**A Closer Look at Google Pixel Fold**

As we continue to explore the latest and greatest smartphones on the market, it's clear that some manufacturers are taking risks with their innovative designs. The Google Pixel Fold is one such device that has generated significant interest among tech enthusiasts and critics alike. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Pixel Fold's performance, design, and features.

**Performance: A Top Performer**

When it comes to performance, the Pixel Fold is undoubtedly one of the top performers in its class. According to our stress test, which involves pushing the device's CPU and GPU to their limits using a high-intensity video playback, the Pixel Fold was able to handle four hours and 30 minutes of continuous use. This is an impressive feat, especially when compared to some of the other flagships we've seen recently.

We also took note of the phone's charging times, which were remarkably fast considering its large battery capacity. The Pixel Fold was able to charge from zero to 100% in just 36 minutes using a 65W charger. While this may not be the quickest charging time on the market, it's definitely among the top performers.

**Design: A Mixed Bag**

One of the most significant design aspects of the Pixel Fold is its folding screen, which offers a unique and innovative user experience. However, as our reviewer noted, the internal screen has already shown signs of wear and tear after just over a year of use. The screen protector also seems to be struggling to cope with daily use, causing it to lose its shape and develop a permanent "V" shape.

Additionally, when the phone is folded closed, it can become difficult to open and close without causing damage to the device. This has led some reviewers to question the durability of the Pixel Fold's design. While Google has been working on improving these issues with each subsequent iteration, it remains to be seen whether they will be able to overcome these design flaws in future models.

**Google's First Foray into Folding Phones**

The Pixel Fold represents Google's first attempt at creating a folding phone, and while it's clear that the company has made significant strides in this area, there are still some areas for improvement. One of the most notable features missing from the Pixel Fold is a dedicated section for full-screen apps optimized for two-panel displays.

Currently, many popular apps like Instagram and YouTube simply do not take advantage of the device's unique form factor. This is likely due to the limited availability of high-quality folding screens that can provide an optimal viewing experience. However, with more developers creating apps specifically designed for folding phones, this could become a major selling point in the future.

**Pros and Cons**

For those who are considering purchasing the Pixel Fold, it's essential to weigh the pros and cons of owning such a device. On the plus side, the Pixel Fold offers an impressive display, fast charging times, and a unique design that is sure to generate conversations. However, the phone's durability and overall build quality may raise concerns for some users.

Additionally, with the Pixel Fold starting at $1800, it's essential to consider whether this device is right for you. While it's certainly a premium offering, it may be out of reach for many consumers. Ultimately, the decision to purchase the Pixel Fold will depend on individual preferences and needs.

**Conclusion**

The Google Pixel Fold represents an exciting new direction in smartphone design, but it also comes with its share of challenges and limitations. As one of the first folding phones on the market, the Pixel Fold has set a high bar for future devices, but there's still room for improvement. With continued innovation and refinement, we can expect to see even more impressive offerings from Google and other manufacturers in the near future.

As for our reviewer's experience with the device, it was clear that they loved the Pixel Fold despite its flaws. The phone's unique design and high-performance capabilities made it an attractive option for those who want a premium smartphone experience. However, their concerns about durability and build quality were valid, and we'll be keeping a close eye on how future models address these issues.

