The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is a fine successor to last year’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but it’s not the 2025 foldable phone you should buy.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| IP68 water resistance | Chunky design compared to the Galaxy Z Fold7 |
| Wide array of AI features | Expensive to buy, expensive to keep premium AI features running |
| Unfolding to a tablet size remains fun | Battery life is somehow worse than last year’s model |
Score: 3.5/5
In this review
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Specifications
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Design
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Camera
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Performance
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Battery
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold used in this review was loaned to me by Google Australia for the purposes of this review. As always, whether a product is loaned to me or sent to me on a permanent basis has no effect on my end review, and brands do not get any oversight or early access to my reviews; this is a principle I’ve held to for more than 25 years of reviewing to date, and I’m not going to change now.
I mention this because increasingly Internet reviews are plagued by paid content offers masquerading as reviews, AI slop masquerading as reviews and grifters out for freebies. It’s not how I operate at ART and will not be, and I feel that the only way to combat the perception of “no online professional reviews can be trusted” is to be 100% transparent and upfront.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
Last year was the first year that Google brought its foldable phone to Australian audiences officially, and only its second take at what a foldable phone could be. For a second effort, there was a lot to like about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and that started with the design.
Also read:
Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold Review
Here’s the thing about the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s design compared to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
It’s basically identical, at least from an external perspective. Both phones are the same size, and they’re the same weight, even though Google has mixed up its colour formula for this year’s iteration.
It’s available in Moonstone or Jade, or for those of us who like actual meaningful colour names, grey or very pale green. It’s the latter Jade model that Google sent my way, and it’s a very subtle colour accent, almost white in some lighting conditions, though easily identifiable next to the Porcelain white of last year’s iteration.
No prizes for guessing which Pixel Fold is which.
There are some minor design differences in play. For whatever reason, the SIM card tray – the Pixel 10 Pro Fold supports a single Nano SIM plus eSIM – shifts from the bottom to the top of the exterior cover display side of the phone.
In terms of the display, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold does feature a slightly larger external display, thanks to a smaller bezel with a 6.4 inch 2364×1080 60-120Hz OLED display, compared to the 6.3 inch 2364×1080 60-120Hz OLED on the older model.
That does technically mean that the older Pixel 9 Pro Fold has a better PPI (Pixels Per Inch) rating, but unless you’ve got the vision capabilities of Clark Kent (so I hear, just a rumour basically) you’re unlikely to notice that.
What you might notice is the bump upwards in brightness to 3,000 nits, making it somewhat easier to discern in bright outdoor lighting conditions, though the Pixel 9 Pro Fold already did pretty well on that score.
The inner display on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is essentially the same as last year’s model, with an 8 inch, 2152×2076 pixel 1-120Hz flexible OLED screen, though again you do get a bump up in brightness to 3,000 nits. Last year, I picked the Pixel 9 Pro Fold as superior over that year’s Galaxy Z Fold6 due to having a larger display.
That’s no longer the case for the exceptional Galaxy Z Fold7, however, which matches the internal display size of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold while presenting a significantly slimmer phone that’s easier to pop into your pocket.
The biggest changes to the Pixel 10 Pro Fold in design terms come in the durability stakes… maybe.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is the first foldable phone to come with an IP68 rating for water resistance, not that I’m going to suggest that anyone should go swimming with a phone that costs this much.
That would be a remarkably stupid thing to do, but I do have to applaud Google’s engineers for cracking the water resistance puzzle ahead of Samsung in this particular respect. No, I haven’t drowned the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, because as I’ve commented previously, so much of that kind of testing is just destruction porn for its own sake.
However, I haven’t been able to ignore – if only because YouTube seems intent on showing it to me over and over again – that somebody has put the Pixel 10 Pro Fold under significant duress, and in ways that are at least to a degree more measurable.
That’s… not a good look, though I will point out that the thumbnail is designed in a somewhat clickbait style, and the way that the phone is bent backwards after it’s clearly already broken isn’t something anyone sane would actually do.
That’s pushing a point that nobody would realistically make, veering into the very destruction porn side of matters that I’m not a fan of.
My takeaway from that kind of testing is that, yes, it’s still breakable, and not as robust as Google makes out – but bending it back and forth until it breaks is really only showing that (quelle surprise!) it will break.
Ideally, don’t break phones.
Camera
It’s long (and annoyingly) been the case that foldable phones, despite their high price points haven’t quite enjoyed the best in camera optics that a given brand can offer.
That’s still true for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which features a primary 48MP wide, 10.5MP ultra-wide and 10.8MP 5x Optical Telephoto lens at the rear of the phone, plus selfie lenses in both the cover display and unfolded display with 10MP sensors.
Premium phones often up the ante year on year in terms of camera optics, but that’s not what Google has done with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold.
