Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold reviewed: the most resistant foldable

It’s technically the third-generation, but Australia’s second, as Google delivers a new foldable. Is the Pixel 10 Pro Fold this year’s best folding phone, or just a new variant of last year’s?

The world is changing and phones are changing with it. Mobiles are getting both slimmer and more capable, including high-end processors to rival computers, cameras to rival proper cameras, and delivering an operating system that can let you do more than simply browse the web, write emails, and doomscroll social until you fall asleep.

These days, a phone is a truly impressive piece of hardware, and some use it more than their laptop or tablet. But what if a phone could cross that bridge and handle more than just what a regular smartphone could do?

Enter the world of foldable phones, a category that may as well be tablets-as-phones, encasing a tablet inside a phone using a foldable screen. Closed up, they’re phones, but unfolded, and they’re compact tablets, distinct from the compact phone foldables Motorola has made in the revamped Razr range.

It’s a concept Google joins Samsung in, and Australia is seeing a new version with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Is it an improvement on last year’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold, or just more of the same?

Design

The second official Google foldable we’ve seen in Australia and the third official in the list (because Australia missed out on the first-gen model), the Pixel 10 Pro Fold takes much of what you might have heard about the current Pixel 10 range and stuffs it into a slightly difference space. A more foldable space.

Officially the second Pixel Fold Australians get to see, Google has taken what worked last year and improved the design ever so slightly.

The materials are largely the same, offering Corning’s scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass on top of an aluminium frame, steel and aluminium cover, but with a fraction more thickness, maxing 10.8mm thickness when folded and 5.2mm unfolded, a difference of 10.5/5.1mm in last year’s generation.

The Pixel 10 Pro Fold is a fraction thicker and ever so slightly more durable, but still very much the same Pixel design we saw last year. That makes it slightly better to carry, with the IP68 resistance rating a step in the right direction.

Features

Encased in this combination of materials is Google’s latest chip, the Tensor G5, matched with Android 16, a solid 16GB RAM and a choice of either 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage. For the purposes of this review, we’re looking at the 256GB edition of the Pixel 10 Fold Pro.

Connections are covered from a fairly solid assortment of choices, including 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6, Near-Field Communication (NFC) for Google Pay, ultra-wideband radio for finding things, GPS and GLONASS for finding your way to and from things, plus 5G across both technologies found in the world and Australia, mmWave and the more common sub-6.

It’s about the best combination of wireless connections, with wired merely covered using the Type C USB port at the bottom.

Cameras can be found both on the front, the back, and on the inside screen, with the rear camera stack a trio of tech including a 48 megapixel F1.7 wide camera, 10.5 megapixel F2.2 ultra-wide, and a 10.8 megapixel F3.1 telephoto covering 5X optical zoom.

Meanwhile, there are two selfie cameras both of which are the same: 10 megapixels at F2.2 for both the front-camera on the front screen, as well as above the inside screen, as well.

You’ll also find 15W wireless charging over Qi and Qi2 (meaning magnetic charging is supported, too), as well as charging over USB-C with a faster 30W charger. The battery itself uses 5015mAh, and is found underneath the entire thing.

Display

All that’s left are the screens, and if you’ve seen the last generation of Pixel Fold, they will be a little reminiscent.

Offering a familiar 8 inch inside screen size, the display on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold are similar but different, providing lovely colours and sharp visuals. The fold is still there, evident when you run your fingers over it or view it at an angle, but the outside screen is a little bigger, too.

Instead of a 6.3 inch display, Google has opted for a slightly brighter 6.4 inch screen, albeit with fewer pixels. There isn’t enough loss to make you concerned, with the OLED exterior display still nice, still fast at 120Hz, and still OLED. Still good, still good.

In-use

Using the Pixel 10 Pro Fold comes in one of two ways: as a phone or as a tablet. Keep the phone closed to use it as the former, or open it up and get an 8 inch compact tablet, dealer’s choice.

Whatever you choose, you’ll get Android 16 in its purest form, providing a way to use the phone as a phone or as a tablet, thanks to that foldable design, and even some of the AI features Google added to the range this year.