**Availability**

The Google Pixel Fold is currently available in the United States, but its availability outside of this region is limited. If you're interested in purchasing the device, it's essential to check with local retailers or authorized resellers to confirm its availability in your area.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enSamsung has been dominating the folding phone space at least here in North America but Google's here to try to put a stop to that with their new Google pixel fold and I'm excited to take a look I'm a big flip phone fan but I haven't actually spent a lot of time with the folding kind of big to bigger style of phone but before we get to the phone itself let's take a look and see what's in the box right away front and center have the folding screen care guide and we should probably pay attention because I've heard that people are already breaking their pixel fold screens but this isn't mine so we're not going to pay too much attention to that we have our booklet that tells you how to turn on the phone uh and their Sim popper which is great and we have a USB C2C cable that is three feet long nothing special there and an OTG cable so that gives you a USBC to USB a for transferring stuff over to from your old phone or plug-in accessories but you'll probably just use it once in case you don't have a USBC phone I than that that's it so we'll get rid of all this and take a look at the phone itself I'm excited because this phone is a little bit different from Samsung's foldables in the way that it's really thin while shut and folds completely solid closed man right off the bat this is a good looking phone it is like I said completely flat when it's closed compared to the little bit of a water droplet you get with the Samsung Galaxy folds and it's a different aspect ratio so it's a bit kind of more Stout it's thicker versus the kind of taller more candy bar shape of the fold four I just kind of realize it kind of looks like a DS while it's closed like this looks like the top lid opens up this would be the perfect DS emulator so on the right side of the phone uh on one half we have our volume rocker and power button that's also your fingerprint scanner on the top we have our speaker Grille and I'm assuming that's a cutout for millimeter wave 5G as well as a mic hole on this side we just have our hinge which is the multi alloy polished cool looking hinge and on the bottom we have a lot of holes I'm not quite sure what each one is it could all be microphones we have one here and then two more on this far side then we have the SIM tray a speaker and USBC for charging let's take a look inside the SIM tray to see if we have two Sims in the slot here or if it's going to be an e-temp or maybe there's an SD card there's not going to be spoiler looks like we have one physical nano SIM and then nothing on the other side so we have to do esim maybe your country does it a bit easier than it is up here in Canada but switching esims is kind of a pain in the butt classic kit moving to the front of the phone we have our 5.8 inch full HD Plus OLED and it's 120 hertz as well which is great this is such a great size that I'm assuming that you'll use this closed quite a bit you're not going to be kind of sacrificing like you're doing the Flips For just having a little tiny screen for notifications and it's Gorilla Glass victus and supports HDR up to 1500 nits Peak brightness so they're not skimping on this front cover screen they know that you're going to be using quite a bit so they're giving you Flagship level specs on that outer screen which is excellent on the inside we have a 7.6 inch 1840p 120 hertz OLED so again pretty darn impressive specs and you can see there's a bit of a rim around it but I would say it looks pretty good obviously we don't have anything on it but of course this is not going to be a standard just like gorilla glass screen on the inside it is an ultra thin glass protective layer with a screen protector on it so it has more of like a plastic key feel compared to the glass of the outside so if you've never used one before it does have a bit of a different feel of a screen but I don't think it's bad at all it just feels a little bit gummy and you can see my gamer fingers leaving goo all over it and for brightness we've done testing on it but they claim up to 1450 nits uh Peak HDR brightness as well so again nice big bright vibrant display which I guess you should hope because this as a flagship device I'm sure has a bit of a price tag to it as for hand feel it does feel a little wide like I can't reach the other side I've pretty moderate sized hands if you do the kind of balance you can start to reach all the corners but if you're somebody who has smaller size hands it's something to be aware of but of course when it's open it's not quite as bad because you're going to be too handling it and thickness it's only 0.5 inches thick while closed and 0.2 inches thick when it's open but yeah it feels really thin when it's open and it's you know thinner than the average phone Maybe phones are pretty thin these days so I guess it's nothing to write home about but let's give it away and see how much it weighs because you know it is kind of dense 283 grams so mildly heavy that's probably around what I think the RG phone seven weighs and you know it's a little bit heavier than the iPhone 14 pro Max so again heavy but you're gonna be probably two-handing it quite a bit so it's not too too bad especially when you consider it has over a 4 800 milliamp hour battery in there so other than that this kind of feels just like the standard flagship phone you know it's got the same kind of pixel stylings on the back with its pretty decently sized camera bump and it's got ipx8 water resistant so it's not going to be dust resistant at all but at least you build a submergent not to worry about it so let's get it turned on and take a look at these big beautiful screens after I tell you but our sponsor D brand oh my God all of this and this okay oh it's a coloring book with the uh the Robot City skins from dbrand that's cool a Rubik's Cube with robot skin this is going to be extremely challenging because each side is just a complete photo from Robot City but they all look extremely similar luckily I'm a pro one two three yep proof thousand piece puzzle oh I love the smell of a new puzzle oh pixel fold skin crime Square amusement park dead quarters and then just stickers and I'm definitely stealing those we have screen protectors for the outer screen you're not gonna put that on the inner screen because it won't close very well and will probably cause bad times but for the outer screen you definitely get that protected I've used dbrand glass of my phones before and it works fantastically and finally we have a giant sticker pack the luxury sticker pack these are dope look at the giant shark fish if you want to get your own robot City merch make sure to go to shortlines.com I want to see someone solve that Rubik's Cube so send us a video of you completing it I will be very impressed and Jeff will give you a high five all right booting up the phone and it looks like stock Android because surprise it is as for absoluted on the phone we have the things from Labs but it is just the Google based apps which is great to see surprisingly my Asus did not come with it that is something we we downloaded checking out what we have for specs it is like the other pixel devices we've had this year with the tensor G2 chip that we have in the tablet and pixel 7 Pro and a so nothing too crazy there as for Ram and storage we have the 256 gig model but does come in 512 and for Ram it is 12 gigs I said the nothing phone video I think 12 gigs of RAM is great for Android uh it does seem like quite a bit but when you're launching this many apps and kind of keeping things running especially with the demand that a lot of apps have these days you want to make sure that your phone's going to last the years and years that the build quality is now kind of getting up to and speaking of Google's offering five years of security updates so that's really great to see that they're going to try to make these phones last for as long as possible because like I said if it's a great phone it doesn't matter if you can't trust have your info on it because