Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold review: Samsung takes this round

Google chose the wrong year to focus on incremental upgrades for its flagship foldable.

In the abstract, there's nothing wrong with that. There are only so many things you can do to improve phones on an annual basis, and last year's Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold was, at the time, one of the best foldables money could buy. Alas, 2025 is not 2024. This year's edition, the $1,799 Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, looks and feels nearly identical from a hardware perspective, instead focusing on AI features that may or may not wet your whistle, and don't really feel new given that they were already present in the Pixel 10.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold does curry plenty of favor thanks to solid displays, long battery life, and the same Google photography magic you get with other Pixel phones. But for my money, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7's remarkably thin and light form factor makes that device much more pleasing to use.

The 2025 version of the foldable fight goes to Samsung.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Specs

Before we get into the nitty gritty details, here are the basic specs for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold:

• 6.4-inch outer display with 1080x2364 resolution and 60-120Hz adaptive refresh rate

• 8-inch inner display with 2076x2152 resolution and 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate

• Google Tensor G5 chip

• 16GB RAM

• 256GB/512GB/1TB storage

• 5,015mAh battery

It's not super different from the Pixel 9 Pro Fold in these terms, but there are some differences worth noting. For starters, the 1TB storage option is new, and very welcome. I noted in my review for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold that it's bizarre for such a premium (read: expensive) device to top out at 512GB of internal storage, so I'll give Google props for addressing that.

The new Tensor G5 chip is the same as the one in the other Pixel 10 phones, and we'll talk performance in a bit. Aside from that, RAM is the same and the display sizes are very similar, with the outer display being just one tenth of an inch bigger than last year's. One thing that's nice here is that both displays have 3,000 nits of peak brightness, an upgrade over the 2,700 nits you'd find in the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. It's a better device for using in sunny conditions outside because of that.

The battery has also gotten a boost from 4,650mAh to 5,015mAh, but again, we'll save analysis for later.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Design

Google really didn't get very ambitious with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold's physical design, which is the source of my greatest disappointment with the device.

Put simply, it looks and feels a lot like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. At a glance, you'd barely be able to tell the two apart. It only comes in two boring colors (Moonstone and Jade), as well. It's also got the same weird silhouette as the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, where some of the corners are rounded and others are hard 90-degree angles. I actually find it sort of difficult to grip in certain circumstances; trying to use it in its folded state while lying flat on my back in bed, for instance, is a chore, as it likes to slip out of my hands.

To be fair, I praised last year's model for its physical design because, at the time, it was about as thin and light as foldables got. That is no longer the case. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is remarkably svelte, coming in at 8.9mm of thickness when folded and just 4.2mm when unfolded. Pixel 10 Pro Fold, meanwhile, is 10.8mm folded and 5.2mm unfolded. That's a really serious and immediately noticeable difference.

Put simply, Samsung's phone just feels a lot better to use on a moment-to-moment basis because of its form factor. What Google did here isn't bad, necessarily, but it does feel notably inferior to its main source of competition in the U.S.

Aside from that, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold's displays are both very nice and good for use in a variety of situations thanks to their new boosted peak brightness. I still think an unfolded tablet-style foldable is the very best way to watch YouTube videos on the go, and that hasn't changed here.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Performance

Put succinctly, the Tensor G5 chip powering the Pixel 10 Pro Fold does what you want it to do. This phone performs nearly flawlessly in everyday testing. Apps load quickly and it doesn't ever hitch or buckle when there's a lot going on. I also never noticed any kind of heat problems during use, so you can probably survive without putting a case on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. You might want one just for some more interesting color options, though.

Unfortunately, the Geekbench 6 app that we use for benchmarking isn't available on Pixel 10 Pro Fold at the time of publication, so we can't provide any kind of real numbers-based analysis here. But this feels like a premium handset when it comes to performance, I can promise you that.

Sadly, there aren't really any revolutionary new software features this year that I could find. Pixel 10 Pro Fold has the exact same suite of AI features as the other Pixel 10 phones. That includes good and useful ones, such as live language translation during phone calls and Magic Cue, which scans your data for relevant information (such as flight info or a restaurant reservation) and surface said information when you might need it, such as during phone calls or text chats.

It also includes the ones I don't like so much, such as text-based image editing and that thing where you can show objects to Gemini using the phone's camera and learn more about said object. These are not things I ever plan on using, but your mileage may vary. At any rate, these don't work any differently on Pixel 10 Pro Fold than they did on Pixel 10, so there isn't a lot else to say about them.

To its credit, Pixel 10 Pro Fold does bring back all of the foldable features Google has been building out over the years, such as multitasking on the inner screen. That's eminently useful, and only becomes more-so with the ability to drag and drop things like images from one app to another. Multitasking is extremely intuitive to the point where you don't even really need a tutorial to figure it out. That said, it was that way last year, too, so this isn't necessarily novel.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Battery life

There's one area where the Pixel 10 Pro Fold's thicker form factor benefits it versus the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, and that's battery life.

Google rates this device for about 30 hours of use on a charge, and that's about what I got out of it. I actually had a pretty difficult time getting the battery to fully drain without resorting to cheap tricks like streaming video for hours at a time. When just using it as a regular phone (for web browsing, social media, and the occasional YouTube video) I was able to get more than a day's worth of use out of it.

Compare that to the Z Fold 7, and Samsung looks a little worse. That phone doesn't last for more than 24 hours or so in my experience, so Google wins on battery life, if nothing else.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Cameras

As is usually the case with Pixel phones, the cameras here are more than adequate. That said, they don't seem terribly different from last year. On top of that, they're actually a step down from the Pixel 10 Pro — a significant step down. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold doesn't support 8K video, lacks the 100x Pro Res Zoom, and has far fewer megapixels.

Here are the specs:

• Rear cameras: 48MP wide, 10.5MP ultrawide, 10.8MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom

• Front camreas: Two 10MP selfie cameras

In terms of megapixels and optical zoom count, these are exactly the same as what Google provided last year. Still, they snap nice pictures anyway thanks to decent specs and Google's signature software wizardry. Being able to use the inner, unfolded display as a huge viewfinder is nice, too.

As always, I like the macro lens for taking close-up pictures of tiny things.

Night Sight is still here and still brightens up photos taken in the dark, though I don't think it's noticeably better or worse than before.

The 5x optical zoom lens does its job admirably well, but the 20x zoom is also pretty good, in my experience. The end results don't look overly fake or smudgy, as they often do on other phones. However, the "eye-popping" 100x zoom on the Pixel 10 Pro is missed.

Last but not least, portrait shots still look good and classy.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold: Final verdict

There's nothing really wrong with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold on its merits. Taken on its own, it's basically as good as last year's phone, but with a bigger battery and a stronger chip powering it. And at $1,799, its starting price is $200 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7. For that price, we would expect cameras more on par with the Pixel 10 Pro, which starts at $999.

But $200 is frankly not a huge number when you're talking about phones that cost around $2,000. If you're going to spend that much on a flagship foldable, you might as well go for Samsung's phone just because it's so much thinner and more comfortable to use. I hate to hinge so much of my criticism on the physical form factor, but with foldables, that's kind of a big deal. I think Samsung has the foldable to beat so far this year (rumor has it the company still has a tri-fold coming soon). We'll see how it shapes up in 2026.