We’ve touched on them a couple of times in Pixel reviews thus far, and a few months in, it doesn’t feel like the AI Google has included will change your life incredibly. That could change over time, but right now, it’s just not that big of a deal.

Fortunately, you can use the Pixel Fold without the AI, typing, scrolling, gesturing, and browsing, and logging into the phone using either your face or your fingers, since both are supported here.

Performance

Armed with Google’s latest Tensor chip, the G5, you can expect decent results from the hardware when using the phone, but less so from the benchmarks.

Even after release, Google still doesn’t allow our benchmark app of choice Geekbench 6 to install from the Google Play Store, so we’ve turned to sideloading the app, while also bringing in the previous Tensor G5 benchmarks used in other Pixel 10 models we’ve reviewed, the results of which aren’t stellar.

There’s something about this year’s Tensor G5 chip where it just doesn’t show up well in benchmarks, at least graphically, and we’re not sure why. The results aren’t exactly stunning.

Going on benchmarks alone, it doesn’t seem like Google has the edge on foldable performance this year, losing out to the likes of Samsung’s obvious competitor, the Galaxy Fold 7.

The good news is that despite the problems with the benchmarks, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold still performs well enough when running apps and generally using the phone.

On the flip side, the mobile performance delivers a much better result, with speeds able to hit 538Mbps in our tests on the Telstra 5G network by way of Belong mobile.

Even though the smaller telco caps the speeds to 150Mbps, the initial speed burst gives us an idea of just how fast the Pixel 10 Pro Fold can go, achieving high speeds before Belong’s mobile limiter kicked in.

It’s a shame the system performance doesn’t stand out in the same way, though.

Camera

The cameras are also a bit of an issue, largely because it’s hard to know whether anything has changed. If anything, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold isn’t anywhere near the level of the Pixel 10 Pro it shares its name with.

Take the combination of cameras found on the Pixel 10 Pro XL’s back, which are shared with the smaller 10 Pro. On that phone, you’ll find a new 50 megapixel F1.68 wide camera, a 48 megapixel F1.7 ultra wide, and a 48 megapixel F2.8 telephoto for 5X zoom.

It’s not quite the same for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which lowers things to a 48 megapixel F1.7 wide, 10.5 megapixel F2.2 ultra-wide, and 10.8 megapixel F3.1 5X telephoto camera. Frustratingly, it seems like an identical camera stack to last year’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold, with the main difference being a little bit of optical image stabilisation on that 5X telephoto camera.

The result isn’t bad, but it’s nowhere near as solid as what Pixel 10 Pro XL owners are getting.

Confusingly, the camera system on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is basically two-thirds of the camera system on the standard Pixel 10, and even that model gets a slightly more capable 13 megapixel F2.2 ultra-wide.

Think about that for a second: the standard and less expensive Pixel 10 has a marginally more spec’d camera system than the most expensive Pixel of the range, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold.

If you’re confused, you are clearly not the only one.

As a result, the images from the camera aren’t bad, but they’re clearly not up to where the Pixel 10 flagships sit. Daylight images are fine, but low light can feel a little slow and soft at times. Low light doesn’t see staggering improvements, if any, and the camera stack manages to feel like last year’s under a new phone.

You will find macro support here with the main 48 megapixel camera, and it isn’t bad. But overall the rear camera situation doesn’t feel spectacular, and it’s a similar situation with the selfie cameras.

Two of them are here, both offering 10 megapixels at F2.2 — they’re likely to be the same camera, too, found on both the front screen and the inner unfolded screen — but they’re clearly not the 42 megapixel selfie camera of the Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL. It’s just not the same.

Battery

The camera feels like it needs work, but so does the battery, which has managed to get bigger, but doesn’t always give you more to work with.

Tested with both real-world usage as our daily driver and using Pickr’s BatteryBench app, we found the Pixel Pro 10 Fold definitely offered a better battery than last year, but wouldn’t always give you much more to work with.

We found an increase in time with our always-on screen test, but real-world usage didn’t change much at all, despite nearly 400mAh more battery on offer.

