introduction
hey what's up I'm Yash here yo the Google pixel fold is a weird phone there are so many things about this thing that are unusual so I and many other people have been waiting for a folding pixel this is something we imagined was coming eventually so it is kind of surreal to actually be holding and have been using and testing this phone I've been using it for about a week now and boy do I have a lot of thoughts.
so I guess let's just start with the design I really like a lot of the decisions they've made with this foldable which really optimize far towards it being thin and passport shaped originally when I first got to play with it I was saying man this could be the best foldable to use wall closed and I do now stand by that take it's the easiest best foldable to use when it's closed but unfortunately.
Display And Back Panel
it does have a much lower ranking for using it while open so the front screen is 5.8 inches diagonally it's got these curved edges you can see and it's actually fairly thin bezels all the way around the rails all the way around the phone itself and the hinge are stainless steel and the whole thing is relatively thin it's just bordering on a little bit thicker than.
Outside Brightness
the thickest normal phone you can get I think the number is like 12 millimeters total you can see there's no air gap in the middle so honestly yeah I've spent a lot of time using the outside screen like a normal phone and it's just the most reachable usable outside screen of any folding phone you unlock it with the fingerprint reader on the side which is also the power button and it's pretty quick this is a 120 hertz OLED display that gets up to 1550 nits Peak brightness so it's plenty visible outside.
it looks really good to me in most situations I mean I'm impressed this is a premium outside display which I mean I guess I should be for eighteen hundred dollars but we'll we'll get to the price a little bit later the point is though I I've always said the best foldable have to be usable as just a regular phone too and this one does accomplish that great so then you open up the phone and then that's when things start to get a little more weird.
Weird And Looking Good
so you can't exactly open this phone with one hand I've definitely tried I kind of try this with every foldable some are easier than others this one's pretty much a no-go but once you get it open when you're in there you're greeted with an interior 7.6 inch folding AMOLED display also 120 Hertz and also plenty bright up to 1450 nits really nice size. it's reminiscent of that Oppo Find N2 foldable but there are a couple of things to note here's where some of the weird starts so first of all the crease is pretty average it's definitely not dramatically worse than others I've seen but you can for sure see it if you're looking for it and you can kind of feel.
Folding Test Feel Good
it but because it's through the middle of the screen you aren't usually running your finger over it unlike the vertically folding phones so it's not really a big deal it's easy to disappear to your eyes as you just look at content and use it normally but then there was just some talk about how it didn't seem like the phone fully unfolds to 180 degrees and well I don't know this hinge is really firm so you can Fold It Up halfway or any angle you want really easily which is awesome but then when you fold it flat visually it looks pretty flat but when you put it on a table since there's a camera bump it becomes more clear as it's rocking back and forth it's maybe like one or two degrees short of flat it's kind of weird.
I mean you can you can force it to get to flat or even a little bit past that but it really doesn't feel good to do that anyway then there is the bezel as you've probably seen by now this phone does have a slightly bigger top and bottom bezel than some other folding phones.
Compare with Samsung Fold
it is noticeable at first when you just look at the bezels uh but again it's one of those things where you start using the phone and it is easy to forget about you know I think a lot of videos are going to hold it up side by side next to the Samsung fold and then it's like oh yeah clearly one of them has a dramatically thinner bezel and it is really noticeable but just using a phone it looks fine and Google actually says that this was an intentional decision so what they were saying is they were again biasing so much towards it being thin that for some of the hinge components.
Amazing Hardware
they move them out and above and below the hinge instead of in that z-axis space so that it could be as thin as it is but now you end up with a little bit of extra bezel above oven below the screen but it did allow them room to put in a real webcam or selfie camera instead of a under display one but also I think this is a little bit along the lines of Google the pixel has never really been all about pristine super highly engineered like amazing Hardware they've sort of flexed their strengths on the software side and uh I think there's a little bit of that here too either way you can check the box of ipx8 water resistance which is nice I do really like this satin finish on the back.
