We are five years into the foldable phone era, and I believe 2024 will go down as the year when large-format folding phones got truly good. A few months back, Samsung released the Galaxy Z Fold 6, which finally got wide and thin enough to be genuinely useful. Now, Google has the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which skips all the iterative improvements of Samsung’s annual foldables to deliver a product that gets almost everything correct, right out of the gate.
The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is among the best foldable phone experiences in the world; it’s an impressive piece of premium hardware, and Google’s Pixel-ified version of Android is as elegant and thoughtful as ever. Unfortunately, it also has the same old foldable shortcomings and sky-high price. Until that changes, foldables are going to be niche devices. That doesn’t mean they can’t be fun to use, though, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is extremely fun.