there's a huge security hole in two years they're not going to update it anymore like phones are expensive keep them updated it shouldn't be that hard but let's try the fingerprint scanner and see if it's any good again I feel like with flagships they're all pretty darn Sim with how they are but with this new form factor you never know maybe this is going to be a completely crappy one bam pretty quick it feels like most of it's coming down to the animation this screen turning on and everything like that but it is a pretty darn fast fingerprint scanner I guess my only complaint would be is that it's kind of high up with the phone being so wide you kind of have to hold it in a weird spot in your hand so going all the way up there to get it can be a little bit annoying but I guess it also means you know you're not gonna get accidental impresses and having the volume buttons closer is probably more useful especially when you have this phone screen open you got a lot of info on here you're gonna have some media playing and you're going to want to have access to this to turn things up and down and one thing that's really nice about even the settings menu is they're taking advantage of this wide screen so in here opening up the screen we have our settings kind of panel on the left and then the details on the right which is really awesome to see let's check another Google app and see if they've optimized other things or if that it's just a fluke that it happened to be for settings all right yeah you know I thought I was gonna trick them by going to notes as you see on the left side here we have our list of notes and on the right the content of said notes which is great and then if you rotate it is it going to stay the same no so once you get this different aspect ratio it goes into a different mode which is kind of neat as well so it gives it just a full pager so you just take notes while seeing more on screen and it gives us a split keyboard for easier typing with uh two hands as well which kind of seems weird to have a split keyboard but once you get used to it it's great when I was typing on my iPad I found the split keyboard to be really really quick because you just kind of memorize where the keys are on each side and then get to type in one thing that is a little disappointing is that if you customize this outer screen with different Widgets or move the apps around it actually translates immediately to the inside of the phone as well so you can have a different layout from the outer screen and the inner screen which you can do on Samsung and other foldables and I think that's what I prefer because you're going to want maybe a different layout on this outer screen to take advantage of this size or things you want to see at a glance but on the inside maybe have you know a full calendar or full size widgets for more of your apps because there's just more space for them I'm hoping that's something they can change in an update but as it is right now I think that is a little bit of a miss and a point to Samsung who's been in the game a bit longer one thing that they do have here is the new dock though so if you swipe up on this lower rim without going far enough to get into the app multitasking you can see here your most recent apps or most used apps that you can click and drag them onto the page to do multitasking so it's a super convenient way kind of like they do on iPads to just move through your app seamlessly so on the right we have YouTube and the left we have notes I can swipe up and add mail to the left and change it all over and then in your multitasking view you have this pairing together now it will take a little bit just getting used to pulling up that dock here though actually to get that last shot it took me a couple tries to not go into this multitasking view because it's obviously a bit new but once you get used to it it's pretty convenient and then once we want just one full screen app you can just drag this all the way since we're here let's listen to some crab rave gotta say it sounds pretty good it gets pretty loud the sound's pretty balanced uh it definitely feels Dynamic on the two sides one thing I noticed when I turned it I guess portrait because it opens up to landscape is it sounds a bit better because then your hands are here where the speakers are so it bounces towards your face I found that when it's in it's kind of natural opening Motion in that landscape view the sound's just kind of shooting towards the table and it didn't sound quite as good but still sounds really darn decent overall and I think it's something that you could be happy with as for the screen quality itself looks great one thing obviously is that there are huge bezels because of this aspect ratio but I mean one thing you can do is just zoom in the image the whole way so that it fills the screen if you really want but I guess don't do that I don't recommend it but as for brightness I've got plenty bright color looks great it's no lead and uh the sharpnesses is totally fine so it's good to see that even though it's such a giant screen they're not cheaping out and giving you something that's like 1080P or less because you'd probably start to notice that you know seven inches what if you watch it while closed yeah no surprise the speakers still sound great and the outer screen looks great as well this is more of a natural aspect ratio so you're just seeing more on this little screen though there still is a bit of black bars because it is so wide doesn't look too bad though all right it's time to talk cameras because there are a lot on the back we have a 48 megapixel main shooter at 10.9 megapixel Ultra wide and a 10.9 megapixel telephoto lens you have quite a few options there but that's not all because there's also an inner camera so at the top of the bezel of the inner screen there's another selfie camera here which is an 8 megapixel shooter and on the cover screen we have a 9.5 megapixel shooter there as well five cameras all which can be used to take a picture of your beautiful face so you've been looking to you know update your dating profile this is probably the phone for you because you've got some options you know the nice thing with a folding phone is that if you want to take a selfie you can actually use this outer screen and take a selfie with that that's showing right let's try it out well that would be nice is that if you're once you've taken a photo and you want to switch back to the main screen it'd be great if you just you know tap or if there was a button or unlock you could do to bring it back to this main screen you do have to do it on this outer screen and now let's try with the inner camera and finally the outer screen camera wow that that covers green photo is actually way better than I thought it would be it must have some sort of portrait mode on by default as you can see there's a little bit of artifacting right by my thumb here and obviously it's a pretty dramatic cut off but I mean it worked I'm I'm pretty darn impressed with this photo and I didn't have to do anything it was just like a quick snap looking at the inner screen camera I prefer the external screens camera but this one here totally reasonable and if that was the only selfie camera I would have no problem using that swapping to the outer screen you know of all the photos this is probably my my least favorite but I think it's because it's not in a portrait mode so it's just kind of trying to keep everything looking exposed and even which doesn't necessarily flatter the main subject of the photo comparing the main cameras taking a selfie versus the external screens selfie camera I think I prefer the external screen selfie camera because it gets my skin tone a bit more accurately the main camera is exposing me very well and keeping me very bright and the main subject of the photo but uh I feel like I'm not that light-skinned compared to the external screens so I have to say the edge detection in the selfie mode is very good with the main camera there are like a couple spots in my hair that are out of focus compared to the rest but uh it looks very sharp now let's start taking some selfie videos I guess we'll just take three and then look back at them hello this is me taking a selfie video how do I sound how do I look it's in like a weird letterbox I feel