Camera Testing
which does a good job of minimizing fingerprints and looks pretty good and the camera bump doesn't go all the way to the very edges to meet the rails of the phone that would have been tough with the foldable but I do still think they did a good job of maintaining the whole pixel aesthetic performance is weirdly good it's it's really really good it's actually the best of any pixel phone even though it's using the same chip it's the tensor G2 from the pixel 7 and 7 Pro but it's yeah.
Smoother And Faster
it feels smoother and faster and more consistent than the pixel 7 and 7 Pro so you know maybe it could be that 12 gigs of RAM that are in here it also has 256 or 512 gigs of ufs 3.1 storage but yeah it's been butter the whole time I am very happy to report now it's still a pixel so I have to add the disclaimer that it might not stay this way you know pixels have a history of this accelerated aging which is even more of a bummer when you pay this much for a phone but you know I can't report on that until we actually get to a year from now.
Battery Life Is Amazing
so the best I can do is tell you how it's acting now and it is acting great the other thing though that I'm kind of actually hoping changes over time is the battery life because the battery life in the first this week that I've been testing the phone has not been great uh usually actually I can kind of just throw away the first day or two of me testing this one because it's you know still setting it up still connecting everything and getting it working properly and then.
I can start looking at the numbers but basically every day since I first got this phone I've kind of had the same experience which is not that great four hours of screen on time at the end of my day um which is not nearly as high as some of the flagships out there it is a 4 800 milliamp hour battery.
Battery Test
which is really good for a foldable but not gigantic for a giant screen on the inside so pixels have this feature called adaptive battery and sometimes they can get a little bit better over time depends on your use depends on who you are your mileage may vary um but hey I've gotten I would say this is like C plus battery life and the more.
I think about it I've been using a lot of the phone wall closed which means it's the smaller outside screen and so if I had been using the larger inside screen even more it would not have gone better so yeah c c plus for battery but I want to talk about the software experience here because it is a pixel after all and there is one weird thing so this was a very interesting phone to test because Google had to do a lot of software work.
Apps Testing
I was excited to try all of it you know Google's apps are all these beautiful tablet optimized apps now they're so thoughtfully designed for the phone with this size screen they all look normal on the outside screen but on the inside you know Google Drive has this nice slide out sidebar and multi-column view Gmail's New multi-column View is great the weather app the new weather app is absolutely fantastic Google Calendar is completely redesigned like there's just so much good stuff and then the new dock sort of ties it all together.
Multitasking And Different Layouts
so this dock I talked about on the pixel tablet you swipe up slightly from the bottom and the home bar turns into your home screen dock so this is the the apps that you have on the bottom of your home screen and you can quickly switch between these apps or launch into multitasking super.
easily so just like the other folding phones I feel like I feel like I'm multitasking God when I'm using this huge folding phone open and just just type it away but here is the weird part as far as I can remember uh every other foldable phone allows you to set up the home screens and stuff on the outside screen and then the inside screen is separate you can have a separate set of widgets you can go crazy and make a different layout on the inside here and on this phone you cannot do that so look right now my outside screen is these three pages this one with the icons in the weather and then this calendar widget one and then this third one.
so when I open up the phone that's exactly mirrored here the left one is the first home screen then the right one is the second one and I swipe over and here's the third one but if I like take this raindrop icon and move it over here and then when I go back to closed it's also moved the Raindrop icon there because it's keeping them exactly mirrored at all times.
Others Features
which is fine I think that actually makes a lot of sense especially for beginners like I I bet if if Apple made a folding iPhone right now they would do the exact same thing because iPhone users are used to not having a ton of customization on their home screens but I haven't found a way to unlock that at all like there's no I haven't seen any home screen setting or display setting to actually be able to set up a different home screen on the inside versus the outside just feels kind of on Android like to me like I feel like I can't be the only one who's spending eighteen hundred dollars on a first gen folding phone.
Great Performance
who would like to have some apps on the outside screen and then like a bunch of widgets on the inside screen you know you actually can't even span the Middle With One widget because it's treating them basically as two separate home screens even though it's all with one big folding screen I just found that so weird so anyway aside from.
that I really enjoyed using the pixel fold seriously between the great performance and the Google software you know all the pixel stuff Google Assistant call screening Etc.
it's really easy to get past the weirdness the other thing you typically expect out of a pixel though is good cameras so let's talk about this camera situation for a little bit because as I've said everywhere you look there's just a little bit of weird.
