Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixel Fold Impressions! $1800 of Pixel?!”.
Hey, what’s up guys, I’m Kim BHD here and welcome to your first look at Google’s first foldable phone: it’s almost wild that it’s finally here and I got to hold it and play with it for the first time after all these months of rumors and hype. So the phone is exactly what it sounds like it’s a pixel with a folding screen on the inside, and we are curious just waiting to see what it would look like. Just because this is the official Google take on what a folding Android phone would look like. So now we’ve got it so for a phone like this there’s, basically three categories that matter design, hardware, specs and software – and I guess also probably price but we’ll get to that at the end, because that’s also important it’s an expensive phone, but with my like hours Of Hands-On time with the phone, I did get a pretty good sense of all three of these things so for Design. This is a more compact folding phone, I would say it’s in the same style as the Oppo Find N2, but a little bigger and a little thinner.
So there’s a 5.8 inch OLED display on the outside, pretty thin bezels power button and fingerprint reader and volume buttons on the side and there’s a pretty firm hinge that can stop at just about any angle to hold the phone open for easel mode. But then this is where it gets. Interesting. Google made a pretty big design choice in the hinge mechanism to put a lot of the parts of the folding Hardware above and below the middle instead of behind it.
So that’s what makes the hinge itself and the entire phone so thin, but that also means there’s extra Hardware now above and below the hinge. So when you open up the phone, yes, that means there’s a bit more bezel than usual above and below the display. Now it’s a pretty generous 7.6 inch display unfolding on the inside here, but I think that it it’ll be slightly controversial because people are going to freak out about the bezels. That’S like one of the things you can count on for the internet, but honestly looking at it and using it, I’m totally fine with it like it lets them put an actually good front facing camera and the bezel on the inside here, and it gives you a Bit of something to hold on to and rest your thumb when you’re holding the phone open anyway around the back is the camera bar that doesn’t quite span the whole width of the back, but it still looks very pixel Plus on the side.
There’S an LED flash and a microphone array and it comes in two colors, basically black and white. Honestly, I think it’s a pretty good looking phone, I’m someone who liked the looks of the older pixels, so that falls right in line with that and I keep going back to this Oppo Find N2. This is a phone whose form factor I’ve loved so much, and the pixel is both a little bigger and a little thinner, which is really interesting and we’re gon na have to see how this thinness trade-off pays off, because that naturally means not so much battery right. So, let’s we’ll get to the next category: let’s talk about the next section of things, which is just hardware specs.
So the story of the hardware here is a it’s mostly Flagship or just short of it. So the 5.8 inch display on the outside is a 1080p 120 hertz OLED, with over 1500 nits Peak brightness, which is great, and the 7.6 inch OLED on the inside is also 120 hertz. It’S also just over 1440p and this 6×5 aspect ratio. I think these screens are awesome, but then on the inside, you’ve got tensor G2, which has been in the pixel for several months now and 12 gigs of RAM and then there’s a 4821 milliamp hour battery inside now.
Just for context, that’s an interesting number. 4800. That would make it the largest battery we’ve ever seen in a foldable, but at the same time uh. The pixel 7 Pro has a 5000 milliamp hour battery and the same tensor G2 and average battery life.
I think we can say, and so having a smaller battery and a much bigger brighter screen in this pixel fold does give me some pause about battery life. That’S that’s a question uh that I have to actually use it to find out and review it, but I think also wireless charging good to see, but it’s also kind of slow wired charging, 30 Watts Max and then with the triple cameras at the back. There’S. Actually, all new sensors throughout here, which Google says, are Flagship grade, but we’re definitely going to have to test these out for the full review, but we’re looking at a 48 megapixel main camera, then a 10 megapixel Ultra wide and a 10 megapixel 5x telephoto.
So, overall, as a package teetering on Flagship but not completely maxed out, obviously you know the displays, I think, looked really really good in person super smooth super bright and responsive, but there are clearly concerns. I think the battery is the big question in my head, which is always just going to be a combination of physical capacity, but also software optimizations, and so of course, software is a big part of what makes phone good, especially in a folding phone, because it’s a Phone and also a tablet at the same time, so this pixel fold is going to have all the pixel stuff. You know the Google Assistant now playing hold for me material. U, the customizable, looking version of Android that we’ve seen in the pixels that make it the smartest smartphone in the world, and I love all that, but of course on the inside screen we’re talking about basically a tablet and Android tablets. Let’S be real, have always been a little bit lacking in a software department, so I was curious to see if there was new stuff here and there is some stuff to pay attention to. So.
First of all, the expected stuff like side-by-side multitasking feels really smooth and intuitive the apps resize. However, you want them, but that’s not new. What’S new, is this dock Behavior at the bottom, so you can now long press that bar at the bottom of Android, that’s normally for gestures and it brings up a dock of apps, which I think I need to play with more to understand better. But I’m gon na guess it’s your most recent apps and it’s not fully customizable but we’ll see either way you can quickly launch and bounce around other apps here and jump right into split screen multitasking, just like what Samsung did with the permanent dock on the fold. It’S just this one takes up less space and also during my time with the phone. I was sort of talking with some people on Google’s team about it and they talked a big game about optimization, which I feel like. We hear this story a lot, but they’ve worked with a lot of developers on optimizing tablet versions of their apps to look good on the pixel fold, they’re also launching a tablet, so that should help both devices and also they’ve updated something like 50 Google apps to All work on the larger display, whether that’s a column layout or just something that takes advantage of the entire display, instead of just looking like a stretched phone version of the app. So I think good news on the software TBD when we test it decent Hardware overall and I think, a pretty nice design, but then, of course, we should get to the price which I mentioned at the beginning. I felt like it would kind of overshadow the whole thing, which is how crazy it is, but this phone will cost 1799 dollars is an 1800 phone and 1800 bucks is a lot for a phone. That’S at the top of the market. I’M pretty sure.
That’S the exact same price that Samsung’s fold 4 launched at, but now that’s probably dropped in price since it came out, so I mean we’re. This is going to bring comparisons to every other 1800 folding phone option. So if I’m just guessing from my first impressions, this is going to be a tough sell for anyone who isn’t specifically interested in the pixel software experience which to be fair, I’m one of those people.
I love that, but it’s the same tough cell, that the pixel 7 Pro was, but at least this was sort of undercutting some of the most expensive, like Ultra phones out there, where this pixel fold is the same price as the most expensive best Flagship, folding phones. But all in all, very interesting, very interesting. Google’S first entry into the folding phone space definitely get subscribed to this website.
So you can see the full review when I actually get my hands on this phone for a longer period of time and test it. But for now that’s your first look. Let me know what you think is this gon na be able to sell at this price, or is this just another one first option in the first gen pile that people probably shouldn’t buy? Let me know what you think, thanks for watching get to the next one peace, foreign .