.

That bolted-on tab bar is the one thing this app gets right. That “Games / Apps / Books” bar used to be horizontal, and the foldable layout turns it into a vertical bar that doesn’t suck vertical space away from the rest of the app. We have tons of horizontal space, so this is something all other apps should take note of. For instance, I wonder if Gmail would be better off with a vertical stack of “reply,” “star,” and “archive” buttons on the right-hand side.

But that vertical tab bar still won’t save the Play Store from an “F” grade, both for how bad it is and how important it is. Everyone has to use the Play Store, and it directly brings in billions of dollars in revenue for Google every year. The Play Store should have a top-tier foldable design, and it doesn’t.

If Google is looking for a few suggestions, it should copy the Gmail layout for the Play Store. The “Top Charts” screen should list the apps on the left, and clicking on an app should load the detail page on the right side of the screen, where there is nothing. It’s easy to lose your place if you’re trying to walk down the list, and keeping the list on the screen at all times, with a highlight on your current selection, would be very helpful. Search results also use this half-empty layout and would similarly benefit from a two-panel, “walk down the list” layout.

Here’s Google Maps, and it looks like Google finally figured out the correct status and navigation bar settings. You can turn them clear as an app developer and draw behind them, and that is almost always a good idea. Here, the map extends from the top of the phone to the bottom, drawing under the status and navigation bar, and it looks beautiful. This is A+ work.

Sadly, the transparent bars only work if you have the details panel open. Maps switches back and forth between solid and clear bars a lot, and it’s distracting. It’s like every screen rolled a die and came up with a random status/navigation bar setting. Shout-out to navigation mode, which shows a solid white navigation bar and a gray status bar.

Google Maps itself is great, as usual. The map takes up the full screen, while the info panel lives on the left-hand side and just pops up over the map when it’s expanded. It’s very nice to get info about a place on one side while still seeing its context on the map on the other side.

Navigation isn’t any different from the phone version. It might be interesting to see a list of turns or your distance from the next turn in feet—or anything other than a big, empty map. And weirdly, the navigation line is not centered on the screen; it lives at about the 75 percent mark. So if you cut the phone in half, the navigation line is centered within the right half of the display. It’s hard to see a strong justification for that. Even if you’re arguing that having a big map of things adjacent to your route is helpful, you would want a 50/50 split. Instead, you see 75 percent of the map to the left of your route and 25 percent to the right.

For Chrome, Google essentially just slapped the PC interface onto the foldable and called it a day. The UI is still good, powerful, and familiar, but the little details just don’t feel appropriate for this screen. Chrome for PCs understood the need to maximize vertical space, though, so it killed off the title bar that accompanies most Windows/Mac/Linux apps.

That giant status bar is still here in Android, and it takes up a lot of space to do nothing. The same goes for the bottom gesture navigation bar. There just isn’t much room for a webpage here. For the record, the Chrome UI (not the status and navigation bar) does auto-hide when you start scrolling, but it’s still way too big when it exists. There’s also no thought given to a transparent status bar and navigation bar. The navigation bar should always be clear, while the status bar should turn clear when the UI auto-hides. Instead, everything is always this solid color.

Even more annoyingly, you can’t zoom out on a website. Websites simply stretch from edge to edge and will be whatever size they want to be. You can make things bigger, but never smaller.

Hidden in the Pixel Fold is an excellent new Google Weather app. It looks beautiful, and the two-pane view lets you drill down into any upcoming day. It will tell you the temperature, wind, humidity, pressure, and UV index, along with hourly charts for humidity, wind, and rain. The only thing it’s missing is air quality (blame Canada) and a radar.

Google mostly uses data from weather.com, but it actually has its own short-term weather-prediction feature called “Nowcast.” This feature is purely a 12-hour precipitation forecast, and it works by feeding radar imagery into a machine-learning algorithm. Google says it works better than traditional forecasting since it doesn’t take hours to run like traditional models, so it’s updated more often and uses fresher data.

The app has a properly transparent status bar, which is great, but it goes with the rare semi-transparent navigation bar, which is annoying.

This app definitely deserves a spot in the app drawer, but it’s instead hidden in the OS, to the point that finding it feels like an Easter egg. One way you can access it is to add one of the very lovely weather widgets to the home screen; tapping on the widget will open the full-fat weather app. Unlocking a home screen icon can feel like entering a video game cheat code: First, you google the word “weather,” then you click the menu button in the top box on the Google search results page, then you press “add to homescreen.” This is apparently part of the Google Search app for some reason, which explains some of the odd icon shenanigans. Still, Google Weather deserves to be its own app.

Google Weather gets an A+, though it needs air quality and radar. For extra credit, add a 4×1, four-day forecast widget.

