In a world before Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7, Google’s new $1,800 Pixel 10 Pro Fold might have stood a chance. But after falling head over heels for Samsung’s $2,000 foldable, Google’s third-gen foldable just doesn’t cut it—even with Gemini.
The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is not a bad foldable. It’s a more polished device compared to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, with improvements in all the areas you’d expect year over year, like faster performance, longer battery life, and increased durability. It just doesn’t excite when you hold its bulky frame that looks nearly identical to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold next to the thin and light Z Fold 7. Samsung’s book-style foldable looks and feels like it’s from the future; the Pixel 10 Pro Fold feels like Google is too fixated on AI and neglecting why people buy new phones—for the hardware.
That’s the nature of consumer electronics. It’s cutthroat when the competition brings it, and boy, did Samsung turn things up with the Z Fold 7.
Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Google's Pixel 10 Pro Fold is an expensive foldable that leans hard into Gemini and AI, but falls short compared to Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7. 3 Pros More durable with IP68 rating
Strong battery life
Supports Pixelsnap magnetic charging Cons Average cameras
Weak Tensor G5 CPU and GPU performance
Gemini and Magic Cue are hit or miss
Very visible, warped crease
Thick and bulky
Expensive
A design that’s gonna age like milk
Unlike the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro, which drew the stares of what felt like every plugged-in New York University student returning back to school near the Gizmodo office, I had no fear of using the Pixel 10 Pro Fold out in public in advance of its release. Nobody noticed the unreleased phone because it looks almost exactly like the previous model, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Okay, the cover screen is a larger 6.4 inches versus the previous 6.3 inches, but I couldn’t feel any difference.
There’s nothing wrong with an evolutionary design. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold feels refined for the premium foldable it is. The aluminum is high quality, with an external screen that’s flush to the metal frame. The buttons are all nice and clicky to the press. The “Moonstone” colorway—a gray with hints of purple—looks attractive; I don’t share the same love for the “Jade” yellow, which looks like lemonade to me. In my hand, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold feels sturdy—heavy (258g versus the Z Fold 7’s 215g), but substantial. Even without a case for added grip, I never felt it’d slip out of my hand.
New stuff that you won’t see off the bat is better durability in a number of places, and the Pixelsnap magnetic wireless charging/accessory support. Google says it redesigned the hinge to be gearless, which in turn allows the Pixel 10 Pro Fold to fold for up to 10 years’ worth of folds. I can’t confirm that claim, but I guess that’s something worth touting. The foldable also has an IP68 rating, which finally makes it not only resistant to water but also fully dust-resistant. This increased durability puts the Pixel 10 Pro Fold on par with pretty much every non-folding phone. The IP68 rating is one upside the Pixel 10 Pro Fold has compared to the Z Fold 7, which only has an IP48 rating, meaning it’s only shielded against particles larger than 1mm. How much does this matter in daily use? I’ve had no dust issues with the Z Fold 7 yet, but if you work in dusty environments like construction sites, you may appreciate the higher IP rating on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The 8-inch “Super Actua Flex Display” is also tougher. According to Google, the ultra-thin glass has “two layers of anti-impact film” that should better protect it from drops. Again, I can’t test these claims with my loaner unit (I’m sure Zack Nelson aka JerryRigEverything will put it through his standard durability tests), but it’s good to see the extra protection.
Pixelsnap magnetic wireless charging and accessory support is also low-key awesome. As I said in my Pixel 10 and 10 Pro reviews, it’s just Google’s version of Apple’s MagSafe, which is to say it’s a more secure way for wireless charging than a Qi2 charging pad or stand. On Google’s official Pixelsnap Charging Stand, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold can be used unfolded on a table or nightstand. I hate to admit that I am that guy, but I was that guy watching Netflix and YouTube on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold while lying on my side in bed. Judge all you want, but it beats holding the foldable up or using it in its mini laptop-like mode, where video only fills up half of the foldable display. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold also charges faster (up to 50% in 30 minutes) with a wired cable, but you will need a fast charging brick.
Taken together, these upgrades may feel like substantial improvements over the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. But every time I pick up the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, I can’t help but compare it to the Z Fold 7. Samsung’s foldable is thinner, lighter, and feels better in the hand and my pants pockets. And even though the triple-lens camera bump makes it wobble like crazy on a surface, the crease on the Z Fold 7’s foldable screen is also less visible almost three months later. Meanwhile, the crease on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is more pronounced, warping content in an unignorable way whenever I load up a lengthy article or video.
Are Pixel cameras getting worse?
