Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold Review: Premium design that lacks premium power

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold has my favourite physical design for a foldable phone to date – so it’s a real pity it’s not more of a powerhouse device otherwise.

Pros	Cons
Large design works well inside and out	Tensor G4 is trailing the competition in pure power terms
7 Years of updates – and you’ll get them first	Cameras aren’t as good as the Pixel 9 Pro XL
Good all-day battery life	Tricky to accurately place on wireless chargers – and doesn’t work at all with the Pixel Stand!

Score: 4/5

 

In this review

Pixel 9 Pro Fold Specifications
Pixel 9 Pro Fold Design
Pixel 9 Pro Fold Camera
Pixel 9 Pro Fold Performance
Pixel 9 Pro Fold Battery
Pixel 9 Pro Fold Conclusion

While Google’s original Pixel Fold never saw release here in Australia, its successor, the rather awkwardly named Pixel 9 Pro Fold is being released here.

Like other premium-priced large format foldable phones, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is not inexpensive, and that’s putting it mildly. The price is likely to be off-putting to a lot of users… but not everyone, as Samsung has shown with the success of its similarly priced Samsung Galaxy Fold line over many years.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is arguably the biggest competitor that Samsung’s seen in the large foldable space so far; while Huawei had a few tilts at it with Mate X phones, and Oppo’s had one model – which I couldn’t get in for review, though there’s a fine rundown of it over at Pickr if you’re interested — there can’t be a bigger competitor than the owners of the source operating system.

All that presumes that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is a worthy competitor for folks willing to put down the serious money it commands.

The answer is… maybe. It depends a lot on what you want out of a premium phone, because there’s some areas where Google absolutely nails it… and a few where I’m left wanting.

Also read:

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 Review
Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold vs Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6

Design

If it wasn’t for its left side hinge and the side bezel it creates, you could pretty easily mistake the Pixel 9 Pro Fold for the Pixel 9, honestly. You’re faced at first with a 6.3 inch display, which is technically the same “size” screen as found on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6… but that’s a phone that’s much taller and thinner.

Is somebody lying to you, or it an optical illusion?

Actually, it’s neither, but instead essentially a mathematical quirk of how phone screens get measured diagonally. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 has nearly no bezels and a much thinner screen, where the Pixel 9 Pro Fold benefits from a more regular phone screen with a much higher resolution and marginally brighter display.

The one area where Google doesn’t win that battle is in screen refresh rates; while both phones will run to 120Hz, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s screen is a simpler OLED that switches between 60Hz and 120Hz where the Samsung can run from 1Hz to 120Hz as needed.

Open up the Pixel 9 Pro Fold and you’re faced with an 8 inch display that simply dwarfs that of the Galaxy Z Fold 6.

I’ve long described myself as a “fold guy” (it’s not that I'm bad at poker, I swear) because I figured that if you’re spending premium money then getting more screen makes more sense than just getting a smaller device as you do with the various competing flip phones in the market.

The larger expanse of the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s screen makes it a much better device for multitasking with apps side by side, or simply enjoying content scaled up to fit the small tablet form factor that you’re essentially playing with.

The one catch here is that not every app responds well at this particular size on Android; some will rescale nicely, but not everything. I’ve also noticed an odd bug when switching from the internal display to the external one where some apps – social media apps seem particularly prone to this – won’t scale correctly until you quit and relaunch them, which is irritating.

The issue of the crease in these larger phones always comes up as a concern, and it’s not one that Google’s managed to entirely avoid – but I do think it’s got a solution in hand that’s less evident visually than on Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6. The content you’re enjoying will of course make the crease stand out more or less.

Add Googly eyes (how appropriate!) to make the Pixel 9 Pro Fold look vaguely nervous.

Google only makes the Pixel 9 Pro Fold in two colour choices, either porcelain or black; it’s the former that it sent to me for the purposes of review, along with a simple case in the same colour. Adding the case in does add to the thickness of the phone, robbing it of its title as the thinnest large format folding phone. At the price Google’s asking, I’d still put a case on it anyway to protect it, but then I’m that guy who always pesters you to put a case on every single phone – and you probably already knew that!

Speaking of protection, Google is still playing catchup to Samsung when it comes to water and dust ingress protection. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is rated at IPX8, which means it should survive limited immersion in water, but dragging it through the sand dunes is a no-no.