Camera Features Is Amazing
so first of all actually there are five cameras on this phone there is the nine megapixel hole punch camera on the front on the outside screen then there's an eight megapixel camera on the inside up in that bezel then there's the three primary cameras on the back the thing with these back cameras is because of how thin the phone is there's definitely not enough room to physically fit the same size sensors and Optics that you have in the flagship pixel phone.
so there is all new stuff here and it's a little bit smaller so there's a 48 megapixel main camera a 10 megapixel Ultra wide and a 10 megapixel 5x telephoto pixel fold photos feel a lot like pixel 7A photos which isn't an insult that's just to say that they're in the same style you know the same contrast pixel style but overall are definitely a step down in quality from the flagships they're a bit noisier a bit more muted in the colors especially with the ultra wide and it takes a bit longer to gather the same amount of light as the larger Flagship sensors.
Video Shooting Test
also if you want to see video from the pixel fold I actually shot the entire last autofocus video on the pixel fold so you can clearly see it's a step down from some of the other flagships I've shot with there's a lot of noise and the darker areas of the frame but I will say it was definitely easier to shoot with because it's a folding phone.
so I can just unfold it and I see the viewfinder and I can frame things up with the primary camera so that's an advantage but yeah it's not like you're gonna go out and shoot you know movies on this thing I mean Samsung has had to deal with the same type of thing like the the camera quality of their super expensive foldable phones has always been a slight step down from their you know big Flagship slab style phones so I think that's a fair comparison this is uh a step it's a notch down from the pixel Flagship cameras.
Compact Size
you know what's fun this is a this is technically a first gen device right this is the first time Google's ever made a foldable and on one hand you can kind of tell that they've at least learned some things from the other foldables already out there because this feels a little bit better in some ways like they've gone with this passport sized form factor and they've made conscious decisions to make it thin and there's some hinge Innovation here and it's kept.
Best Folding Display
the pixel aesthetic just a lot of good choices that are impressive for a first gen device but it's still clearly has some first gen shortcomings also that have me thinking well maybe the next one will be better you know like for the inside display the crease and the bezels and the 178 degree almost flat fold like maybe the next one will be better for the weak battery life like yes there is wireless charging but hey maybe the next one will have faster charging than the current Max of 30 watts and of course the app situation is still let's just say it's clearly imperfect so they've done a lot of good stuff with their software but some apps still look horrible I mean look at Instagram it just it looks terrible you can double tap to the left or to the right to move it over closer to the side where it's more reachable.
but still I mean that that is rough Twitter also looks horrible my golf app 18 birdies also not optimized even YouTube studio is just not optimized for this bigger screen and the list goes on and on and on maybe maybe that'll be better by the next one.
Casually And Pretty
so then the last weird thing about this phone is it is one thousand eight hundred dollars so of course that that prices out pretty much anyone who's just gonna like walk into a store casually and just get a normal upgrade for their phone it will be relegated to the early adopters the enthusiasts maybe people Read this Article uh and the pixel fans it's a smaller group but also I say weirdly enough.
I really like using this phone I like love using this phone it's got just the right set of quirks and features to that that I like it over the regular pixel which I had been using and also I think it's it's specifically because it's so well optimized for using it closed like I keep talking about how it's the best foldable to use closed.
it's got the right set of strengths and weaknesses that I spend most of my time just enjoying using it like a normal phone close and then every once in a while my 20 30 40 of the time that I open it up and use it it's just this whole new world and it's a nice benefit it's getting closer to that ideal folding phone for me.
Security And Design And Speakers
I really like it it's also Android 14 coming up soon uh five years of Promise security updates great haptics great speakers I mean this there's a lot of it's got just enough upside that I really like it I'm sure I'm looking forward to the next one still of course but for anyone else who's going to jump in on this first gen version just know what you're getting into it's a weird one.
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