We say this in almost every Android review, but the notification panel is one of the most important interfaces on a phone. When some studies say people check their phones a hundred times a day, the thing they’re checking is the notification panel. It’s the jumping-off point for a million different tasks, and Google knows how important it is since the company updates it in almost every release.

At some point over the years, Android’s notification panel—a flow of incoming data—shacked up with the quick settings panel, which is just a bunch of toggle switches. These two interfaces are in no way related, but Android for foldables and tablets sticks them next to each other in a dual-pane interface.

Since the Pixel Fold has a big screen, it would be nice to see more text from a notification, like the entire Gmail message, instead of a section of it. It would also be helpful to get a full-screen quick settings panel and see more than just six shortcuts. All of this would require a deep rethink of the notification panel / quick settings layout (and that revamp would go great with a return to the Honeycomb single-bar layout), but I think such a dramatic change would be worth it for big screens. The notification panel is important, and Google should come up with something to take advantage of the bigger display. Instead, it just slapped two phone interfaces next to each other. D+.

The calculator presents a history of whatever you’ve calculated last, like an old printing calculator. You can drag down the top “screen” area, which mashes all the buttons down to a thumb-sized area for easier typing. The history section doesn’t actually do anything when your calculations are too big to fit; they just get clipped off, which is strange. The app makes good use of space, though, and the history is genuinely useful. It gets a solid A.

There’s not much to say about the actual camera hardware. It’s a Pixel camera, and the photos look identical to those produced by other Pixel cameras. The interface has some odd features, though. By default, the camera app changes the aspect ratio of the photos it captures depending on which screen you’re using. If you’re using the front screen, the phone will take photos in 16:9. If you’re using the inner screen, you’ll get photos in 3:4.

If you want consistent photos, you can press the little gear button in the camera app and pick “4:3″ and then do the same for the other screen. In total, there are three options for the camera aspect ratio, but you can only pick two from the front screen (16:9 and 4:3) and two from the inner screen (3:4 and 4:3). By default, I was expecting a photo that is the resolution and shape of the camera sensor.

Video is also a bit strange on the inner screen, illustrating the interesting tradeoff manufacturers need to make. The inner screen is wider than it is tall, so it’s already technically in landscape when you open it. When you fire up a 16:9 video recording, though, you will get a vertical video viewfinder, centered right down the middle of the crease. If you’re recording a normal 16:9 video, you can never have the video viewfinder fill the inner screen in the most appropriate landscape orientation.

It seems that the camera wants to be aligned in relation to the camera sensor, not the shape of your screen. As the manufacturer, you have to pick which display you want to prioritize. You could rotate the cameras 90 degrees and prioritize the inner screen, but that would deprioritize the outer screen. Even so, I think that would be a good decision. Many professionals get some kind of external screen that offers a bigger viewfinder, because filming on a bigger viewfinder is a nicer experience. You can also record video in an “immersive” 3:4 aspect ratio, but that’s not appropriate for any other device, so it seems like a bad idea. I just want to record the normal 16:9 using the inner display in landscape mode.

As always, foldables are incredible for games. Android games scale a lot more reliability to different screen sizes, making them one of the best uses of big-screened devices. It’s actually hard to find a game that doesn’t scale gracefully, especially for the PC-port types of games I normally play.

The durability (and support) question

The plastic screen protector doesn’t run edge-to-edge, leaving a gutter of unprotected OLED around the perimeter of the phone. Credit: Ron Amadeo

Outside of Google, I was apparently the first person to ever break a Pixel Fold. Since the phone hit the streets, though, there have been a few more reports of units breaking. Foldables all have delicate screens that can spontaneously shatter from normal usage, and with every foldable release, without exception, you’ll see a wave of posts about broken devices.

What matters is how the company deals with the broken screens, and Google support has a terrible reputation for helping customers. There are only a few broken Pixel Folds out there, but we already have a Google Support Horror Story™ from someone with a broken device. Here’s Reddit user floatingOnTheForth dealing with a broken Fold:

Google support was quick to help me get a replacement device ordered. The only issue is that they put in the wrong address and claim they have “no way of changing it” even though the device hasn’t shipped yet. So it is now shipping to a different state and will be either stuck in the FedEx system until it is eventually returned or will be signed by someone at the other address.

Here’s the final kick to the groin, Google charged me for the replacement device. In other words I have now paid for two devices, one doesn’t work, and the other is being shipped to the wrong address. I have now spent $4k on two devices… one is broken… and the other will most likely be lost in the aether of the black hole that is the undelivered/lost packages of FedEx.

