Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold review: Stylish and stagnant

If you like foldable phones, it's the best time of the year. Samsung's latest just landed, with an exciting new form factor in the mix, and it sounds like Apple is gearing up to deliver something similar in the near future.

Google, though, has not jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold looks almost identical to its predecessor at a glance.

Of course, there's a new processor and fresh colours; there's even a fancy LED indicator on the rear, but does the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold do enough to keep up with the innovations elsewhere? Let's find out.

Specifications

Price

The Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold starts at $1899 / £1799 / €1999 for the base model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That's a £50 price hike in the UK, and a $100/€100 jump in the US and EU.

As always, we have the RAM shortage to thank for that, but at the very least, we can be thankful that it still comes with 16GB of RAM in every storage configuration.

Compared to the competition, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold is firmly in the middle. It's cheaper than Samsung's book-style Z Fold 8 Ultra, but it's pricier than the short/wide Z Fold 8. Similarly, it's cheaper than the Magic V6 (at full MSRP), but it's more expensive than the ongoing introductory price of £1499.

Design

As I mentioned, the 11 Pro Fold looks quite similar to the 10 Pro Fold, and it's almost the exact same size, but if you look closer, there are a few more differences.

For starters, it's slimmer. Only by about 1mm, but you can just about tell when you're holding it in your hand. The camera island also has a fresh new design, with the dark glass camera coverings spanning the entire width of the module.

Hidden inside this camera module, there's a new feature called HiLight, an array of RGB LEDs that illuminate around the flash unit. I'm always a fan of superfluous lighting; I love what Nothing has been doing for the past few years, for example, but Google's implementation left me wanting more.

As it stands, the HiLight only does two things: it shines when you're talking to Gemini, and it can flash in a colour of your choosing when a contact calls you. Google hasn't confirmed if it will ever do anything else, but I certainly hope there's more planned.

The animation that shows you when Gemini is listening or talking is really well done. It looks like a shifting aurora, which is super neat. However, I'm not fully convinced that it's necessary. I know when Gemini is listening or responding because I have ears, and Gemini makes sounds. As for the call indicator, I'm not sure what the prerequisites are, but it never seemed to illuminate for me.

Google has switched up the colours for the new release, and the Olive option I have for testing is particularly fetching. It has a matte green rear panel with contrasting dull-golden accents on the sides and around the camera. If that's not your thing, there's an Obsidian option with darker grey hues throughout.

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is aiming to be one of the hardiest foldables around. It's still one of the only folding phones with an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, and a new glass ceramic coating on the cover screen should help to prevent scratches. The inner screen should be stronger, too, thanks to a thicker coating and dual layers of anti-impact film.

Another thing it has going for it is built-in PixelSnap magnets. Just like an iPhone, this phone can attach to MagSafe accessories without a case attached. I'm not sure why Google is still the only Android brand to do this; it seems like an easy win to me - regardless, as of right now, that's just a Pixel thing.

The screen specs are quite similar to the older model, with the largest difference being the peak brightness. Both panels can now reach 3600 nits, up from 3000. The cover screen also has slimmer bezels, which brings the screen size to 6.5 inches from 6.4 inches, without increasing the size of the phone.

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Of the two changes, the bezels make the biggest impact. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold looks so much more modern because of it, and it feels closer to a normal phone when folded shut. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold was already bright enough for my needs, but more brightness never goes amiss.

Google has also improved the crease on the folding display; it's not a massive change, but it's visibly a bit better. What makes a bigger difference is the way it feels. The older model had a weird bump on the hinge that always drove me crazy, and that seems to have been fully flattened out. Unfortunately, of all the foldables I have tested this year, this crease is still the most noticeable.

The speakers seem to be unchanged, but they're still decent. They're plenty loud enough and can produce some bass despite the slender chassis. I also appreciate that you get a stereo effect in almost every orientation, although it can be quite easy to muffle one speaker with your palm in landscape mode.

