Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold review

Foldables aren’t a new thing anymore but it still is amazing to find the perfect-looking cover screen that doesn’t eschew everyday usability for showboating on the inner screen. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s 6.3in cover screen is as large and more crucially, as wide as most flagship non-folding phones and this is what garners it instant acceptability. Even the specs are comparable with a 120Hz refresh rate, 1800nits of brightness and a fetching 20:9 aspect ratio. The curved edges of the display flushed with the actual frame create a premium and distinct look and even the hinge seems to have been designed with much thought. The damping is just right and opens and closes with a reassuring snap. When shut, there is zero gap between the screens and it gets an IPX8 rating to prove its mettle. Interestingly enough, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the only one of the current foldable trio that we have which sits flat on a desk without the camera bump getting in the way and just highlights the almost perfect design and weight balance for this form factor. Gorilla Glass Victus 2 lends a premium feel to this device, front or back and is barely thicker than the 9 Pro XL making it that much easier to adopt this form factor if you’re new to the foldable world.

The Super Actua Display (inner screen) is what helps the Pixel 9 Pro Fold leap ahead of the competition and at 8 inches, is currently the largest between the Samsung and OnePlus competitors. Even brighter at 2000 nits and an acceptable fold crease, this is the closest you can get to a tablet until now. And that was the original vision for every book-type foldable to begin with. Google has finally shown us how it’s done. Sure the crease isn’t as refined as the OnePlus Open and the computing power might be down on the Samsung Fold 6, but overall in terms of hand feel and everyday practicality, it comes out tops. The only real downside to using such a thin design is the lack of any body from the speakers. It can get loud but it is not a pleasing sound.

Identical to the others in the Pixel family, the Fold also gets a year of Gemini advanced complimentary which includes 2TB cloud storage and a much larger token capacity of one million. In simple terms, it has a broader spectrum of capabilities and processing times see an uptick too. All the goodness of AI-infused photo editing features like Reimagine, Erase and Add Me make an appearance, along with one bespoke feature to the Fold called Made You Look. The last one is probably the most ingenious and effective way of ensuring your subjects, infantile or otherwise, maintain eye contact with the lens and don’t spoil an otherwise perfect frame. Google’s Best Take feature fixes that problem too by using AI to select the best faces of each individual in a group shot. Add Me, like on the Pixel 9 Pro allows you to add yourself to a picture later in a group shot with a guided AR placeholder.

It works well most of the time but even when it doesn’t, there is hope of it getting better with updates and is a really handy feature to have. Other things like Reimagine in the photo gallery editing suite let you select the background from almost any photo and change it to practically anything else you can imagine, as the name suggests. While it is amusing at first, dwell on it and you realise how potentially damaging this could be if used for misinformation or misrepresentation. Especially given the Pixel’s lack of any AI watermarking or information that alludes to any tampering even in the photo’s metadata. Nothing you see on social media could be real if this trend picks up and AI needs to answer some very difficult ethical questions about its diabolical effects. Then again, Google’s AI also identifies different voices from a video clip and lets you play with their levels at will, boosting some and cutting others off completely!

A full suite of triple cameras gives it enough bravado to stand up against the OnePlus and Samsung and Pixel has its computational prowess to fall back on. Yet, the 48MP wide, 10.5MP ultrawide and 10.8MP telephoto are a decent bunch of hardware to begin with. Add a 5x telephoto with macro capability and you already have a step up on the Galaxy Fold 6 and OnePlus Open. The sensors aren’t quite as large as on the Pixel 9 Pro XL though and for most daytime pictures you won’t even notice the difference, thanks to Google’s computational prowess. 5x in low light leaves a lot to be desired but it redeems itself when it comes to things like Super Zoom up to 20x and Panorama mode. Both process and stitch the images much more naturally than competitors and viewing or editing photos on that large 8in inner screen is just pure joy. If you use a lot of Lightroom or even video editing, the generous real estate makes a big difference to the final output.

Most of the AI-based photo and video edit features require you to back up the files first and just as well, you get a 2TB complimentary cloud storage for a year when you pony up for any of the new Pixels. Video is mostly great but stabilisation is nowhere near as good as current-gen iPhones, but offers post-capture stabilisation that is very effective. It does capture a lot of dynamic range and if you shoot at 30fps instead of 60fps, you can even avail of Video Boost that enhances the colour luminosity. Overall, these are good cameras not just by Folable standards, but even regular flagship, made more capable by some amazing editing tools.

Google’s Tensor G4 chip might trail behind Qualcomm and Apple’s offerings in Samsung and iPhones, but with 16GB of RAM, it’s not slow either. Sure, games are displayed with slightly less fluidity and it gets warm to the touch, but it never came to a grinding halt or made our teeth grind. Video editing is hasty by Android standards and having multiple app windows active has no negative impact on the performance either. While Samsung has Edge Panels and S-pen support to make full use of the un-folded screen and OnePlus lets you open and tile up to three windows via its Canvas function, the Pixel fold concedes with two side-by-side panels that seem to underutilise the massive screen.

But the option to have app pairs saved is a great idea and makes it super easy to have instant visual feedback on related items. Like the headphone app alongside music for example. Translated text showing up on the outer screen and Made You Look are the other two features where Google has maximised this opportunity.

Not compatible with Qi2 wireless charging standards, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold does with the bog standard wireless charging and even wired speeds remain a paltry 21W. The 4650mAh battery though is well optimised to the Tensor chip and wrings every ounce of life from it, making it easily last a day under normal conditions. Depending on how many times you use the inner screen, video recording in 4K, gaming with max GPU usage etc will fluctuate this expectation.

Google’s push to put Gemini front and centre of most experiences pays off better than most of its rivals. Considering Apple Intelligence is still a few months away from realisation and Samsung anyway relies on Google services for its on-cloud requests, The Pixel itself is best placed to take advantage of this new frontier. A lot of the experiences that make the Pixel 9 Pro Fold fun to use are powered by AI but then it also is finally a well-made handset that can compete and even surpass most of its competitors in terms of build quality, specs and real-world performance. The only real fly in its ointment is the massive sticker price which inevitably raises expectations of camera performance to stratospheric levels and in reality, they only scrape the sky.