very uh clustered claustrophobic here but maybe it looks good and sounds good I can tell by the preview it doesn't look great this is selfie video with the external screen how does this one sound and how does this one look is it any different is it any better who knows this is a selfie video with the external screen uh it's a little weird to like line up because you want to line up with the screen uh but you can't so let's see how it looks I didn't expect there to be so much of a difference between the three but they are pretty significantly different the internal one is definitely the worst it looks the worst I don't know if it'll show up for you when you're watching the video on screen but there was even ghosting which is super odd so internal camera definitely the worst in every scenario but the difference between the external screen camera and the main cameras is actually pretty interesting as well the main cameras had a very clear microphone like it sounded very crisp versus the external screen had a pretty warm and full microphone so it sounds different but I think I prefer the main camera's mic but I think I prefer the footage from the cover screens cameras because it's a more traditional kind of selfie video look it's very easy to know where you're looking where you're gonna look like versus the main cameras because you're holding it where you want to look at yourself on the cover screen you're kind of off center and then I wasn't a huge fan I'm kind of surprised that I prefer the more kind of close and centered look of the external cover display but I think no matter what all of them are fine like you're none of them are blowing me away but you know you have lots of options so Google's known for their cameras and I took this out to the symphony last night to see how it performs in an indoor setting where it's pretty dark and of course it performed very very well no matter if I was using the ultra wide the telephoto or that 48 megapixel main shooter I have to say the photos turned out really evenly lit across the board and the ultrawide didn't see too much Distortion though you can tell at the tops of the photos especially with the dramatic ceiling that there is a little bit of a warp to it but nothing too bad and I can only tell because you know I can directly see back-to-back photos that were taken with and without the ultra one one thing that wasn't as great was the video performance in the theater you can see some of the dark spots are quite noisy but that'll happen pretty much with any phone so I don't really have any Matrix complaints with that this one of the chandeliers using the 5x optical zoom so you're gonna be losing quality like you would with the 20x super zoom which you know maybe is useful for some people but I don't know when I need to get that close to a subject from far distance this because it's a little it's a little weird but I have to say again it does look very good and the contrast between the bright lit lights and the dark background though some of the parts of the background are a little lost or you know quite noisy it's not super noticeable like I would post this on Instagram I don't think anyone would really notice or call me out and be like this photo looks a little weird in the dark spots I also went outside and took some photos into daylight to make things a little bit easier for the camera and the photos are pretty decent I think the I think the clarity looks really good and the lighting is pretty even though the plants definitely weren't this Brown uh they're pretty colorful to the eye in person yet everything is just kind of yellow children Brown which is fine again with the clarity it makes it kind of look more realistic I guess but yeah the colors are completely missing and I'm not really sure what caused that heading over to the motorcycle that we always take a picture of it looks pretty good the sharpness and Clarity though there is a bit of warmth this motorcycle is black but here it's it's a pretty warm black even in the fire hydrant in the back it's a pretty red red in person but in here it's pretty faded and again the flowers in the background are very Brown I don't actually use a pixel so I don't know if that's standard I think it's a good looking photo but kind of like my complaints with the nothing phone I'd rather have a more flat or realistic photo and apply a faded filter or you know up the warmth then just have it kind of be warm and have to edit it back to what it actually looked like in person as for the ultra wide it looks good again like I mentioned in the indoor photos you can see a little bit of distortion on the sides but I think overall getting everything in the shot is going to be way more worth it than that little bit of distortion I know in some budget phones the Distortion can look pretty bad but here uh it doesn't look too crazy after taking some pictures outside I went took a video of Alex in the shop to see how it performs you know taking a video of people moving objects and some pretty flat lighting and I'm not super impressed so it starts on the ultra wide camera and things are pretty darn noisy even though again the lighting is pretty even and fairly darn bright but when it switches to the main camera it improves a little bit but I'm it's still not excellent uh it would be great to see some of that noise cleaned up as there isn't really an excuse for it to be so noisy I took a photo shooting towards the sun to see if there's any uh haloing or lens flare effects and there is a little bit you can see in the shadow as there's a bit of a rainbow from the Sun hitting the lens but overall I think it performs pretty strongly and lets things be contrast while not blowing up the sky after this I took a video of Andy to test the microphones and Shake all right we're outside taking a video of Andy trying to find parking we can hear the tray in the background it's a little windy what do we have does it sound good there's only one way to find out let's give it a listen I gotta say the stabilization though is really good on this like I'm jiggling the camera like a lot and it is it is holding steady like really really steady I'm really impressed the mic quality is totally decent again it might be the speakers on the phone so you'll hear what it actually sounded like but I'm pretty impressed there were still some sections with noise though which is odd and I couldn't find any setting that I might have enabled that would be causing it but again something to be aware of though with the film grain and the bezels from this giant screen it seems kind of cinematic so at least you got that going for you let's now talk about Labs results jumping right into games the pixel fold performs okay both when the screen is open and closed but something to note is that when you're using that big internal screen the performance does drop pretty significantly looking at Dolphin emulator playing Mario Kart Wii we can see the external screen doesn't perform great but even then it performs leagues better than the internal screen with the external getting a median of 47 FPS and the internal only getting 29 FPS neither of those are very compelling though when even the 7A gets a median of 60 and every other Flagship doesn't really struggle with the frame rates and any game we tested the only one to really bounce back would be Call of Duty mobile which again on the external screen performs pretty darn decently with 93 FPS but when comparing to the internal screen it only got 79 FPS so why is performing so much worse even compared to the other pixel devices well that's when it comes down to thermals this thing is getting hot especially with how thin it is it's having trouble getting rid of all that excess heat when your hands are holding on to it it's playing games it's got the volume coming out and because of that it's starting to throttle performance not super great to see and it's definitely the sacrifice of having this thin body luckily though the battery performance is pretty solid in the battery longevity test we use the external screen because if we want to keep your battery going you're going to be using that external screen you're able to get 20 hours of video playback which is great in compares to some of the best phones we've seen this list so far and for the stress test we use