Camera Performance

Only the main camera of the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold has been upgraded. It now sports a 48MP 1/1.56-inch sensor, while the older model only had a 1/2-inch sensor. This means it's now equivalent to the base model Pixel 11, but still behind the Pro models.

You also get a 10.5MP 1/3.4-inch ultrawide with macro focusing and a 10.8MP 5x telephoto with a 1/3.2-inch sensor. Each screen has its own 10MP punch-hole selfie snapper, too.

Starting with the new main sensor, it's a notable improvement. Images look cleaner in low-light situations, shutter speeds are slightly faster, and there are fewer denoising artifacts. You'll even get a bit of background softening on close-up shots.

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The other lenses, as the spec sheet suggests, aren't quite so impressive. I'm not a big fan of the 5x focal length; it's too zoomed in for a lot of situations, and combined with its poor minimum focus distance, it's only really useful for taking photos of things that are far away.

Google has increased the maximum digital zoom to 30x, rather than 20x, but I'm not really sure why. This tiny, low-resolution sensor can't deliver anything usable at such distances, and while computational image processing does its best to clean things up, it can't quite manage.

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The ultrawide is decent, and it can focus extremely close up - but the distorted image of an ultrawide is never my favourite for macro shots. It also struggles in low-light situations, as many ultrawides do, but Google's Night Mode always ensures a decent exposure (if a little on the noisy side).

Arguably, the biggest upgrade to the Pixel 11 Pro Fold cameras is not the hardware, but the software. All of the Pixel 11 phones now give you much more control over the way that your images look. You get four default looks to choose from: Original (the normal Pixel look), Natural, Shadows, and Vanilla.

The differences are subtle, but all of the new options produce colours that are a bit less exaggerated than classic Pixel shots. I preferred Vanilla in most situations; it adds a bit of extra warmth to the shots, which I think looks quite good.

If you want to take things a step further, there are six additional looks that can be applied on top. They're a bit like filters or film simulations, but they're built into the imaging pipeline, so you can't apply them after the fact. This list includes pretty dramatic styles like "Black Tie" which is a very high-contrast black-and-white option, or "Digi" which delivers low-dynamic-range shots that look like they came from an old compact digital camera.

You also get some familiar Pixel-exclusive features like Camera Coach, which is designed to help newbies frame better shots. There's still the group photo-faking Add Me feature, and Made You Look, which plays animations on the cover display to get the attention of babies and young kids. The latter has a couple of new animations to choose from, too.

There's a new addition called Magic Capture, which can automatically pull still frames from a short video clip and apply light edits like cropping, straightening, and unblurring. As a photographer, this one doesn't really appeal, but if you ever find that you can't decide between shooting a video and taking some snaps, maybe it'll be useful.

Google has also been hard at work improving its video performance. Video stabilisation has been improved, and the recordings should be better quality, too. In addition, there's a new suite of creator-focused tools to help with the video-making process.

You can now bring up a smart teleprompter that keeps pace with your speech, an audio visualiser to monitor mic levels, and gridlines to help you frame vertical videos for TikTok or Reels. There's even a new way to manage your files, and you can sort your video clips into project folders to keep things nice and organised.

What frustrates me, though, is that despite the "Pro" moniker, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold is lacking any real pro video features. There's still no Log profile, no APV codec, no high frame rate 4K options, and so on. It's behind almost all of the competition in this area.

Phone Performance

The Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold has the Tensor G6 chip inside, just like the rest of the Pixel 11 lineup. Google tells us it's 25% faster in web browsing, opens apps 15% quicker, and has 50% more TPU compute for local AI tasks.

It comes with 16GB of RAM in every configuration, and you can select either 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage depending on your needs (and budget).

Google neglected to mention any improvement in graphics performance, and in my testing, it doesn't seem like there is any. Graphics benchmarks score similarly to the previous model, and games play similarly, too. Considering it was already behind the competition, that's not great news for gamers.

