Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold review: The top foldable phone

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Google's Pixel 9 Pro Fold sets a new standard for other foldable phones to meet or exceed.

The company nailed almost everything. The cameras take superb photos, build quality and design are top-notch, and performance is excellent. Importantly, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold also looks and feels like a regular phone when folded — a factor that separates it as the best foldable phone to date.

Now, Google just needs to figure out the biggest drawback on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold (and every other foldable out there, to varying degrees) — a lack of dust resistance. It's a downside that brings unwanted anxiety if excessive dust or sand features in your life, whether frequently or infrequently.

Design: An unrivaled construction

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold has all the markings of a high-end, modern phone. Its metal and glass construction is dressed in a fine matte texture, the frame edges are flat, and the phone feels dense and rock solid.

Some of the phone's design compromises, like thicker black borders around the exterior display and the fact that it feels somewhat bulky and heavy when folded compared to a regular phone, can be excused due to its foldable form. Its exterior display also offers a closer approximation of a traditional phone than any other foldable phone currently available.

Unfolded into tablet mode, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is a remarkably thin and light tablet with narrow black display borders. At eight inches, the tablet display is the largest available on a foldable phone in the US. The crease down the fold is noticeable at a glance, but it's quick and easy to ignore.

While the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's familiar exterior display and large tablet screen distinguish it from the tablet-hybrid competition, its construction has one key drawback.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold's IPX8 rating makes it less durable than a regular phone, like the Pixel 9 Pro, which has an IP68 rating, and some other top foldables.

The "X" means the Pixel 9 Pro Fold lacks an official dust resistance rating, which means it wouldn't be a good idea to bring it to overly dusty or sandy places. Indeed, I didn't bring the Pixel 9 Pro Fold on a beach trip out of concern that sand would get inside the hinge or behind the tablet display, despite the fact that it would have been a perfect opportunity to test its camera.

It's an unfortunate drawback when its main competitor, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, has an IP48 rating, which offers at least some protection, even if it's only against particles as large as coarse sand.

The "8" in the IPX8 rating means it has solid water resistance that's equal to most premium phones you can buy today for accidental drops in water.

Performance and battery life: Enough for most people

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold runs as well as the rest of Google's Pixel 9 lineup, as they all run on Google's Tensor G4 processor. I go into more detail about Google's Tensor G4 processor in my Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL review.

In short, the Tensor G4 processor isn't as powerful on paper or in benchmark results as other foldable Android phones running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processors, like the Galaxy Z Fold 6. In reality, however, there's no perceivable difference while running apps and playing games.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold obtained a 55% result in our updated foldable phone battery test. We list the details on the updated test below.

The result is understandably lower than a regular phone's battery test result due to the former's tablet display. The Pixel 9 Pro with a 6.3-inch display, for example, scored 62%. Indeed, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's large 8-inch tablet display drains much more battery power than a regular phone display.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold should still last most people a full day with mixed phone and tablet use before needing to charge again at night, even if its battery test result isn't stellar. Heavier use, like lots of gaming and video streaming, may require a mid-day top-up.

We run the same battery tests for foldables as we do for regular phones, except we use tablet mode for some tests and folded mode for others. In our updated battery test, we used tablet mode for the gaming and video streaming portions, as we believe most people would use tablet mode for those applications. We used the folded phone mode for the music streaming and CPU benchmark tests to reflect a day's worth of casual app use in phone mode. Our previous foldable battery tests included individual results for both folded and unfolded modes, which we feel doesn't reflect how someone would use the phone in typical usage. See our guide to the best phone battery life for more information.

Displays: The biggest tablet you can fit in one hand

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold's exterior display is the same as the Pixel 9's — a sharp, 6.3-inch, 1080p OLED display with a 60-120Hz refresh rate. It's also bright enough to easily see what's on the screen on sunny days.

Crucially, it's also the same aspect ratio (width and height) as the Pixel 9's display. That means it's more familiar to use for quick, minor tasks than its stout predecessor, the Pixel Fold, whenever you don't need or want to use the tablet display. It's also a key factor that places it ahead of the Galaxy Z Fold 6, which has an awkwardly narrow exterior display that's less ideal in a few ways. For example, the typing experience is comparably cramped, and apps appear smaller, even if the screen is longer than a typical phone screen.

One might expect the sharper and brighter Pixel 9 Pro's display with a more advanced 1-120Hz variable refresh rate on a $1,800 device like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. However, these upgrades are barely noticeable on the Pixel 9 Pro, and they wouldn't be worth it if they forced Google to raise the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's price.

As previously mentioned, the eight-inch tablet display is the biggest you can find on a foldable phone in the US. It's a sharp 2,076 by 2,152 OLED display that supports a variable 1-120Hz refresh rate.

The tablet display is excellent for uses as simple as running your usual apps on a bigger screen. Not only are photos, videos, games, and any other content bigger so you can see more detail, but more content can fit in a web browser or a shopping app.

It's also handy for more complex tasks, like searching for flights, where a regular phone screen might feel cramped and limited when weighing lots of information at one time. It's equally great for multitasking and running two apps side-by-side, like YouTube on one half and a web browser on the other.