It’s a difference of 4650mAh on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold versus 5015mAh on the 10, and that technically can provide over three days of usage on the “extreme” battery saver mode if you want to use it and sacrifice features, or closer to 1.5 days of use with a small amount of phone calls and limited tablet use.

Use it more and that life will go down further, with the overall battery result feeling that very little has really changed.

One positive is the support for Qi2’s magnetic wireless charging. Granted, it maxes at 15W as opposed to Qi2 25W’s increased amount, but it does mean you can use some of the MagSafe accessories normally made for the iPhone, which is a change for the better.

Value

One area hasn’t really changed, and that’s the price: at $2699, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is pretty much the same price as last year, making it a direct replacement for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

That’s not necessarily a bad price for a foldable — all foldable phone-tablet hybrids tend to be around the same price in Australia — but because very little has changed, it does make the value seem less impressive overall.

And it wasn’t great value last year, either.

What needs work?

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is the feeling that nothing has really changed, or even that you’re still not getting quite the same premium experience as the other flagship Pixel, the Pixel 10 Pro XL. That affects the value, too.

Both models are similar, and yet both models are different, particularly when it comes time to look at the camera side of things.

That’s not a dramatic shift for foldables, and there are clear differences between the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 and the S25 Ultra flagship it clearly competes with.

But Samsung appears to have done a better job, as well, bringing that 200 megapixel camera over from its big flagship to the new foldable, while Google has left the Pixel 10 Pro Fold shortchanged.

By comparison, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold feels like it relies on last year’s cameras, albeit with subtle differences few are likely to notice.

It’s a confusing turn of events, because it means the latest model doesn’t do a lot differently from the previous generation, and that makes it the little bit more difficult to consider.

What we love

Possibly one of the best aspects of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is that you’re getting a decent little smart display in what is a rather well-made foldable, at that.

“Smart screen?” I hear your internal monologue ask. “But aren’t all phone screens technically smart screens?”

The answer to that is yes, sure, but thanks to the large 8 inch unfolded screen and support for PixelSnap’s take on MagSafe and Qi2, the 8 inch display of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold can now mount to a Qi2 charging stand and show your photos as a screensaver, just like the Nest Hub and Google tablet generations.

Just look at it charging and sitting upside down on Belkin’s Qi2 UltraCharge Pro 3-in-1 (even though an Android user won’t really get great use from the Apple Watch charger at the back).

It’s a solution to a problem few really have, and one means you can easily turn your phone into a photo frame of sorts when it’s charging on a stand.

Technically, this isn’t a new feature — Google has supported photo screensavers on Android for ages — but with a larger inside display and magnetic charging, it means you can make the 8 inch inside screen of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold more useful than simply just a somewhat used inside screen.

On a stand and charging, it’s a lot prettier than simply leaving the phone there, and switches off when the lights go down.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

The other big deal change is the durability, which jumps from an IPX8 rating you’d definitely need to think about if you opted to take the Pixel 9 Pro Fold to a beach, to a more impressive IP68 water and dust resistance rating.

That is literally the difference between walking out in a storm and feeling confident your phone will be fine, but less so at a beach and dropping in the sand — a vibe you could have had with any other foldable phone — and all of a sudden knowing that no matter where you take your foldable phone, you’ll be right.

A rating of IP68 makes the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold the most resistant foldable around.

We still wouldn’t go out of our way to intentionally drop or mishandle the phone — don’t go throwing it to friends and such; it’s not a volleyball — but you can feel confident knowing it’s more of a survivor than any other foldable phone around.

The reputation for fragile foldables fades with this phone, that’s for sure.

As for whether it achieves anything majorly new, that’s a different story altogether.

There’s nothing really wrong with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold per se, but it’s unexciting and doesn’t feel as “pro” grade as the name suggests. The only major development is the magnetic charging and the water resistance, both of which are on the non-foldable Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL, and which will save you some money in the process while still delivering a better camera system.

Rather, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is in a confusing place. It’s a good foldable and a solid little big phone. But it doesn’t break any major new ground, nor does it change anything.

It’s more of the same, but a marginally better more of the same.

In a year where foldables are getting thinner and offering more capable cameras, Google played it safe with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and it shows. It’s not bad, but it could be better.