When I played some Wuthering Waves, I had to lower the graphics settings by a couple of notches compared to the Galaxy Z Fold 8 or Honor Magic V6 to get the same kind of performance. And the game looked far less pretty because of it.

Of course, that only matters if you're into graphically demanding games. This phone can breeze through daily tasks without a hiccup, and it always feels quick. At a price like this, though, you shouldn't need to make performance compromises, and you are.

Another strange concession is that the battery is actually smaller this time around. It has a 4806 mAh pack, down from 5015 mAh. In fairness, it seems to last just as long, and the phone is slightly slimmer and lighter than before - but personally, I'd take a bigger battery over marginal weight savings.

One upside is that the wireless charging speed has improved; it's now 25W, up from 15W, taking full advantage of the Qi2.2 charging standard. Wired charging is still 30W, which isn't too impressive, but it managed to reach just under 60% in half an hour by my count, which is hard to argue with.

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold runs Android 17 with Pixel UI on top. Previous Pixel owners will feel right at home here, as it doesn't shake up the formula too much.

There are a lot of great things about this software, including fantastic features like Now Playing, Call Screening, and At a Glance updates. There are still a couple of things that drive me crazy, though. You still can't select multiple apps on the home screen and move things around in bulk. You also can't get rid of the Google search bar on the home screen, for some reason.

Multitasking is a big deal on foldable devices, and sadly, I think Pixel UI does it worse than most. You can only have two apps side-by-side in split-screen mode, and there's no easy way to switch the position or orientation of these apps when they're open.

A new feature called Bubble Anything aims to improve matters, and it does, but it's not the most elegant solution. You can now open apps in bubbles, a lot like what Facebook Messenger does by default. You can move these bubbles around on the screen, or they'll dock in the corner of the folding display, and then open them as required in a smaller floating window. I never really liked this feature on Messenger, so unsurprisingly, I'm not a big fan of it here either.

One feature I actually do love is called Rambler. This is built into Gboard, and it's a new AI-assisted speech-to-text tool. You just hit the button, speak naturally with all the usual pauses, "ums", and repetition, and Google's AI model will clean it all up, turning it into intelligible sentences with perfect grammar. It works exceptionally well, but it won't be exclusive to Pixel for long. Samsung already teased the feature on its Z Fold devices, and I believe it'll be rolling out to other Android handsets, too.

There are many more Gemini Intelligence features to come. Some are restricted to certain regions, while others will roll out globally, and it's not clear which will remain exclusive to the 11-series phones. Soon Gemini will be able to take agentic actions on your behalf, Maps will use Gemini to suggest dishes or find loyalty cards, and Circle to Search will work with the camera so you can search in real life, too.

As we've come to expect, Google promises seven years of software updates and security patches for the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, matching the likes of Samsung and Apple.

Verdict

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is a lovely-looking phone that feels extremely high quality and well built. I really want to love it, but the sad fact is that it's a long way behind the competition, and it's just as expensive.

For instance, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra has a slimmer chassis, a shallower crease, a bigger battery, better multitasking, better cameras, and a more powerful processor. Sure, it's a little more expensive, but all the same could be said of the Honor Magic V6, and that currently sells for less than the Pixel.

If you love Pixel UI and want PixelSnap magnets, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold is the way to go - but with so few upgrades since last year, you could save a tonne by opting for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. You needn't feel like you're missing out on much.

Alternatives

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra

The most obvious competitor is Samsung's latest large-format foldable. It's a little more expensive, it's not as dust-resistant, and there are no magnets built in, but otherwise, it bests the Pixel in almost every way. It's slimmer, lighter, more powerful, has more impressive cameras, and a bigger battery, too.

Honor Magic V6

The Honor Magic V6 actually bests the Pixel with its IP69 rating, and beyond that, it has one of the biggest batteries around, amazing gaming performance, and some of the most impressive camera hardware, all while being slimmer and lighter. The big downside is that it's not sold in the US.