Foldable devices have always appealed to me, someone who spends a lot of time on their phone ranging from casually scrolling TikTok or watching YouTube videos to answering a good amount of emails or writing articles on the go, but no device has ever quite nailed it until now. I’m a pretty staunch iPhone user day-to-day, just purely because of the ecosystem, but the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the closest an Android device has come to pulling me way from iPhone – it’s that good
Whilst Google released the original Pixel Fold last year (it didn’t make its way to Australia), this device has almost nothing in common with it outside of the fact that it’s a foldable. The dimensions have totally changed with the device being taller and less wide which makes it less awkward in both folded and unfolded forms.
On the outside, the phone has a 6.3-inch OLED Actua display with a 1080 x 2424 resolution. Whilst using the phone closed, it feels like you’re using any standard smart phone, which is a good thing. It doesn’t feel compromised at all even in closed position, which is great for quickly scrolling social media or replying to a text message.
With the phone opened, you have a massive 8-inch OLED Super Actua internal display with an almost perfectly square 2076 x 2152 resolution. Both screens are hugely improved on the original with a peak brightness of 2700 nits and 120hz refresh rates. The crease in the internal display is almost not noticeable with the device laying totally flat as well.
The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the thinnest foldable on the market, taking the crown from the Z Fold 6 and that goes a long way to making this a great phone to use in both positions. When closed, it doesn’t feel too bulky, being just a little bit thicker than most standard phones, and when you’ve got the display opened, the size, weight and dimensions give you a bunch of extra screen real estate without feeling awkward to hold, improving on a lot of other foldables that I’ve used.
Google has done a great job in making the transition seamless between both displays and I’m sure this is thanks to the flagship Tensor G4 processor. There wasn’t a single time that I opened the phone up and didn’t have exactly what I was looking at on the outer display and visa versa. Launching apps into split screen works perfectly, and there’s a bunch of improvements made for tabletop mode, where you can fold up the phone and place it down for easy scrubbing of YouTube videos and such.
My favourite use of the 9 Pro Fold was for gaming, where you can really take advantage of that gorgeous 8-inch display to really immerse yourself in any game. Games such as Disney Speedstorm can also take advantage of the Tabletop mode so that you can treat the system like a Nintendo DS in clamshell mode, with what you’re playing appearing on the top screen whilst the bottom screen has your controls. There’s a number of other games that let you do this too, and I hope it becomes the norm.
There’s a number of great features that take advantage of the inner and outer screens at the same time with Live Transcribe letting you dictate on the inner screen whilst someone stands on the opposite side to see what you’re saying and talk back, there’s a really cool photo feature called ‘Made You Look’ which puts a number of cute animations on the cover display for children so you can get their attention whilst gaming.
Obviously though, one of the best parts of a foldable is the fact that you can use the outer screen to look at yourself whilst you taking selfie photos using the good lenses, and that’s super intuitive here too. I will say though, if there’s one thing that stops this from being a perfect device, it is the cameras, and that’s not because they’re bad, but because it’s a bit of a shame that they’re a little bit of a step down from the 9 Pro, especially given it’s in the same range.
In saying that, what is on offer here is still absolutely fantastic. You’ve got the same 10MP selfie cam on the external display and internal display (down from 42mp on the 9 Pro), a 48MP main lens (down from 50MP on the 9 Pro), and 10.5MP ultrawide and 10.8MP telephoto lens (down from 48MP for both on the 9Pro).
Still all absolutely fantastic cameras that take great photos with great vibrancy and it’s hard to go wrong with the shots that they produce, but I’d have loved to have seen the same lenses that we got on the 9 Pro which I reviewed a few weeks ago and absolutely loved. I also don’t think the camera bump is as nicely handled as it is on those devices either.
With the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, you get pretty much all of the same AI features that came with the standard 9 Pro XL. Building on the likes of Magic Eraser, Add Me is a brand new feature that essentially allows you to add the photographer into the photo with a second pass. This basically guides you through the process of taking a photo, then telling you to line it up in the exact same spot to add the person that took the first photo. It works super well, and whilst it once again raises the question of what is reality and what is the purpose of a photo, it does its job well if you want to use it.
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Magic Editor from last year has some improvements now as well, with the ability to reframe photos which is super helpful for turning photos into different dimensions, or maybe you want a more zoomed out image. Again, it just depends what you’re wanting to use it for, and does make you question reality at certain points, but it works really damn well. You can also re-imagine photos in Magic Editor, which is basically just using AI to re-write parts of the photos to change the scenery which is a lot of fun to play with.
Probably the biggest addition of AI comes in the way of the assistant, which now uses Gemini out of the box. I hadn’t used Gemini too much, but these devices come installed with it as the main assistant as well as one year free of Gemini Advanced through Google One AI Premium ($32 a month after that) which allows you to use Gemini Live.
I was really impressed with how quick and responsive Gemini was as a regular assistant but it was Gemini Live that made me a believer in AI. This basically allows you to pull up a responsive AI bot that is responsive and takes into context what you’ve said and also remembers past conversations, so that it’s a lot more natural than your usual assistant. Testing with the likes of my partner and mother, we were all super impressed with how natural it was and what it knew about the variety of things that we were asking it.
It’s quite clear that there’s still a bit to go with this though, as it definitely could do better at integrating into other apps, and there was also times that it wouldn’t remember previous things that we’d spoken about which breaks the experience a little, but when it works, it feels quite magical and like a legitimately great use of AI that could change the way we use our phones.
Pixel Screenshots is another great new app that utilises AI to make your life easier. I’m somebody that takes a lot of screenshots (over 65,000 to be exact), and this app basically helps you not only sort these and create labels for your screenshots, but you can literally just ask it to search for something and it does a great job of finding it.
All-in-all, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold does a lot of things extremely well, and I think it’s a great second attempt at this category for Google, that can only get better with time.
