Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold review: the best phone for entertainment fans

Phones that fold out into a miniature tablet are becoming more popular every year and there are a few reasons why you might think about buying one — they’re the best phones for streaming TV on the go, they’re great for mobile gaming and there’s plenty of room to get work done on a long commute.

Google’s first-ever folding phone — the Pixel Fold — can do all of those things, but there are some major issues with it, especially when you compare it to the very best Pixel phones. It’s chunky, the battery life is disappointing and the internal screen feels a little flimsy. Thankfully, Google has made some pretty big changes to its 2024 foldable to bring it up to speed with the competition.

Launched at a Made By Google event, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold arrived alongside the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL. Google’s flagships are top Android devices and this foldable phone feels more integrated into the series than before.

At the time of writing the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold will set you back £1,749 so it doesn’t come cheap. We do expect it to be discounted in the future though, especially during sales like Prime Day and Black Friday.

So is this folding phone worth splashing out on? I’ve been trying it out over the last couple of weeks to answer that question, and here I’ll take you through everything you need to know about its design, display, camera, performance, battery and software.

The new Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold has had a total overhaul in comparison to its predecessor, and not only in its name.

The most obvious difference is that it’s a lot thinner than the Pixel Fold. In fact, it’s 1.5mm thinner folded up and 0.7mm thinner unfolded. To allow for the smaller body, the battery has shrunk a little from a 4,831mAh cell in the Pixel Fold to a 4,650mAh cell in the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

The new handset also has bigger screens than before, going from a 7.6-inch internal display and a 5.8-inch cover screen to an 8-inch internal display and a 6.3-inch cover screen. The folding screen is both sturdier and brighter, which I will go into later.

Aesthetically, the Pixel Fold and Pixel 9 Pro Fold look quite different with a new square camera module tucked into the corner on the back, as opposed to the camera bar we’ve seen before. The camera setup is the same, although there’s a host of new software to improve the look of photos.

Elsewhere, Google has upgraded the hardware to the Tensor G4 processor (up from G3) and included 16GB of RAM (instead of 12GB).

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold has been designed in a way that makes it a realistic option for your day-to-day handset. It carries the same sleek design language as the Pixel 9 Pro with a polished matte glass back and glossy hinge. But more importantly, it’s very thin, lightweight and feels a lot sturdier than its predecessor.

Folded up, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold looks almost like any other smartphone, although there’s one straight edge and one with rounded corners, and there are slightly thicker bezels than you would usually find on a high-end smartphone. Open it like a book and you reveal a bigger mini tablet screen on the inside.

You can buy the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold in obsidian black and porcelain white, I tested out the former.

The newly redesigned camera module on the back is more square in shape than the Pixel Fold’s camera bar. The only issue I had with it was that it sticks out quite a bit more than it did before, luckily its placement doesn’t cause it to rock when you use it on a table.

Folded up the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold only feels a little bigger than one of the Pixel 9 devices, and unfolded, it is thinner than most tablets. For the first time, the size of a foldable phone didn’t annoy me during testing, I could easily slip it into my pocket when I wasn’t using it.

One of the biggest perks of buying a foldable phone is the fact that you can use it in a few different positions. In this case, you can open the phone partway and prop it up like a laptop, or use it flat like a tablet.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold has two displays: a 6.3-inch cover screen and an 8-inch foldable tablet screen on the inside.

The smaller screen is about the same size and shape as a regular smartphone, and the quality matches up to a lot of other handsets too. You won’t need to open up the phone for more simple tasks because the cover display does a good enough job on its own. I used it to answer messages, run online searches and flick through photos taken on the camera.

At 2,700 nits its peak brightness, the cover display is bright enough to use in most lighting conditions, even under direct sunlight. And the refresh rate goes all the way up to 120Hz so the phone feels super smooth to scroll and swipe on (although it can only drop to 60Hz).

For times when a bigger screen comes in handy, the internal display has crystal clear resolution, bold colours and equally high levels of brightness. It’s a stunning display that shows off the best in foldable screen technology, and the crease is barely visible when you look at the handset head-on.

Entertainment fans in particular will get a lot of use from having the miniature tablet screen. It’s very well suited to watching TV shows and movies, I used it to catch up on the latest series of Selling Sunset on Netflix and to stream A Star is Born on Prime Video. The contrast meant I could see the entire scene, even when there were darker corners or shadows, and the size of the display meant I didn’t miss any details either.

Like the outside screen, the internal display has a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, but to conserve battery life it can drop to as little as 1Hz.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold sports a fantastic camera system, despite not getting the same upgrades as the flagship handsets. It isn’t all that different to the first generation of the device, but it doesn’t need to be.

