Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold review: When you try your best but your best is not enough

Note: This review was first published on 19 November 2024.

It folds, but is it Pro?

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is Google’s second attempt at a high-end, book-style foldable phone, but it’s the first time the device is officially supported in Singapore.

In this iteration, Google has marketed it as a foldable version of its futuristic conventional Pixel 9 series phones. You get all the Gemini smarts, Pixel AI photo-editing tools, and the little optimisations on its standard bar-type handsets, alongside the same Google Tensor G4 chipset.

TL;DR version:



Pixel 9 Pro Fold is a nice foldable with excellent UI, photography, and secondary display, but its battery, performance, and high price severely limit its potential. 



It retails at S$2,399 (256GB) and S$2,579 (512GB) on the Google Store, iShopChangi, and Metapod. More retail information can be found here.

However, all these are on a foldable form factor with an 8-inch LTPO main display in near 1:1 aspect ratio, and a 6.3-inch secondary screen with a standard 20:9 aspect ratio. Google also has foldable-specific features, like Made You Look for photo-taking, a Taskbar for app shortcuts, and Split Screen for multi-app support. These are quire standard for high-end foldables currently on the market.

Is S$2,399 (256GB) a reasonable price to pay, when it has rivals like Honor and Samsung to contend with? Let’s find out.

Almost there with its design

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold shows how important a phone’s aesthetics and design are and how they inform the user experience. At first glance, it’s seemingly thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold6, which is a plus in our books.

The hinge feels sturdy and it's noticeably less rigid than the Galaxy Z Fold6. This makes for a more effortless unfolding experience than Samsung’s foldable. However, Google’s curved edges and smooth metallic sides make it hard to get a good grip when opening the two halves. We recommend buying a compatible phone case to give it a better grip.

Getting a case also fixes another design issue: the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s oddly shaped camera block. The island’s placement makes the phone wobble with only two corners touching the desk, folded or not. Google’s conventional Pixel 9 series devices don’t have this problem since the Camera Bar design runs across the back, making them more stable and balanced.

Another design gripe is the top and bottom left corners of the hinge frame, which gives the Pixel 9 Pro Fold a strange C-shaped silhouette sitting in your peripheral vision when you look at its secondary display. The rest of the phone looks like a careful work of art, but the front looks like something from the 2000s. It also affects the viewing experience, which we’ll touch on later.

Sadly, that wasn’t the last ergonomic problem the Pixel 9 Pro Fold had. Instead of optical or ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensors, Google placed a fingerprint sensor inside the device’s touch-sensitive power button. 

While it’s accessible when the phone is folded and unfolded, the sensor offers no tactile hints, placed just above similarly shaped volume buttons. Also, the sensor/power button is so thin that you will almost always flop fingerprint recognition on the first try. 

Overall, it’s a pleasant-looking phone but severely lacks attention to detail in its handling and finer design points. Our criticisms would be considered nitpicking if this were a budget or midrange handset. Unfortunately, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is asking for S$2,399, and we’re not so sure that having to “fight” your phone to use it properly qualifies for a premium experience.

High-quality displays in and out, but distracting to use

In its folded state, Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s external screen carries a 6.3-inch Actua Display that supports 60-120Hz refresh rates. It’s also rated at Full HD resolution (2,424 x 1,080 pixels) with a standard 20:9 aspect ratio. It also can handle 24-bit colours and has up to 2,700 nits peak brightness under direct sunlight.

We liked everything about its display: it looks accurate and is super smooth, and the pleasant aspect ratio makes the experience feel like a conventional smartphone. Nothing feels claustrophobic here, unlike Galaxy Z Fold6’s compromise with a secondary panel (also 6.3 inches) that has an odd aspect ratio (22.1:9). 

Sadly, Pixel 9 Pro Fold hampered the viewing experience with its C-shaped silhouette we’ve mentioned above. The rounded display corners come with a thick, half-polished left bezel that ends at an angled edge. 

This left bezel is hugely distracting if you’re not using Dark Mode for app interfaces or websites. Even with Dark Mode enabled, the bezel catches the eye because it shimmers under stray lights. It’s a pity because it’s a really good secondary display.