the internal screen and you know hit the CPU and GPU hard and we're still able to get four and a half hours which is again one of the top performers that we've seen so far great job as for charge times everything that seems pretty standard with a zero to 100 charge with a 65 watt charger taking an hour and 36 minutes and in an hour I was able to get 77 so it might have the quickest top-ups but it's not too bad and finally for brightness the internal and external screen we're both able to get 450 nits which is there's a pretty middle of the packed result that we've seen compared to other flagships but not too bad now Samsung for some reason has not sent us their full devices before so I don't actually have one to compare but Elijah's been using a fold four for about a year now and one of my main concerns about folding phones kind of comes true with this one here so it's been used for about a year you can see all the gamergu that's been building up over that time but the internal screen looks awful look at that that screen protector is coming off it's fighting for its life in fact it's fighting for its life so much listen to this it's not supposed to make that sound and it's really not supposed to look like this on top of that it has a permanent kind of v-shape so even with me kind of trying to push it flat it does what I'm holding it but once I Let Go it bounces back a bit but that's also a valid complaint for the pixel when you open it up it also kind of opens to a bow unless you force it flat but if you've watched Jerry Rick everything's video you got to be really careful with that handy we'll just break back so though Samsung's been doing this for four years it still can't get it perfect well Google's first try be perfect no thank you and that's another kind of complaint I have and what I've seen a lot of reviewers have is that with this being so new for Google there aren't really any killer folding features I think the Play Store really needs a great for full section that has apps that are already optimized for two panel displays because there just aren't any like believe it or not a lot of people use Instagram and again I know a lot of people brought this up but this does not look good like why is this in the center yeah you can move to the side but this should be full screen and it is on the Samsung Galaxy fold 4. if it's gonna look like this at least give me the ability to scroll with this empty space or do something more useful on top of that if you're not someone who uses these large form factor folding phones like myself it takes a while to get used to because it's still very thick and was a huge presence in my pocket it took a bit to get used to especially when I was sitting for so long in an uncomfortable chair already at the symphony this is actually starting to cause some discomfort being in my pocket for so long but that could just be me coming from the Zenfone 10 and before that you know the smaller flip style phones so your mileage may vary clearly it's a bit of a mixed bag for me I love folding phones and I truly believe that they're the future and even though I prefer the flip style I do see a place for these folding phones and as somebody who does a lot of admin stuff you know running this channel takes quite a bit and having a larger screen would be great at 1800 US Dollars it's a pretty high entry point though it is the same price as the fold four and probably the fold five when it releases uh time soon if you are not somebody who knows what they're going to do with this form factor I don't think it's something that you should just kind of jump into as a hey why not the flip styles are a lot easier to kind of just go well why not because at the end of the day when you have it open it's just your current phone this one here you're adding another phone to the back and with that you're getting double the screen space but do you need that you can't see it all when you're watching videos and some of your games might not work and the apps you use might just be the regular size anyway so make sure you do a lot of research and let us know down below are you the person that this phone is for are you sold on the pixel fold this is only available in America so if you're outside of the states is this something that you want to come to your country for me it's pretty hard to missSamsung has been dominating the folding phone space at least here in North America but Google's here to try to put a stop to that with their new Google pixel fold and I'm excited to take a look I'm a big flip phone fan but I haven't actually spent a lot of time with the folding kind of big to bigger style of phone but before we get to the phone itself let's take a look and see what's in the box right away front and center have the folding screen care guide and we should probably pay attention because I've heard that people are already breaking their pixel fold screens but this isn't mine so we're not going to pay too much attention to that we have our booklet that tells you how to turn on the phone uh and their Sim popper which is great and we have a USB C2C cable that is three feet long nothing special there and an OTG cable so that gives you a USBC to USB a for transferring stuff over to from your old phone or plug-in accessories but you'll probably just use it once in case you don't have a USBC phone I than that that's it so we'll get rid of all this and take a look at the phone itself I'm excited because this phone is a little bit different from Samsung's foldables in the way that it's really thin while shut and folds completely solid closed man right off the bat this is a good looking phone it is like I said completely flat when it's closed compared to the little bit of a water droplet you get with the Samsung Galaxy folds and it's a different aspect ratio so it's a bit kind of more Stout it's thicker versus the kind of taller more candy bar shape of the fold four I just kind of realize it kind of looks like a DS while it's closed like this looks like the top lid opens up this would be the perfect DS emulator so on the right side of the phone uh on one half we have our volume rocker and power button that's also your fingerprint scanner on the top we have our speaker Grille and I'm assuming that's a cutout for millimeter wave 5G as well as a mic hole on this side we just have our hinge which is the multi alloy polished cool looking hinge and on the bottom we have a lot of holes I'm not quite sure what each one is it could all be microphones we have one here and then two more on this far side then we have the SIM tray a speaker and USBC for charging let's take a look inside the SIM tray to see if we have two Sims in the slot here or if it's going to be an e-temp or maybe there's an SD card there's not going to be spoiler looks like we have one physical nano SIM and then nothing on the other side so we have to do esim maybe your country does it a bit easier than it is up here in Canada but switching esims is kind of a pain in the butt classic kit moving to the front of the phone we have our 5.8 inch full HD Plus OLED and it's 120 hertz as well which is great this is such a great size that I'm assuming that you'll use this closed quite a bit you're not going to be kind of sacrificing like you're doing the Flips For just having a little tiny screen for notifications and it's Gorilla Glass victus and supports HDR up to 1500 nits Peak brightness so they're not skimping on this front cover screen they know that you're going to be using quite a bit so they're giving you Flagship level specs on that outer screen which is excellent on the inside we have a 7.6 inch 1840p 120 hertz OLED so again pretty darn impressive specs and you can see there's a bit of a rim around it but I would say it looks pretty good obviously we don't have anything on it but of course this is not going to be a standard just like gorilla glass screen on the inside it is an ultra thin glass protective layer with a screen protector on it so it has more of like a plastic key feel compared to the glass of the outside so if you've never used one before it does have a bit of a different feel of a screen but I don't think it's bad at all it just feels a little bit gummy and you can see my gamer fingers leaving goo all over it and for brightness we've done testing on it but they claim