You’ll get a 48MP wide camera, a 10.5MP ultrawide with macro focus, a 10.8MP 5x telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom and a 20x digital Super Res Zoom.

The results? Balanced, detailed photos no matter what you’re shooting pictures of, up close or further away. What’s great about the Fold’s camera is that it really takes shadows into account making photos look more natural. Colours are boosted but not so much so that they look unrealistic and lines are crisp and sharp.

Thanks to the telephoto lens you can take precise shots in optical quality at 0.5x, 1x and 5x. But more than that, thanks to the 20x Super Res Zoom you can actually blow up the scene to show more than the human eye can see.

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold comes with all the same tools as its flagship siblings. That includes Add Me to put the photographer in the shot, Best Take to combine group photos so everyone looks their best and the Magic Editor to resize and remove objects.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold also has Reimagine, Google’s new feature which lets you create and add objects to images using AI. You just need to type in what you want to see and it will appear in the scene. The results are hit and miss, sometimes it looks realistic and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. I’ll leave it up to you whether that’s a good thing or not.

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold sample photos

Take a look at the gallery below to see a selection of unedited shots taken on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Open Gallery

Powering the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the Google Tensor G4, the same processor used in its Pixel 9 devices. Built to support Google’s AI software, it’s not the most performance-focused chipset but it does provide good speeds no matter what you intend to use your phone for, whether that’s working, editing or gaming.

You can buy the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold with 256GB or 512GB of internal storage, and it comes with a huge 16GB of RAM. It’s a significantly more powerful bit of kit than the Pixel Fold was.

Battery life is provided by a 4,650mAh cell which Google claims will give you up to 24 hours of battery. It lasted me through the whole day but I would need to charge it before I headed out the house again in the morning.

You only get 21W charging on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, I was surprised Google hasn’t matched even its Pixel 9 Pro handset with 27W charging. What that means is this phone takes ages to charge up — it took me about an hour and a half to power it from 0 to 100%. Some smartphones now take less than half an hour for a full charge, so this is pretty disappointing.

Android 14 runs the show and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold has one of the cleanest versions of the operating system with very minimal bloatware. It’s long-lasting too with seven years of software updates and feature drops to come, meaning this phone could last until 2031.

Google has some clever software tricks created for its foldable smartphone. You can split the display into two open apps and use both simultaneously, dragging and dropping images or text from one to the other (we would still like to see this increased to three windows like Samsung’s devices, though). There’s a translation feature which displays the conversation on both sides so you can have a more free-flowing conversation in another language. Made You Look shows a cute cartoon on the cover display to catch your little ones’ attention long enough for you to snap a photo of them.

And to add to that, you’ll get all the same AI tools as the Pixel 9 series like upgrades to Call Assist to transcribe details from phone calls. There’s a new Screenshots app which uses AI to organise and store your screenshots, as well as pull information from them to use in your calendar or notes app. Google Gemini is built in, it’s the latest chatbot capable of having more free-flowing conversations so you can find recipe ideas, create packing lists, and more.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold won’t be for everyone — it’s expensive and most people won’t have any need for the mini-tablet display. But it’s worth remembering that you are basically paying for two devices, and if you think you would get a lot out of having both a smartphone and a tablet in one, then they don’t get much better (or thinner) than this.

Perfect for entertainment fans, the big bright internal screen displays TV shows and movies with crystal clear definition and vibrant colours, and it’s fast and smooth to use which makes it a good choice for mobile gaming.

If you don’t want to make too many sacrifices on the camera system, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold offers plenty in that department, even packing in useful tools to improve the look of shots both pre and post-capture. It’s a shame the system doesn’t match its Pixel 9 Pro equivalent but for a foldable phone, it still impressed me.

So what are the downsides? Unlike some other foldables, this isn’t so well suited to productivity because you can only split the screen into two windows (instead of three) and it doesn’t come with a stylus to speed up your workflow. I’d also have liked to see a faster charge time and even faster performance.

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s biggest competition is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, similar to this device it starts as a normal-looking phone and folds open to reveal a larger flexible screen on the inside. If you need a big display for work then it’s likely to be the better option because it comes with a stylus and it’s performance-focused. For comparison, the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is more suited to watching videos and gaming.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6

If you like the idea of a foldable phone, but can’t see yourself needing the tablet screen, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 is the best clamshell-type folding phone you can buy. It echoes the Noughties flip phone, starting as a palm-sized device and folding out into a regular-sized smartphone. The small cover screen on the outside can be used to answer messages, change the song, set timers and so on.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6