The external speakers have a hollow soundstage that lacks punch, and audio can seem slightly lopsided if you’re holding/watching content on the External Screen in landscape mode.

Open up the phone, and the 8-inch Super Actua Flex LTPO display has a near 1:1 aspect ratio (~1.04:1) with excellent pixel density (2,152 x 2,076 pixels resolution, ~373 PPI). It supports 1-120Hz refresh rates, HDR, and the same peak brightness as its outside screen. The screen is also sharp, accurate, and smooth, but the classic foldable crease plagues its viewing experience. 

The crease is less visible when browsing the home screen. It becomes prominent once you begin web browsing or consuming media on the device (Google Photo images, TikTok videos, etc.). 

The line also mildly distorts the content, which is disappointing. It’s most visible when there are lights overhead (as with most offices, restaurants, or any domicile) and when your displayed content has plenty of light colours or white space (from apps or websites).

While less noticeable at first glance than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6’s crease, Google’s crease ended up being just as annoying when you use the Pixel 9 Pro Fold seriously. 

Otherwise, an excellent foldable

The good news is that many apps are already optimised for unusual aspect ratios, so there are almost zero compatibility issues with apps on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's 8-inch panel.

Like other expensive foldable phones, it supports upright content viewing on its Main Display in Tabletop Mode. 

You can prop up your Pixel 9 Pro Fold half-fold to watch videos, with supported apps with video playback controls in the bottom half. The downside is that the aspect ratio is not common, and you’d get huge black bars by the sides and on top of your videos (not helped by a thicker main display bezel that keeps the screen safe).

The foldable-specific features set the Pixel 9 Pro Fold apart from its regular counterparts. Otherwise, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the same as the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro XL we’ve reviewed previously. That includes its built-in Gemini features and any Pixel AI photo or video editing tools you’d already get with these devices.

The only notable feature specific to Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s is its Taskbar, which is on par with the Galaxy Z Fold6 experience if you don’t have exceptional needs.

All in all, the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold does better than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 in the secondary display user experience. Its 77.1mm width is actually even wider than the average bar-type smartphone's ~76mm width, and the 6.3-inch panel has a standard 20:9 aspect ratio, so you're actually getting a full smartphone experience just on the secondary display. The main display then gives you an 8-inch tablet to work with, but it has the same visible crease problem, and the phone’s design and handling work against an otherwise excellent foldable device. 

Imaging Performance

To quickly recap, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold has five cameras. The triple rear setup (48MP main, 10.5MP ultrawide, 10.8MP telephoto) handles the bulk of the user's photography needs. The other two are the 10MP front camera (on the smaller secondary display) and 10MP inner camera (lodged inside the squarish main display). Those are more for selfies or video calls and meetings.

Google introduced Made You Look, a camera feature that plays a cartoon animation on the external display to get your subject's attention during photo-taking. You won't find it game-changing unless you photograph a very young infant or a pet. The other camera features are also pretty similar to its mainline Pixel series, including all the editing features that spearheaded the race towards smartphone AI.

Anyway, let's look at how Pixel 9 Pro Fold handles photography. We have high hopes because its standard Pixel 9 series does it very well, and we don't expect the foldable to differ greatly.

Imaging samples

As expected, the main camera on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is just as excellent at photography as its regular Pixel 9 series counterparts. The other cameras are good too, although the telephoto seems to have a greener tint and the ultrawide has a cool colour temperature.

They, however, exceed our expectations for detail retention and sharpness.

We shot a few more samples to check if it's consistent. It is.

It's hard to believe how sharp and detailed the 20x zoom is, but we had minimal assistance (by leaning our hands on a steady surface). The carpark sign that you can barely see with the primary camera shows up so sharply on 20x zoom, and it even managed to capture the ornaments hanging from the tree above the walkway.

Benchmark Performance

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold shares the same in-house processor as its flagship Pixel 9 series phones. It’s the Google Tensor G4, which has proven to be similar in performance to its predecessor.

We are not expecting huge differences in performance just because Google stuck the same chip inside a foldable form factor. However, it does mean it will be compared against Qualcomm processors found in the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 and Honor Magic V3, which is a first for Google’s foldable in Singapore since they didn’t bring the old one in.