Actually that’s true of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 as well, but it’s IP48 instead, which means that it’s also going to resist having ants or small detritutus entering its crevices; the Pixel 9 Pro Fold has no such tested resistance. For more on what all those numbers mean if you’re hopelessly lost, I’ve got a guide to water resistance (and why it isn’t “waterproofing”) on phones right here.

Camera

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold breaks with current Pixel styling, because it doesn’t have a camera bar – or even a camera lozenge/stadium as with the Pixel 9 Pro XL or Pixel 9 – at the rear.

Instead there’s a camera block that houses its rear cameras, while its selfie cameras sit on both the cover display and upper right corner of the primary display – no fancy (but disappointing) under-display cameras here!

Annoyingly, Google takes the same approach as Samsung when it comes to the camera optics on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, because while this is a seriously expensive smartphone, it doesn’t have the best cameras that Google brings to smartphone photography as part of its arsenal. If you want that, you’d want the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL instead, a phone that’s cheaper in every size and storage capacity than any Pixel 9 Pro Fold is.

What you get isn’t bad, to be clear, with a 48MP Wide, 10.5MP Ultrawide and 10.8MP 5x Telephoto on the back and your choice of 10MP selfie cameras for when you need a little ego stroking photo work doing. It’s just that – and this is in no way unique to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, I hate it equally on Samsung’s Fold phones too – you’re stuck spending way more on a phone that should be able to incorporate better sensors – but doesn’t.

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 lower specification of that primary wide lens combined with the telephoto lens does cut its effective zoom down to just 20x compared to 30x on the Pixel 9 Pro XL (or 30x on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 for that matter), though as with most of these long hybrid zooms, less is often more.

This shot of a mostly-sleeping goose (I think it’s a goose?) was taken at 20x, to avoid disturbing it.
Or getting beaked for disturbing it.

Google does offer a few tweaks specific to this model, most of which have been seen on similar Samsung phones, like a half-folded tabletop mode that gives you controls on one screen and camera viewfinder on the other, or flipping the screen to the external display when open to allow you to take selfies with the superior 48MP camera if you wish.

There’s an array of cute animated characters you can alternatively opt to display in a mode called “Made You Look” that feels tailor made for young families. All of my family are a little too old for this to be truly useful to me, but it’s certainly attention-getting fare.

Then there’s the AI side of matters.. and honestly, this is exactly the same crop of features as found in the Pixel 9 Pro XL, with the good (Zoom Enhance) matched up with the less-than-good (Reimagine). I won’t reinvent the wheel here; if you want to know what I think and what I’ve found in Google’s camera AI features, go read my Pixel 9 Pro XL review here, or watch the video below.

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold Sample Images

Performance

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold uses the same Tensor G4 processor found in the Pixel 9 Pro/Pro XL and Pixel 9 handsets, paired up with 16GB of RAM and either 256GB or 512GB of onboard storage. As with all Pixels, there’s no facility for storage expansion via microSD card.

The Pixel 9 Pro XL didn’t surprise me with its comparative performance against other flagships, because Google’s Tensor CPUs have been a step behind in pure performance terms since their inception… and the same is essentially true here as well.

The obvious competitors here are Samsung’s Galaxy Fold phones, so how does that Tensor G4 stack up there?

One surprise here just before actually writing up this review is that during my review period, Google lifted the block on the benchmarks I use (it’s a common thing it’s done for most Pixel phones to date) for the Pixel 9/Pro/XL phones, and the Fold as well, so I could fully benchmark them with versions of those apps direct from Google Play. Here’s how the it compares using Geekbench 6:

When last year’s Galaxy Fold is faster, it’s not a good look, Google. It’s not a situation that improves if we switch to GPU testing via 3DMark either.

I have made the observation previously that most flagship phones have more power than you’ll typically need, and that’s certainly true here.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold doesn’t feel “slow” relative to the Galaxy Z Fold 6 for example, though it does have less power to bring to bear if you’re multi-tasking with multiple apps open across the primary 8 inch display.

This is also an issue where Google’s big advantage in software updates concerns me. As with other Pixels, you get seven years of OS, security and Pixel Drop feature updates, and being Google you'll see them before any other Android phone. It is a little odd that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is launching with Android 14 rather than Android 15, but that's not what really makes me worried.