up to 1450 nits uh Peak HDR brightness as well so again nice big bright vibrant display which I guess you should hope because this as a flagship device I'm sure has a bit of a price tag to it as for hand feel it does feel a little wide like I can't reach the other side I've pretty moderate sized hands if you do the kind of balance you can start to reach all the corners but if you're somebody who has smaller size hands it's something to be aware of but of course when it's open it's not quite as bad because you're going to be too handling it and thickness it's only 0.5 inches thick while closed and 0.2 inches thick when it's open but yeah it feels really thin when it's open and it's you know thinner than the average phone Maybe phones are pretty thin these days so I guess it's nothing to write home about but let's give it away and see how much it weighs because you know it is kind of dense 283 grams so mildly heavy that's probably around what I think the RG phone seven weighs and you know it's a little bit heavier than the iPhone 14 pro Max so again heavy but you're gonna be probably two-handing it quite a bit so it's not too too bad especially when you consider it has over a 4 800 milliamp hour battery in there so other than that this kind of feels just like the standard flagship phone you know it's got the same kind of pixel stylings on the back with its pretty decently sized camera bump and it's got ipx8 water resistant so it's not going to be dust resistant at all but at least you build a submergent not to worry about it so let's get it turned on and take a look at these big beautiful screens after I tell you but our sponsor D brand oh my God all of this and this okay oh it's a coloring book with the uh the Robot City skins from dbrand that's cool a Rubik's Cube with robot skin this is going to be extremely challenging because each side is just a complete photo from Robot City but they all look extremely similar luckily I'm a pro one two three yep proof thousand piece puzzle oh I love the smell of a new puzzle oh pixel fold skin crime Square amusement park dead quarters and then just stickers and I'm definitely stealing those we have screen protectors for the outer screen you're not gonna put that on the inner screen because it won't close very well and will probably cause bad times but for the outer screen you definitely get that protected I've used dbrand glass of my phones before and it works fantastically and finally we have a giant sticker pack the luxury sticker pack these are dope look at the giant shark fish if you want to get your own robot City merch make sure to go to shortlines.com I want to see someone solve that Rubik's Cube so send us a video of you completing it I will be very impressed and Jeff will give you a high five all right booting up the phone and it looks like stock Android because surprise it is as for absoluted on the phone we have the things from Labs but it is just the Google based apps which is great to see surprisingly my Asus did not come with it that is something we we downloaded checking out what we have for specs it is like the other pixel devices we've had this year with the tensor G2 chip that we have in the tablet and pixel 7 Pro and a so nothing too crazy there as for Ram and storage we have the 256 gig model but does come in 512 and for Ram it is 12 gigs I said the nothing phone video I think 12 gigs of RAM is great for Android uh it does seem like quite a bit but when you're launching this many apps and kind of keeping things running especially with the demand that a lot of apps have these days you want to make sure that your phone's going to last the years and years that the build quality is now kind of getting up to and speaking of Google's offering five years of security updates so that's really great to see that they're going to try to make these phones last for as long as possible because like I said if it's a great phone it doesn't matter if you can't trust have your info on it because there's a huge security hole in two years they're not going to update it anymore like phones are expensive keep them updated it shouldn't be that hard but let's try the fingerprint scanner and see if it's any good again I feel like with flagships they're all pretty darn Sim with how they are but with this new form factor you never know maybe this is going to be a completely crappy one bam pretty quick it feels like most of it's coming down to the animation this screen turning on and everything like that but it is a pretty darn fast fingerprint scanner I guess my only complaint would be is that it's kind of high up with the phone being so wide you kind of have to hold it in a weird spot in your hand so going all the way up there to get it can be a little bit annoying but I guess it also means you know you're not gonna get accidental impresses and having the volume buttons closer is probably more useful especially when you have this phone screen open you got a lot of info on here you're gonna have some media playing and you're going to want to have access to this to turn things up and down and one thing that's really nice about even the settings menu is they're taking advantage of this wide screen so in here opening up the screen we have our settings kind of panel on the left and then the details on the right which is really awesome to see let's check another Google app and see if they've optimized other things or if that it's just a fluke that it happened to be for settings all right yeah you know I thought I was gonna trick them by going to notes as you see on the left side here we have our list of notes and on the right the content of said notes which is great and then if you rotate it is it going to stay the same no so once you get this different aspect ratio it goes into a different mode which is kind of neat as well so it gives it just a full pager so you just take notes while seeing more on screen and it gives us a split keyboard for easier typing with uh two hands as well which kind of seems weird to have a split keyboard but once you get used to it it's great when I was typing on my iPad I found the split keyboard to be really really quick because you just kind of memorize where the keys are on each side and then get to type in one thing that is a little disappointing is that if you customize this outer screen with different Widgets or move the apps around it actually translates immediately to the inside of the phone as well so you can have a different layout from the outer screen and the inner screen which you can do on Samsung and other foldables and I think that's what I prefer because you're going to want maybe a different layout on this outer screen to take advantage of this size or things you want to see at a glance but on the inside maybe have you know a full calendar or full size widgets for more of your apps because there's just more space for them I'm hoping that's something they can change in an update but as it is right now I think that is a little bit of a miss and a point to Samsung who's been in the game a bit longer one thing that they do have here is the new dock though so if you swipe up on this lower rim without going far enough to get into the app multitasking you can see here your most recent apps or most used apps that you can click and drag them onto the page to do multitasking so it's a super convenient way kind of like they do on iPads to just move through your app seamlessly so on the right we have YouTube and the left we have notes I can swipe up and add mail to the left and change it all over and then in your multitasking view you have this pairing together now it will take a little bit just getting used to pulling up that dock here though actually to get that last shot it took me a couple tries to not go into this multitasking view because it's obviously a bit new but once you get used to it it's pretty convenient and then once we want just one full screen app you can just drag this all the way since we're here let's listen to some crab rave gotta say it sounds pretty good it gets pretty loud the sound's pretty balanced uh it definitely feels Dynamic on the two sides one thing I noticed when I turned it I guess portrait because it opens up to landscape is it sounds a bit better because then your hands are here where the speakers are so it bounces towards