Foldables are no longer a “new” technology, but as they mature, one thing is still very clear. No foldable does it “right” yet as the market continues to only serve niche users, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is a really good encapsulation of that.
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The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is one of the latest in an ever-growing market of book-style foldables. These devices are designed with the idea of carrying a phone that opens up into something closer to a tablet. That’s opposed to flip-style foldables, which are meant to take a full-size smartphone and condense it down into something smaller.
For me, I’ve always felt that these book-style devices are the ones with more utility, but there’s been a big problem since the start.
What’s the right way to do it?
Especially in the early days, there was no one set way of making a foldable. Samsung had a tall and narrow outer display. Oppo had a super compact design. Huawei and others toyed around with displays that folded around the outside instead of the inside. It was truly just a game of throwing out ideas to see what stuck and what people liked.
As such, there were plenty of problems. Android apps were rarely optimized for these displays, and in many cases you’ll still find games or apps that don’t play nicely with the wider display of a foldable.
And there’s also the constant problem of trying to figure out how to even take advantage of the form factor.
You’ve got twice the screen inside, but what’s the point if the movie you’re watching only takes up a third of it, or if the game you’re playing is cropped, or if the website you’re visiting is just zoomed in all of the way? That’s a question that the many brands putting out foldable smartphones still haven’t really answered. Even Google really just says that you can “do more things on a bigger screen” on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold while offering a few tiny examples of that on its store listing for the new foldable. And it’s a problem, yes. No one knows how to talk about foldables, still, because they’re still not perfect. The “killer app” hasn’t been found just yet.
But, to me, I think that’s also where these devices shine.
Foldables serve a niche, a lot of niches. They make us think about our phones completely differently. If you look at a foldable from the perspective of a normal phone, they just seem pointless. But it’s those times where you think outside of the constraints of the phones we’ve had for years that these devices shine. The magical moments where I can complete a task on a foldable that would have taken twice as long or been way more difficult on a normal phone are the exact reasons I keep a foldable in my pocket at all times.
These experiences differ for everyone. For me, it comes down to times where I need to access a full desktop website on the go, something that’s a pain on a normal smartphone. Or when I need to juggle apps. On a foldable, I can just put them side-by-side rather than dealing with the back-and-forth or the constraints of multitasking on a traditional smartphone. Are these things I do every day? No! But that’s the beauty of a smartphone that can literally close up the part you’re not using when you don’t need it.
No two people use a book-style foldable in the same way. That’s why there’s no perfect design, no perfect way to use it. A bigger canvas for the web and multitasking are some of the biggest reasons I like carrying a foldable, but for someone else, it might boil down to just having more room for a specific app, handwriting with a stylus, or playing a specific game that sells them on their foldable.
To this point, I kind of hate that foldables are starting to merge into the same core ideas.
The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is, again, a good example of this. Instead of sticking with the widescreen layout of its predecessor which was better for movies and games, it goes for something that’s, well, the same thing Samsung and OnePlus are already doing. The same can be said for Samsung. The narrow outer display of the Fold 5 and prior was a downside for many, but it led to an inner aspect ratio that had usability advantages, such as for typing.
Before designs all converged on this nearly square aspect ratio, foldable buyers could really just pick what worked best for them. Their niche was served.
I do think that, out of all of the foldable design options, the one being used across the OnePlus Open, Galaxy Z Fold 6, and now the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is perhaps the best overall. It splits the difference the best and serves the most people, but that’s not really what foldables are about – at least not at this point. If foldable makers wanted to serve the most people, they’d be working to drop prices, not raise them. They’d be pouring a whole lot more into getting software up to par, so everything on a foldable actually takes advantage of being on a foldable. But, five years in, it just doesn’t feel like that’s happening, at least not to the extent that it should be.
Will we ever settle on the “right” way to do a foldable? With designs converging, it seems that’s what the market is naturally trying to do. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is Google’s take on the “right” way to do it, every though it knows some people will disagree.
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