Pixel phones are known for having some of the best cameras. On paper, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold reads like it has a good bag of cameras. There’s a 48-megapixel main camera, 10.5-megapixel ultrawide, and 10.8-megapixel telephoto with 5x optical zoom. A 10-megapixel camera is embedded in both the cover screen and inside the foldable display.
On a $1,800 phone, the cameras should not have any compromise. Every camera—especially the ones housed in the camera bump—should take class-leading photos on the same level as flagship non-folding phones. This year, the cameras to measure up to are the iPhone 17 Pros, Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and Pixel 10 Pros. The cameras on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold don’t, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Gizmodo social media editor and video producer Adriano Contreras, who is a self-described Pixel fanboy entrenched deep into Google’s hardware ecosystem, also thinks the cameras on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold (and the 10 Pros) have actually regressed compared to the Pixel 9 series.
You don’t even need to pixel peep to see something about the photos and videos coming out of the Pixel 10 series… looks worse. Photos out of the 48-megapixel main lens—the one that should be sharpest in great lighting and low-light—often look soft with more smeary details compared to the iPhone 17 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra/Z Fold 7. I was surprised to see how comically saturated Adriano’s skin looked during one sunset shoot on Gizmodo’s rooftop. As I flipped through the camera roll on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold to select a range of shots for the below gallery, I couldn’t help but feel like many of my photos looked like cartoons—the colors don’t look real. Night Sight photos have barely improved in several generations; what should be dark or black skies render as pixelated blues, grays, and purples, like pixels buffering when you’ve got a bad connection.
Zoom in even a little on photos, and the clarity—or reduced clarity—becomes clear. The same way that people are starting to rebel against the excessive HDR processing from iPhone cameras, I think Google needs to dial back its own computational photography. When a photo becomes more of an ideal “memory” as you imagined or remembered than an accurate representation of a moment that actually happened, it feels like we’ve crossed a line.
Below are two sets of images shot from the following lenses: 0.5x (optical), 1x (optical), 2x (optical-quality), 5x (optical), and 20x (digital Super Res Zoom):
Google says the Tensor G5 chip that powers the Pixel 10 series improves image processing, while maintaining the image quality that Pixel phone cameras are known for, but it really does feel like the company might have leaned too hard into computational photography and AI solutions, and somehow made everything look uglier.
I know that Google is going all-in on AI and Gemini, integrating it across Android and into as many apps as possible, but the AI camera and editing features in the Pixel 10 series are all kind of gimmicky. Add Me (adds the photographer into the shot using AI compositing), Best Take (creates one “best” photo where everyone is smiling and doesn’t have their eyes closed or blinking), and Camera Coach (uses Gemini to analyze a scene and then offer framing suggestions) are all worth trying out, but none of them are must-haves. Add Me and Best Take may solve “real” problems like including everyone in a shot or the hassle of taking multiple photos to get that one perfect one, but they also don’t feel ethical to me; it’s “Photoshopping” without needing to do editing. Those “photos” aren’t real. Google doesn’t seem to care because its Pixel camera chief, Isaac Reynolds, is more interested in creating memories as you want to remember them, not necessarily what actually happened.
That’s also a good segue to the generative AI features like Super Res Zoom and Help Me Edit. The former is a way to upscale zoomed-in photos—on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, it’s for magnification up to 20x—and was introduced in the Pixel 3. But Help Me Edit, an editing feature within Google Photos, which lets you tell Gemini with a text prompt the changes you want to make, and it will hopefully make them for you, is a step down a very slippery slope.
I get that it’s democratizing and making photo editing easier and faster, but it’s also enabling doctored photos to spread at an even faster pace. I’m not a boomer denouncing new methods to do old things like edit photos, but I think we should have a conversation about whether using AI to generate family photos that never happened or create details in zoomed-in photos that were never actually there is something we actually want. Left unchecked, the authenticity of photography, especially phone photography, is at the sole direction of the people in charge of helping us capture reality. My point is, Google’s idea of what a camera and photography are is veering away from my definition. So we’re back to deciding whether you want the best image quality or all these AI camera and editing features you may or may not care about.
Gemini shows promise, but it’s not there yet
Another area where Google seems more interested in AI than offering a competitive experience to the Z Fold 7 and other foldables? Performance. Google is now on its fifth generation of custom Tensor G-series silicon, and it’s still a laggard compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Apple’s A-series chips.