your face I found that when it's in it's kind of natural opening Motion in that landscape view the sound's just kind of shooting towards the table and it didn't sound quite as good but still sounds really darn decent overall and I think it's something that you could be happy with as for the screen quality itself looks great one thing obviously is that there are huge bezels because of this aspect ratio but I mean one thing you can do is just zoom in the image the whole way so that it fills the screen if you really want but I guess don't do that I don't recommend it but as for brightness I've got plenty bright color looks great it's no lead and uh the sharpnesses is totally fine so it's good to see that even though it's such a giant screen they're not cheaping out and giving you something that's like 1080P or less because you'd probably start to notice that you know seven inches what if you watch it while closed yeah no surprise the speakers still sound great and the outer screen looks great as well this is more of a natural aspect ratio so you're just seeing more on this little screen though there still is a bit of black bars because it is so wide doesn't look too bad though all right it's time to talk cameras because there are a lot on the back we have a 48 megapixel main shooter at 10.9 megapixel Ultra wide and a 10.9 megapixel telephoto lens you have quite a few options there but that's not all because there's also an inner camera so at the top of the bezel of the inner screen there's another selfie camera here which is an 8 megapixel shooter and on the cover screen we have a 9.5 megapixel shooter there as well five cameras all which can be used to take a picture of your beautiful face so you've been looking to you know update your dating profile this is probably the phone for you because you've got some options you know the nice thing with a folding phone is that if you want to take a selfie you can actually use this outer screen and take a selfie with that that's showing right let's try it out well that would be nice is that if you're once you've taken a photo and you want to switch back to the main screen it'd be great if you just you know tap or if there was a button or unlock you could do to bring it back to this main screen you do have to do it on this outer screen and now let's try with the inner camera and finally the outer screen camera wow that that covers green photo is actually way better than I thought it would be it must have some sort of portrait mode on by default as you can see there's a little bit of artifacting right by my thumb here and obviously it's a pretty dramatic cut off but I mean it worked I'm I'm pretty darn impressed with this photo and I didn't have to do anything it was just like a quick snap looking at the inner screen camera I prefer the external screens camera but this one here totally reasonable and if that was the only selfie camera I would have no problem using that swapping to the outer screen you know of all the photos this is probably my my least favorite but I think it's because it's not in a portrait mode so it's just kind of trying to keep everything looking exposed and even which doesn't necessarily flatter the main subject of the photo comparing the main cameras taking a selfie versus the external screens selfie camera I think I prefer the external screen selfie camera because it gets my skin tone a bit more accurately the main camera is exposing me very well and keeping me very bright and the main subject of the photo but uh I feel like I'm not that light-skinned compared to the external screens so I have to say the edge detection in the selfie mode is very good with the main camera there are like a couple spots in my hair that are out of focus compared to the rest but uh it looks very sharp now let's start taking some selfie videos I guess we'll just take three and then look back at them hello this is me taking a selfie video how do I sound how do I look it's in like a weird letterbox I feel very uh clustered claustrophobic here but maybe it looks good and sounds good I can tell by the preview it doesn't look great this is selfie video with the external screen how does this one sound and how does this one look is it any different is it any better who knows this is a selfie video with the external screen uh it's a little weird to like line up because you want to line up with the screen uh but you can't so let's see how it looks I didn't expect there to be so much of a difference between the three but they are pretty significantly different the internal one is definitely the worst it looks the worst I don't know if it'll show up for you when you're watching the video on screen but there was even ghosting which is super odd so internal camera definitely the worst in every scenario but the difference between the external screen camera and the main cameras is actually pretty interesting as well the main cameras had a very clear microphone like it sounded very crisp versus the external screen had a pretty warm and full microphone so it sounds different but I think I prefer the main camera's mic but I think I prefer the footage from the cover screens cameras because it's a more traditional kind of selfie video look it's very easy to know where you're looking where you're gonna look like versus the main cameras because you're holding it where you want to look at yourself on the cover screen you're kind of off center and then I wasn't a huge fan I'm kind of surprised that I prefer the more kind of close and centered look of the external cover display but I think no matter what all of them are fine like you're none of them are blowing me away but you know you have lots of options so Google's known for their cameras and I took this out to the symphony last night to see how it performs in an indoor setting where it's pretty dark and of course it performed very very well no matter if I was using the ultra wide the telephoto or that 48 megapixel main shooter I have to say the photos turned out really evenly lit across the board and the ultrawide didn't see too much Distortion though you can tell at the tops of the photos especially with the dramatic ceiling that there is a little bit of a warp to it but nothing too bad and I can only tell because you know I can directly see back-to-back photos that were taken with and without the ultra one one thing that wasn't as great was the video performance in the theater you can see some of the dark spots are quite noisy but that'll happen pretty much with any phone so I don't really have any Matrix complaints with that this one of the chandeliers using the 5x optical zoom so you're gonna be losing quality like you would with the 20x super zoom which you know maybe is useful for some people but I don't know when I need to get that close to a subject from far distance this because it's a little it's a little weird but I have to say again it does look very good and the contrast between the bright lit lights and the dark background though some of the parts of the background are a little lost or you know quite noisy it's not super noticeable like I would post this on Instagram I don't think anyone would really notice or call me out and be like this photo looks a little weird in the dark spots I also went outside and took some photos into daylight to make things a little bit easier for the camera and the photos are pretty decent I think the I think the clarity looks really good and the lighting is pretty even though the plants definitely weren't this Brown uh they're pretty colorful to the eye in person yet everything is just kind of yellow children Brown which is fine again with the clarity it makes it kind of look more realistic I guess but yeah the colors are completely missing and I'm not really sure what caused that heading over to the motorcycle that we always take a picture of it looks pretty good the sharpness and Clarity though there is a bit of warmth this motorcycle is black but here it's it's a pretty warm black even in the fire hydrant in the back it's a pretty red red in person but in here it's pretty faded and again the flowers in the background are very Brown I don't actually use a pixel so I don't know if that's standard I think it's a good looking photo but kind of like my complaints with the nothing phone I'd rather have a more flat or