We're also including the Pixel 9 Pro XL to see how a foldable form factor affects performance (or not).

Putting it to the test

To find out how the competitors line up specs and price-wise, check them out in this link.

To find out more about the tests we conduct and what they relate to, we've jotted them down here.

Performance benchmark remarks

In day-to-day use, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold has a noticeable lag upon bootup and app starting, but it runs buttery smooth once the phone settles in. In 3D-rendered action games, temperatures were well managed with no noticeable frame drops, although loading times appeared slightly longer than normal.

It’s clear (and expected) that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is behind the other two Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 foldables here, with CPU scores slightly behind and GPU scores a mere fraction of its main competitors. The PCMark scores also hint that it uses older UFS storage technology than the other two. All in all, the benchmark just proves that the phone is a foldable version of the Pixel 9 series.

Battery Life

Our battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more. 

As it turns out, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s 4,650mAh battery could barely keep up with its form factor. It has a bigger main display than the Pixel 9 Pro XL and a battery that’s 500mAh smaller, hurting its uptime and compounding the chipset's struggles to stay efficient with larger displays, as seen in our Pixel 9 review.

Among foldables, it’s also two hours shorter than its competition, with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 getting an extra ~80 minutes with a smaller battery capacity (4,400mAh). Our hopes with performance benchmarking are now dashed, seeing how it has the lowest uptime among the three foldables and not much power to show for it.

The phone’s wired fast-charging also had super aggressive safety features built in. It took 30 minutes to reach 50%, but the next 50-100% slowed down to about a full hour to attain. While ~90 minutes isn’t terrible, the Honor Magic V3 fills up in half the time and lasts two hours longer. 

As if to kick you in the teeth when you’re already down for the count, the S$2,399 Pixel 9 Pro Fold does not include a charging adapter.

Conclusion 

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is a decent foldable. On the one hand, it’s an excellent U.S.-backed alternative to Korean and Chinese book-style foldable phones officially available in Singapore. While not amazing, the IPX8-rated design is still more parallel than its Galaxy rival. It’s sufficiently thin when folded, which increases the value of its prominent display since you’re not sacrificing portability. It’s also good at taking photos, even though its competition isn’t terrible, either.

Also, Material You (Google’s Android 14 reskin) has been pleasant to use since two generations of Pixels ago. Google is also one of the pioneers of mobile generative AI, and they brought that to the foldable to make it just as versatile as its regular candy-bar Pixels.

An outsider looking in probably won’t see anything amiss with the S$2,399 (256GB) Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and we believe most of its users would be very happy with the device, and that’s all that matters if we are to be honest.

On the other hand, it’s hard for us to recommend Google’s phone when it’s sandwiched between two East Asian beauties that look and work better. 

From Korea comes the S$2,548 (256GB) Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6, which also has generative AI tools that are just as good, a better processor, better uptime, and an entire ecosystem of proprietary appliances and apps ready to heed their master’s command. This is on top of having zero compatibility issues with Google’s services, and extra dust protection thanks to its IP48 rating.

Around the corner comes the S$1,999 (512GB) Honor Magic V3 by the Chinese, with a processor as good as Galaxy’s, better uptime, thinner body, higher starting storage, and somehow manages with an IPX8 rating. It’s also just as competent with Google services, so even if you don’t like its shabby AI tools, you can still use the free AI photo editor available in the Google Photos app.

As a result, the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold offers nothing exceptional out of the box except for a larger screen when folded. It fared relatively worse in its synthetic performance and battery uptime, both of which are the biggest bugbears to people paying top dollar and worrying about portable displays. We counted too many penalty points on the board, like its non-existent fast charging past a certain threshold or excluding a charger when it’s already rocky on other fronts.

If Pixel AI’s full suite of abilities appeal to you, there isn't an alternative, and competent AI-capable foldables other than from Samsung. Who knows? Google may be okay with their devices being just an alternative. But we’ll only be sure when we see future iterations of Pixel and the level of investment and R&D Google is willing to inject into this form factor. Until then, everyone has to make do and pick the lesser foldable evil of their choice.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold officially retails at S$2,399 (256GB) and S$2,579 (512GB) on the Google Store, iShopChangi, and Metapod. More retail information can be found here.