Over time the gap in performance is going to mean that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 – more powerful but also offering 7 years of updates – is likely to be able to implement features or run them better than the Pixel 9 Pro Fold can, even if Samsung users have to wait longer for their OS upgrades.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is 5G capable, and while Google Australia’s assertion to a room full of journalists (I was one of them) was that it was dropping mmWave 5G from the Pixel 9 Pro line because the Australian market didn’t need it, it seems like nobody told the Pixel 9 Pro Fold team that.

It’s the only Tensor G4 phone you can get in Australia that has both sub-6GHz and mmWave compatibility, and while you might not hit that much mmWave coverage in Australia just yet – in a weeks’ worth of testing I’ve not been able to go far enough afield myself to do so, to be 100% transparent here – there is a wider usage of it if you’re travelling internationally, especially in the US. I don’t get why Google didn’t keep it across all the Pro phones, but it is at least present here for the phone's single nano SIM or eSIM.

Then there’s the question of AI, and again I’m back in familiar territory with what Google’s offering here.

You get a year’s subscription to Gemini Advanced, along with the 2TB of Google Drive storage that comes with that tier, though it’ll cost you $32.99/month after that year is up.

For some business users I can see the utility of Gemini Advanced and having access across all their Google accounts and devices, but at the consumer level it’s not exactly essential, or all that well integrated across everything the Pixel 9 Pro Fold can do. Honestly it feels like the jury’s out as to whether consumers will pay for additional AI features at all right now.

Other features such as Pixel Studio for generating AI images from prompts are present, as is the database-creating Screenshots app. They’re fine for what they are, though I suspect most users will use dip into Pixel Studio as a neat gimmick once and then probably not again at all. Again, you can read all about those features in my Pixel 9 Pro XL review.

One curious missed trick for the Pixel 9 Pro is the lack of any kind of S-Pen equivalent for that gorgeous 8 inch display. While Samsung does still charge extra for its Fold-compatible S-Pens, it feels like such an obvious inclusion for Google to leverage its extra screen real estate and maybe even sell a few extra AI features along the way.

Battery

The Pixel 9 Pro fold manages to pack in a 4650mAh battery into its frame, slightly more than that of the rival Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, no doubt thanks to its more ample frame giving Google’s ex-HTC designers more space to stuff in battery cells.

To test out its battery endurance, I first ran it through my standard YouTube battery test, running a 1080p video at maximum brightness and moderate volume on the primary display.

What I’m looking for here is for as much over 90% as possible; phones that fall below that mark often struggle to last through a day’s usage. The history of these larger screen foldables is that they haven’t much failed the 90% mark… but often not by much. So how does it compare?

While it’s arguably even more impressive that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 matches the Pixel 9 Pro Fold – it’s got a higher power processor and slightly smaller battery – the practical reality here for the Google phone is that it should be good for all-day battery life.

Based on my more ad-hoc tests that’s certainly true; over a week’s testing I’ve typically found it down around 20-30% remaining battery capacity at the end of the day unless I’ve been hammering it particularly hard that day.

On the charging front, there’s no included charger, with the option for wired USB-C or wireless Qi charging. Google missed a trick not including Qi2 here, I feel – HMD Global beat them to the punch of having the first Qi2 Android phone in market -- and what’s even more unusual is that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold doesn’t work with the Pixel Stand charger either. That’s almost certainly down the location of its charging coils not lining up with the Pixel Stand.

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold: Alex’s Verdict

I love that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold exists, because it presents competition to Samsung’s near monopoly on large screen folding phones.

Google isn’t first there, but actually owning the OS behind Android and presenting an option that matches Samsung in terms of future updates is a big plus in my book. Also in the plus column is the way that Google makes intelligent use of size, both for its internal display and external display. I can (and have) seriously used just the external display without feeling like I had to pull it open, and the same just isn’t true for the Galaxy Z Fold 6.

However, I do have to balance that against the fact that it could be a more powerful camera competitor at this price… and a more powerful phone to boot. You’re paying a lot for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and for hundreds of dollars less you can get phones that are considerably faster. Having a lot of screen space is nice, but it’d be even nicer if the Pixel 9 Pro Fold had power to spare to run apps on that display.

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold: Pricing and availability

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold retails in Australia from $2,699.

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