realistic photo and apply a faded filter or you know up the warmth then just have it kind of be warm and have to edit it back to what it actually looked like in person as for the ultra wide it looks good again like I mentioned in the indoor photos you can see a little bit of distortion on the sides but I think overall getting everything in the shot is going to be way more worth it than that little bit of distortion I know in some budget phones the Distortion can look pretty bad but here uh it doesn't look too crazy after taking some pictures outside I went took a video of Alex in the shop to see how it performs you know taking a video of people moving objects and some pretty flat lighting and I'm not super impressed so it starts on the ultra wide camera and things are pretty darn noisy even though again the lighting is pretty even and fairly darn bright but when it switches to the main camera it improves a little bit but I'm it's still not excellent uh it would be great to see some of that noise cleaned up as there isn't really an excuse for it to be so noisy I took a photo shooting towards the sun to see if there's any uh haloing or lens flare effects and there is a little bit you can see in the shadow as there's a bit of a rainbow from the Sun hitting the lens but overall I think it performs pretty strongly and lets things be contrast while not blowing up the sky after this I took a video of Andy to test the microphones and Shake all right we're outside taking a video of Andy trying to find parking we can hear the tray in the background it's a little windy what do we have does it sound good there's only one way to find out let's give it a listen I gotta say the stabilization though is really good on this like I'm jiggling the camera like a lot and it is it is holding steady like really really steady I'm really impressed the mic quality is totally decent again it might be the speakers on the phone so you'll hear what it actually sounded like but I'm pretty impressed there were still some sections with noise though which is odd and I couldn't find any setting that I might have enabled that would be causing it but again something to be aware of though with the film grain and the bezels from this giant screen it seems kind of cinematic so at least you got that going for you let's now talk about Labs results jumping right into games the pixel fold performs okay both when the screen is open and closed but something to note is that when you're using that big internal screen the performance does drop pretty significantly looking at Dolphin emulator playing Mario Kart Wii we can see the external screen doesn't perform great but even then it performs leagues better than the internal screen with the external getting a median of 47 FPS and the internal only getting 29 FPS neither of those are very compelling though when even the 7A gets a median of 60 and every other Flagship doesn't really struggle with the frame rates and any game we tested the only one to really bounce back would be Call of Duty mobile which again on the external screen performs pretty darn decently with 93 FPS but when comparing to the internal screen it only got 79 FPS so why is performing so much worse even compared to the other pixel devices well that's when it comes down to thermals this thing is getting hot especially with how thin it is it's having trouble getting rid of all that excess heat when your hands are holding on to it it's playing games it's got the volume coming out and because of that it's starting to throttle performance not super great to see and it's definitely the sacrifice of having this thin body luckily though the battery performance is pretty solid in the battery longevity test we use the external screen because if we want to keep your battery going you're going to be using that external screen you're able to get 20 hours of video playback which is great in compares to some of the best phones we've seen this list so far and for the stress test we use the internal screen and you know hit the CPU and GPU hard and we're still able to get four and a half hours which is again one of the top performers that we've seen so far great job as for charge times everything that seems pretty standard with a zero to 100 charge with a 65 watt charger taking an hour and 36 minutes and in an hour I was able to get 77 so it might have the quickest top-ups but it's not too bad and finally for brightness the internal and external screen we're both able to get 450 nits which is there's a pretty middle of the packed result that we've seen compared to other flagships but not too bad now Samsung for some reason has not sent us their full devices before so I don't actually have one to compare but Elijah's been using a fold four for about a year now and one of my main concerns about folding phones kind of comes true with this one here so it's been used for about a year you can see all the gamergu that's been building up over that time but the internal screen looks awful look at that that screen protector is coming off it's fighting for its life in fact it's fighting for its life so much listen to this it's not supposed to make that sound and it's really not supposed to look like this on top of that it has a permanent kind of v-shape so even with me kind of trying to push it flat it does what I'm holding it but once I Let Go it bounces back a bit but that's also a valid complaint for the pixel when you open it up it also kind of opens to a bow unless you force it flat but if you've watched Jerry Rick everything's video you got to be really careful with that handy we'll just break back so though Samsung's been doing this for four years it still can't get it perfect well Google's first try be perfect no thank you and that's another kind of complaint I have and what I've seen a lot of reviewers have is that with this being so new for Google there aren't really any killer folding features I think the Play Store really needs a great for full section that has apps that are already optimized for two panel displays because there just aren't any like believe it or not a lot of people use Instagram and again I know a lot of people brought this up but this does not look good like why is this in the center yeah you can move to the side but this should be full screen and it is on the Samsung Galaxy fold 4. if it's gonna look like this at least give me the ability to scroll with this empty space or do something more useful on top of that if you're not someone who uses these large form factor folding phones like myself it takes a while to get used to because it's still very thick and was a huge presence in my pocket it took a bit to get used to especially when I was sitting for so long in an uncomfortable chair already at the symphony this is actually starting to cause some discomfort being in my pocket for so long but that could just be me coming from the Zenfone 10 and before that you know the smaller flip style phones so your mileage may vary clearly it's a bit of a mixed bag for me I love folding phones and I truly believe that they're the future and even though I prefer the flip style I do see a place for these folding phones and as somebody who does a lot of admin stuff you know running this channel takes quite a bit and having a larger screen would be great at 1800 US Dollars it's a pretty high entry point though it is the same price as the fold four and probably the fold five when it releases uh time soon if you are not somebody who knows what they're going to do with this form factor I don't think it's something that you should just kind of jump into as a hey why not the flip styles are a lot easier to kind of just go well why not because at the end of the day when you have it open it's just your current phone this one here you're adding another phone to the back and with that you're getting double the screen space but do you need that you can't see it all when you're watching videos and some of your games might not work and the apps you use might just be the regular size anyway so make sure you do a lot of research and let us know down below are you the person that this phone is for are you sold on the pixel fold this is only available in America so if you're outside of the states is this something that you want to come to your country for me it's pretty hard to miss\n"