On the design of a day out of the house with a mobile device: how different Pixel Folds have different conceptions of their battery packs
Without the last 25 percent left I wouldn’t have made it that day, so I had to take a late-morning shower. The high battery drain from thePixel Fold could be a bug. Sometimes, I was able to get through a day on a single charge. I think we’ll learn more from long-term testing, but as it stands now, I’d keep a battery pack or a charger handy if I planned to spend a long day out of the house using the Pixel Fold.
Though the Pixel Fold and Z Fold 4 share the same overall concept — a phone-sized device that opens up into a small tablet — they go about accomplishing it in different ways. The most obvious difference is the Z Fold 4 has a portrait-first approach: when you open the phone, the screen’s default mode is in a portrait orientation. The Pixel Fold is flipped 90 degrees: when you open it, the inside screen has a landscape orientation.
Taking Portrait Photos with a Camera and the Front-Falling Screen for Framed Photon Capture on a Folding Pixel Camera
As far as image quality goes, it’s a Pixel camera, through and through. It’s easy to see how color and details in bright lighting look great. It handles dim light well, even when people are moving a bit, and night mode comes in handy for very low light. Portrait photos from the main camera look convincing, but I still hate the crunchiness of the 2x portrait setting, and there are some real weird artifacts in one of my shots in this mode.
On the flip side, you can take portrait selfies with the main camera and use the front-facing screen to frame them up. It is an option to have in your back pocket because it is better for selfies than the main camera, and it is a better option than a folding phone.
You can shoot 4K and up to 60p with any of the rear-facing cameras, and there’s also an option for 30p. I did it because it was pretty good and there is a modest crop if you keep the video stabilization enabled.
The Pixel Fold is a big part of this. It is not comfortable to use it in the outer screen format, even if it feels more natural than the remote control-esqueGalaxy Z Fold 4. In your tote bag, purse, and pocket, you notice its weight but carry it on your person. If I felt like I was getting an incredible experience in exchange for carrying the extra weight around, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but that’s not the case.
What Do Smart Devices Have to Know Before Using Their Apps? A Comparative Study of Pixel Fold Unfolded and Split Screening Modes
Each smart device has a series of terms and conditions that no one read and require you to agree before using it. It is not possible for us to analyze all of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.
Additionally, if you want to use Google Assistant, you must agree to let Google collect app info and contact info from your devices. Additional agreements might be needed for some features such as Google Wallet.
The inner screen may be good for entertainment. I really liked playing Pocket City 2 on the big screen because I love it so much. The top portion of the screen is where the video goes if you put your phone in an L shape, it’s handy when I want to watch something while eating lunch or folding laundry. Watching a video like this is much more comfortable than using the narrow, letterbox-y laptop mode of the Z Fold.
But there are more multitasking options in the window. The only way to run multiple apps at once in a single screen is by using the two split screen apps on the Google Play Store. I can open multiple apps to cross-reference my credit card activity, Starbucks card history, and my calendar to file an expense report in Concur all at the same time on the Z Fold 4. Not so on the Pixel Fold.
To work in the Fold’s unfolded mode, there are a lot of new apps that have been enhanced by the company. Gmail, YouTube, Photos — they all make use of the full screen by putting information in sidebars and vertical columns. The desktop-like interface of Chrome allows for the loading of full versions of websites, as well as the use of tabs at the top of the window. Google Meet readily moved a tiled view of attendees to the top part of the screen when I set the phone up in an L-shape, sliding the controls to the bottom half of the display. I didn’t have to fiddle with anything — it just worked.
The issue isn’t present at the SAMSUNG. Apps that are launched in the default orientation work the majority of the time. The Z Fold rotates 90 degrees for an optimal experience of watching video or split-screening two apps. I prefer the default mode to be the best one for most apps, since they’re all in single, vertical- scrolling, portrait-oriented apps.
Apps that do stretch across the screen don’t always do it in the most useful way. Slack just unhelpfully spreads the phone app across the whole screen instead of utilizing multiple columns, which results in a lot of unused blank space. Chris found an outlier that was slick on the big screen of the Fold. If this was my phone, I would use it a lot for quick photo edits.
Bad News About Using Pixel Folds as a Daily Driver: Screen Repair Costs and Lifetime Concerns for First-Generation Smartphones
The screens themselves are nice enough: the outer is a 5.8-inch 1080p 120Hz panel, and the inner display is a 7.6-inch diagonal 2208 x 1840 OLED — also with a 120Hz top refresh rate. The inner screen protector is plenty reflective, so it is good for use outside in direct sunlight. It wasn’t the best experience to use the big screen in the shade on a sunny day.
Repairing a foldable phone is more difficult and more expensive than repairing a traditional phone. The cost of other phones is less than the price of the two-year protection plan, which is $279 per month. With this plan, you’ll pay $29 for a screen repair at a walk-in Asurion uBreakiFix center (or a brick-and-mortar Google Store if you happen to live in New York City). Other covered repairs cost $129. You won’t be able to send your phone off to Google if you don’t live in a location with a U.S. U.S. branch, but you will get a replacement phone shipped to you the day after you pay for it, likely with a hefty hold on These are important things to consider before purchasing a Pixel Fold, and it would be wise to consider the cost of Google’s repair plan if you’re pricing one out.
I have other bad news. After just a few days of using the Fold as my daily driver, I discovered a tiny hairline scratch on the factory-installed inner screen protector. That’s not exactly confidence-inspiring. One of my co-workers discovered a chip in the plastic bezel on his review unit, too. These are far from catastrophic, but the almost-year-old Z Fold 4 review unit that I have on hand doesn’t show any scratches as prominent as the one on the Pixel Fold. It suddenly makes more sense why Google didn’t make the Pixel Fold compatible with a stylus.
There are a couple of practical concerns that came up in my testing, too. The phone’s battery life wasn’t great, but the phone seems to be draining more on STANDBY than it should. I have concerns about the long-term viability of first- generation hardware from the company.
Samsung, ever the copycat, might also adjust its hardware to be more like the Pixel Fold, depending on the reaction it sees to Google’s device. I think that would be a shame, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see a Galaxy Z Fold 6 with a shorter, wider cover screen and a landscape orientation inner display in a year’s time. A lot of the positive reaction to the Pixel Fold ahead of its launch has been around the fact that it has a more usable outer display, though my experience shows there are compromises to be had with it.
The floating window option wasn’t available when using the Pixel Fold. I frequently open the calculator when I am looking at my banking app, or grab a code from my two-factor app, when I’m in other apps, without having to go back to my homescreen or reload the original app.
We will have to wait to see if the Pixel Fold’s future generations make changes to the design and features that can’t be quickly fixed. The desktop mode is not useful if you cannot connect an external monitor to the phone.
It is gratifying that there is at least some competition in the US foldable phone market. The Z fold 5 does not look like it will be much different than the Z fold 4 because it is very similar to the Z fold 3. There is a need for another player to shake up the situation by taking money from prospective folding phone buyers.
A lot of the differences between the experiences are found in software, where Google could catch up quickly. One thing to know is that the Pixel Fold is launching with the newest iteration of the operating system, but it is expected to bring a desktop experience and app pair as well as other things.