Even if the tablet display is almost a perfect square that causes letterboxing with videos (black chunks of screen above and below the video), it's bigger than even the biggest traditional phone screen you can find in the US, the iPhone 16 Pro Max with its 6.9-inch display. Other foldables have similar degrees of letterboxing, too.

Games may take on a square aspect ratio, which may seem odd to some gamers expecting the usual rectangular aspect ratio most games use. However, you don't lose any horizontal point-of-view with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's tablet display, and you actually gain vertical point-of-view.

Cameras: Great for photos, but video quality is somewhat disappointing

As with any of the best Google Pixel phones, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's 48MP main camera, 10.5MP ultrawide, and 10.8MP 5x zoom lenses take consistently high-quality photos with excellent dynamic range, lighting, contrast, depth, and rich and natural colors.

The ultrawide and zoom cameras have low megapixel numbers compared to most high-end phones released in 2024, yet they still take great photos that few can complain about, with the same high-quality attributes as the main camera.

Photos taken with comparatively low-megapixel cameras, like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's ultrawide and zoom cameras, typically have less detail compared to higher-megapixel cameras when you crop into them. However, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's low-megapixel cameras apparently didn't get the memo. The photo below is a crop of the photo above taken with the 5x zoom camera, and it has an incredible amount of detail for a 10.8MP photo of a subject that's about four miles away from where the photo was taken.

As a parent of toddlers, I'm duty-bound to mention Google's thoughtful "Made You Look" feature. With the phone unfolded, it shows cute, colorful animations on the exterior display to attract a baby or toddler's attention, letting you snap a photo with the rear cameras. At the very least, it's effective in getting kids to look at the camera and mostly stay still. The faces they make for the photo are up to them! I've seen confusion, intrigue, and smiles from my own kids with the Made You Look feature.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold can record video up to 4K resolution at 60 frames-per-second (fps), which is standard on most phones, even in the mid-range. It also supports 10-bit HDR to achieve extended dynamic range between dark and bright parts of a video.

I can't say the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is a superb option for people who take lots of videos. In my tests, I experienced noticeable and distractingly noisy artifacting (graininess) in shaded areas on bright sunny days. Colors and lighting also appeared to adjust nearly constantly in dimmer conditions. It's a shame because videos otherwise look fantastic, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold has incredibly effective video stabilization.

AI: A new suite of smart features and the generally useful Gemini chatbot

With the Pixel 9 series, Google added new AI-powered smart features, with Add Me, Screenshots, Pixel Studio, and Reimagine being the most noteworthy. I cover these new AI features in more detail in my Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro reviews.

Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, also comes built-in with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. As an AI chatbot, it's similar to ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot. Among an immense (and growing) list of abilities, Gemini can help you write something, summarize text, brainstorm ideas, find ideas for things to do during a vacation, and research a topic of interest.

One of my favorite uses for Gemini is asking it to explain a new topic "like I'm five years old." It's an incredibly effective way of learning about something new, whether it's complex or not. Gemini is also useful to simply answer pretty much any question you might have on any topic, as it answers the question for you instead of showing links to articles.

However, one of the major issues with all AI chatbots, not just Gemini, is they can occasionally return with incorrect and outdated information. For example, it can give you a poor recommendation of a product you're looking for. I searched for a backup power system for my computer, and it suggested a system that wouldn't provide enough power, even though I provided the relevant information. Or, you might ask about the newest model of a product, and it'll sometimes give you information about a previous model, which is a sign that its knowledge database hasn't yet processed the latest information.

For the most part, however, especially for the simpler tasks I listed above, Gemini is incredibly handy, and it's worth exploring.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold includes a year of Gemini Advanced, which typically costs $20 a month. It processes more data to give you more complete results than standard Gemini, but I find that most people don't need its level of comprehensive description. Where Gemini Advanced may be more useful is its integration into Google apps and services like Gmail and Docs to help you write and summarize emails and documents, which can be handy, especially since you can use Gemini Advanced with Gmail and Docs in a web browser on a computer, too.

Should you buy the Pixel 9 Pro Fold?

If you're after a foldable phone that opens into a tablet, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the top recommendation thanks to its design, build quality, cameras, large tablet display, and familiar exterior display. During testing, it was the easiest and most comfortable foldable phone I've used to date.

However, you should actively avoid the Pixel 9 Pro Fold or any foldable phone without an official dust resistance rating if you often visit the beach or places with lots of dust in the air — the risk of damage is simply too high for such an expensive device.

You could also simply buy a dedicated phone and tablet for less than the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. For example, one of the best Android phones in our guides, the Pixel 9 Pro, and the 11-inch iPad Air from our best iPad guide. And you'd still have $200 left to go toward a pair of wireless earbuds from our best earbuds guide.

Still, there are clear benefits and conveniences to a phone-tablet hybrid like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. For one, you can switch between phone and tablet mode and keep doing what you were doing without skipping a beat. Plus, phone-tablet hybrids are a single device you can fit in your pocket, which is much more convenient than carrying a tablet around.