Android 16 is powered by the new Tensor G5. It’s performant enough for basic phone things, but pales in comparison to the power you get from the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip in phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra or OnePlus 13 or the A19 chips in the iPhone 17 series and iPhone Air. Phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip are around 40% faster on Geekbench 6’s single-core benchmark than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and the iPhone 17 series and iPhone Air are almost 75% faster. It’s only going to look worse for the Tensor G5 in the Pixel 10 Pro Fold when phones with Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip are released in the next few months.
If you’re a gamer who likes to play 3D games like Genshin Impact or Fortnite, or you’re looking to use CapCut for editing more involved TikToks or Reels, I would look elsewhere. The Z Fold 7 performs way better for both games and editing videos. There was a recent report that said Genshin Impact was unplayable on the Pixel 10 series because of a new update. The game ran okay on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold with the default “medium” settings—not buttery smooth but not nearly as jittery as that one video had suggested. Google and the game’s developer miHoYo have since come out to debunk that Genshin Impact runs poorly on Pixel 10 series phones.
With a less powerful CPU and GPU in the Tensor G5 SoC (system-on-chip), my main concern for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is how it’ll perform in a few years. My experience with Pixel phones has always been that they really start to show sluggishness even within a year of ownership. Somehow, fundamental stuff just breaks, and there seem to be hardware and software issues constantly popping up with every “Pixel Drop” of features. While 16GB of RAM is roomy—4GB more than the 12GB in the Z Fold 7—the 256GB of storage is offensive on an $1,800 phone. Consumers deserve at least 512GB when they’re paying twice as much as a non-folding phone.
Tell Google all of this, and company reps will deflect and tell you the Tensor G5 is designed for best-in-class AI, designed specifically for Gemini Live, Magic Cue (the opt-in AI feature that offers “agentic” suggestions like relevant information and actions within apps), and all the other AI stuff happening underneath the hood. That may be true, but I’ve yet to experience any “holy shit” moment where I’ve felt Gemini or Magic Cue—the two headlining AI features on the Pixel 10 series—made the current phone experience appear outdated.
As I said in my Pixel 10 review, Gemini Live and Magic Cue are still works in progress. They are very hit or miss; working sometimes, not working when you expect it to. As a techie, I can see a future where proactive AI on phones that offers suggestions at the right time in the right place can be really powerful. I want to spend less time buried in my phone tapping in apps and let an AI—whether that’s Gemini or Siri or whatever—take the wheel. I’ve been hearing this spiel for over a decade. Nobody has cracked it just yet, not even Google. Gemini is still in the early innings of an AI ball game where it’s really hard to convince people to change how they’re used to using their phones. Even when I know there are AI features that could do something for me, I still find myself doing things manually. Old habits are hard to break.
While testing the many new AI features in the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed. If you’re buying this phone, you should take the time to learn what each AI feature is and how to use it. You should opt into as many of them as possible and really try to adjust your mobile computing to embrace this “intelligence,” otherwise, you’re wasting your $1,800 value. Why not get a different foldable if you don’t care about AI features that much? I gave all the AI features a fair shake, but in the end, I reverted back to using the foldable like any similar device—as a tablet for watching videos and reading. I hate to say it, but Gemini opening to the side of my other app content as opposed to blocking it just isn’t enough of a selling point.
Samsung reigns supreme this year
The bar for what to expect from a foldable—the kind that opens up like a book and often costs nearly $2,000—was raised this year by Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7. To even compete, any foldable needs to push the envelope of design while offering an experience on par with it or better. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold hardware is nice, but incomparable next to the Z Fold 7, even if it’s slightly more durable.
Things would be different if Gemini, Magic Cue, and the other AI features in the Pixel 10 Pro Fold were a game-changing experience, but the reality is they’re not… yet. Maybe someday that may be the case, but it’s just not on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold.
Perhaps the only feature that the Pixel 10 Pro Fold wins against the Z Fold 7 without contest is battery life. Google shoved in a 5,015mAh battery that brute forces its way to longer battery life compared to the Z Fold 7’s 4,400mAh cell. Whereas the Z Fold 7 barely makes it through a full day with at least 10-15% in the tank after 12 hours, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold easily ended the same period with 25-30% left. I never had battery anxiety while using the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It’s one advantage of a thicker phone, I suppose.
The value proposition for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is still the same it’s been for the previous two generations: you get a bigger screen. At least with Samsung’s Z Fold 7, the bigger screen folds up into a footprint that feels like a regular big-ass phone. Unless you’re deeply intrigued by the potential of Gemini and AI, the Z Fold 7 is the better foldable, though you’ll need to fork over an extra $200. On the day this review is publishing, I’ve seen new Z Fold 7 foldables going for the same price $1,800, because of Prime Day. Those deals will only get better into the holidays.