It runs on the exact same camera hardware as last year’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Last year I described the cameras on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold in the following way:
“The actual performance of the Pixel 9 Pro Fold as a camera phone is fine for what it is, which essentially means for most users it’s going to be more than enough.”
The same is true for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and the problem there is that this means that it’s a phone that’s only really pitching towards the upper end of mid-range phones rather than the premium space it really occupies in price terms if camera quality is important to you.
In theory, the upgraded image signal processor in the Tensor G5 could lead to changes in the way that the Pixel 10 Pro Fold takes shots, but if it does, I’m struggling to see it in action.
All of this might seem theoretical more than practical, because nobody should be looking for year-on-year upgrade paths for smartphones anyway, but it’s ultimately a little disappointing when there’s actual competition in the larger foldable space out there for Google to essentially be taking a year off from improving its camera hardware.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold can take some nice pictures, and its use of AI in some circumstances can lead to better shots than you might expect.
Basic daylight flower shot? No worries.
Selfie photo. Note the AI issues around the glasses — my head doesn’t cut in like that in real life, though that’s a super-common problem for a lot of phones.
Obligatory cat photo. Google knows what the Internet is for.
Its telephoto lens for example only pushes up to 20x, the same as the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and while that’s very conservative against the likes of the kinds of non-folding camera phones you can get for this kind of money, it does give it some power for getting better freehand zoom shots than you might expect to see.
Ultrawide shot of the clock tower at Sydney Central Station.
Wide lens shot of the same clock. It’s still a bit far away to read easily, though.
2x zoom — a crop of the primary wide lens with a little Google AI thrown into the mix.
The 5x native telephoto zoom lets us read the clock easily. (Or I could do the same thing with the Pixel 10 Pro fold because it knows the time anyway, but…)
20x zoom, nicely AI smoothed. That’s a bit bigger than a pocket watch.
You do also get a dual screen mode called “Instant View” that lets you see the last shot you took with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold if the phone is unfolded when you’re taking photos.
Instant View ensures I capture Mini Mecha Godzilla’s good side. Presuming he has a good side, that is.
The idea here is that you might not miss those temporal shots if you can see what you’re taking straight away, which is fine in theory, but the reality of shooting photos with a tiny tablet remains the same; it’s a clunky way to manage photo taking.
Google also incorporates its AI-led Camera Coach application into the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s camera array. I do love the idea behind Camera Coach, letting novice users find out what their phone is capable of by analysing the photographic scene and providing tips on how to improve the shot.
Smart stuff, though I don’t quite get why Google couldn’t make it a feature drop for older Pixel devices, and it’s still plagued by being quite slow. If you’re after tips on how to take a better shot of a moving subject, Camera Coach is essentially useless.
A moving tram isn’t suitable for Camera Coach, because it’s moving.
Also, for some reason, I feel like a Golden Gaytime. Just me?
Once again, I fall back to the word “Fine” to describe the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s camera capabilities. There’s nothing terrible here, but for the kind of money that Google wants for it, I think it’s reasonable to expect something slightly more sexy than just “fine”.
Performance
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is, like the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro XL, built around Google’s own Tensor G5 hardware, paired up with 16GB of RAM and either 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage, depending on your budget. You can’t expand the inbuilt storage, but Google sure would love it if you dropped some cash on a Google Drive backup plan – more on that below.
Google does this stupendously annoying thing with its new Pixel phones where, for the first month or so from their debut, some standard benchmarks are earmarked as “not compatible” with the new hardware.
Not other Android apps, just benchmarks, which is cutely stupid when you realise that you can sideload them, but moreover, the Tensor G5 has been out in the Pixel 10/Pro/XL phones for more than a month and it works just fine from Google Play there. It’s so transparently a barrier to comparison there, because Google knows its silicon isn’t quite as fast as that of its competitors.
So how much slower is it? I sideloaded Geekbench 6 onto the Pixel 10 Pro Fold – naughty me, Google will give me a stern looking at, I’m sure – to get a picture of how the Pixel 10 Pro Fold compares against other large form factor foldable phones.
I don’t have a figure there for the original Pixel Fold because Google never released that phone in Australia, but any way you look at it, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold doesn’t come off all that well, though it does represent a performance bump up from the Pixel 9 Pro Fold at least.
It’s a similar story looking at GPU performance, by way of (sigh) sideloaded 3DMark Wild Life Extreme:
I have long made the comment that at the premium end of the market, actual benchmark dominance perhaps doesn’t mean quite what it used to, because most phone users aren’t likely to stress out the internals of their phones to a degree that totally taxes their capabilities.
The catch here, I feel, is that these large form factor foldable phones have a lot more scope to do so, because you’re not just talking about a standard slab phone here; you’re also holding a small tablet in your hands.