A few days later, the user offered an update: “We’re on Day 6 and I still don’t have a definitive answer on anything. My case has been ‘escalated to a specialist team’ (whatever that means) and Google Support refuses to give me a timeframe or let me talk to someone higher than bottom-tier customer support.” I bring this up because it’s exactly how most people predicted this would go.

Some day, Google will have a series of Pixel Fold parts available through a partnership with iFixit, but that’s not the case right now. iFixit is still overdue for Pixel 7a parts, a phone that came out months ago. It will be interesting to see how much something like the inner screen will cost.

Durability concerns are easily the biggest barrier to buying a Pixel Fold. I wish a company like Corning would provide a fix for all the problems with foldables, but for now, we have these delicate devices. Plenty of people buy sports cars that have a history of being unreliable and just deal with them constantly being in and out of the shop. Foldables still feel like that.

A fun and expensive luxury item

The Pixel Fold proves that Google has a vision for foldables that isn’t just a copy of what everyone else is doing. The focus on tablet apps is something only an ecosystem provider like Google can really take on, and it’s exactly the kind of work Google should be doing. If Google can stick with this sort of thing (that’s a big “if”), it can bring a lot of value to foldables.

The hardware of the Pixel Fold is very impressive. Google isn’t usually able to lead the industry in things like battery density and thinness, but the Pixel Fold actually uses better hardware than what you can buy from the competition.

We’re at the point where most Google apps have some kind of special display mode for foldables, and all the heavy hitters are using a UI that gives some thought to bigger-screen devices. The actual benefits over a normal phone are what will make or break a foldable. Considering the extra weight, cost, and worry about durability, will a Pixel Fold make you more productive than you’d be on a regular phone? Not necessarily.

For a device that should be focused on better productivity, some of Android’s most important interfaces didn’t take on that challenge. While a ton of work has been poured into the apps, the mandatory home screen launcher is a major issue. A closed Pixel Fold is a lot worse than my daily driver phone, just because I can’t fit everything I want onto the home screen. The Pixel Fold’s front display is shorter than a normal phone, but the real issue is that the home screen isn’t customizable.

Google Pixel Fold

$1800 at Amazon 800 at Google

With Nova launcher, I can manage eight rows of stuff on my phone, but the Pixel Fold’s launcher only gives you four rows to work with. My setup is probably an extreme case, but anyone used to a custom launcher will be very disappointed in what Google is offering here. “More stuff on your screen” should be a major selling point of any foldable, but the sub-par home screen experience means you’re often getting less.

The major triumph of the Pixel Fold is that Google looked at its app designs and said, “These need to change for tablets and foldables.” Now it needs to do the same for many of Android’s core UI elements. The separate status and gesture navigation bars are not appropriate for these height-limited devices, and they need to go. Google needs to give up on the idea of recycling the phone UI and build something designed for foldable devices. The company had the right idea with Android 3.0 Honeycomb: one solid bar across the bottom of the screen that contained everything.

The notification panel is another core OS element that doesn’t feel like it’s making the most of a big screen. You only get a phone notification panel with a useless quick settings panel next to it. Just as apps understand they can’t show the same old interface on a large screen, the notification panel should be a big, full-screen interface showing more content and more actions. It needs a major overhaul for large-screen devices.

Google latched on to the “phones, but bigger” interface style after the first failure of Android tablets, but Google needs to return to the bespoke interface design of the Honeycomb era if it wants this second swing at big screens to work. Features like the bottom tablet taskbar are a good start.

How much you’ll like the Pixel Fold will depend on what apps you use and if they’re set up for foldables. I mostly live in Google’s apps and play the occasional game, and those are all great. It’s hard to get over the home screen, though. I feel more productive on a regular phone because I can set up the primary interface the way I like.

The good

Google somehow managed to win the hardware wars, turning in a device that is thinner than the competition, with a bigger battery.
The tablet-first foldable design is a real differentiator from other foldables.
Google did a ton of app work, turning in great foldable designs for a lot of its primary apps.
The soft-touch glass back is back! It’s scratch resistant, has great grip, and doesn’t show fingerprints.

The bad

The Pixel Launcher is very limiting, and there are no alternatives for foldables.
The navigation and status bars need a major overhaul for big-screen devices. Google needs to stop using the phone UI and switch back to something like the single-bar honeycomb UI.
The notification panel, one of Android’s most important interfaces, is just the phone version. It needs to take better advantage of the big screen.
In-screen fingerprint readers (yes, two of them) would be better than the small and finicky side reader.

The ugly

Nobody at Google seems to understand the status and navigation bar settings. They can be clear, offering a beautiful full-screen UI, but most apps, even Google ones, don’t bother to set them up correctly.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Ron Amadeo Reviews Editor

Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He loves to tinker and always seems to be working on a new project.

136 Comments