While it’s disappointing that Samsung dropped S-Pen support in the Galaxy Z Fold7, it does do a lot with Android to enable multi-window displays and even floating app displays to let you properly multi-task. Samsung developed that capability some years back and talked at the time about how it did so with Google’s support, being a very prominent Android partner.
You might think that Google would somewhat return that partnership expertise with the same kind of multi-window support, but it’s just not so. You can run with a split screen array of two apps, adjustable horizontally or vertically, and… that’s about all.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold comes with Google’s typical 7 years of OS, security updates and Pixel feature drops promise, and you can expect to see Android updates first on Pixel devices. That’s the advantage to being on the hardware that’s made by the OS manufacturer, of course, though it’s matched here by Samsung’s promises.
Google also bundles in a year’s subscription to its Google AI Pro platform with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which also includes 2TB of Google Drive backup for documents, photos and videos.
Not a bad value proposition given that Google wants $32.99/month for AI Pro, which means that it’s a “saving” of $395.88 over that first year.
Herein lies the trap, however, because if you do get addicted to all that tasty storage or Google Gemini’s more advanced features at that tier, you’re then going to be on the hook for $395.88 (or more, if prices go up) per year for the privilege.
Google is very heavily invested in AI for its Pixel phones, but there’s little here in an AI sense that isn’t on the Pixel 10 Pro XL or Pixel 10; you can go read my reviews of those to see how well features like Magic Cue actually work – or in my case, seem not to. I think I’ve made my broader position on AI clear by now, no?
Also read
Pixel 10 Pro XL Review
On the networking front, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is Wi-Fi 7 capable (good), and 5G capable too, but with a slight twist of the knife. Google was the only manufacturer to offer up 5G phones with full mmWave and sub-6Ghz support in Australia, but this year it’s decided to cut corners and just go with slower sub-6Ghz only.
I was cranky with Google when it did this with the Pixel 10 Pro XL, and I’m cranky here with it too, because it does mean that, oddly, last year’s Pixel phones are technically superior phones. That’s not how it’s meant to be, Google!
Battery
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is built around a 5015mAh sealed battery, a bump upwards from the 4,650mAh power pack found in last year’s Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
That kind of upwards stretch for phone batteries is rather expected in premium models, but as always, battery capacity numbers aren’t that meaningful without knowing how well a given phone will perform in day-to-day operation.
I’ve already seen with the Pixel 10 Pro XL that the Tensor G5 can be a somewhat power-hungry creature, so I was interested to see how the Pixel 10 Pro Fold might stack up against other foldables, given it’s running on a smaller battery than the regular Pixel 10 Pro XL is.
As always, my first point of comparison is my YouTube streaming battery test; you can read more about that here or watch the video below to find out how I test mobile phone batteries.
Here’s how the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold compares against other large form foldables:
96% in the first hour does point to a phone that should be good for most people’s daily use, and this is the one area where the Pixel 10 Pro Fold does outdo the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 by a significant margin.
However it is equally notable that despite a bump upwards in battery capacity, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is outpaced in this test by last year’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which is disappointing. Phones generally, but especially premium models should ideally improve their battery life year-on-year, not slide backwards!
One area where Google has finally stepped forwards in battery terms is in charging. There’s no charger in the box, so you’ll have to bring your own, but like the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro XL, it’s compatible with the Qi2 wireless charging standard, which means you get all that nice magnetic alignment and slightly faster charging speeds as a result.
One caveat here that annoys me, given the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s high asking price is that it’s capable of only 15W Qi2 speeds where the actually-cheaper Pixel 10 Pro XL gets Qi2 charging at 25W.
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Alex’s Verdict
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is Google’s best foldable phone to date, even if it really is just an incremental update to the prior model.
However, the reality for these large foldable phones is that their premium pricing means that they’re out of the grasp of most buyers, because lots of people simply don’t have $2,699 or more to spend on a folding phone. It’s technically cheaper than the Galaxy Z Fold7’s official RRP, but the reality here is that it’s not that hard to find Samsung’s foldable at the same kind of price or cheaper. About five seconds searching on Amazon (affiliate link, to be transparent) found one that’s substantially cheaper at the time of writing, for example.
Google has somewhat rested on its laurels with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold where Samsung’s actually innovated, and I do have to say that if I was spending this kind of premium money, the Galaxy Z Fold7 is the phone that I’d be buying this year.
The Galaxy Z Fold7 is thinner, it’s got better cameras and superior application performance. While the Pixel 10 Pro Fold does best it in battery life terms and Qi2 compatibility, I’m not sure that’s enough to make it the better option.
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Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Pricing and availability
The Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold retails in Australia with pricing at $2,699 (256GB), $2899 (512GB) or $3289 (1TB). The model tested was the 256GB variant.
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