I recently saw this update from MKBHD about what he and others think about the phone.
Majority of them felt that, strangely, the best part of the phone was the external screen used about 90% of the time, and the internal screen used 10% of the time, though they still loved the internal screen when apps supported it.
I’m wondering how other Pixel Fold owners feel, now that they’ve had the phone for some time?
Coming from the z fold to this one, I definitely use the inner screen less, and that’s Google’s fault. The z folds outer screen is nice for just quick stuff but that’s about it, forcing you to open it up. Once you do, the experience completely changes and it’s magical. Samsung forces apps to full screen and with the phones default orientation being portrait, I basically have never had an app not look decent. Poorly optimized with a bit of white space? Sure. But all in all everything worked great on the phone and I loved every second of it.
Now Google’s approach is quite a bit different. With its default orientation being landscape, that puts the onus completely on developers to create brand new interfaces for their apps with a focus on the horizontal. That is SUCH a harder task to deal with than Samsung’s approach of just forcing things to fill. I’d say maybe 50% of the apps I use just don’t support landscape at all and have massive black bars. Another 30% “support” landscape by just filling things out with white space. The last 20% are optimized for foldables and they are a joy to use.
Ultimately, I’m not sure who has the right set up, or if there even is one. Samsung’s version is definitely a lot easier to work with, since most apps “just work.” But that comes at the cost of having the ridiculous cover screen and never really taking advantage of the landscape side of things. Google has the sexy passport thing going on but only has its own apps and like three others that actually use it right. Maybe one day google can take its role as developer of an ecosystem seriously and actually push itself and other developers commit to supporting foldables (LOL yeah right).
I’m enjoying it so far but I won’t lie; I did get cold feet for a while and almost returned it and kept my z fold 4. The battery was pretty rough for the first few days and the phone was getting HOT just like browsing lemmy and watching YouTube. But I upgraded to android 14 beta and now I’m getting shit like this, which is incredible considering I’d MAYBE get 5 hours of screen on time with my z fold 4. The heating problems went away too so I basically don’t have any complaints now.
When next year’s phones come out I’ll probably swap back to the z fold unless google does something incredible with gen 2. I just don’t see them being capable of supporting an ecosystem like this in the long term and would rather bet on Samsung. And if Samsung can finally jam that s-pen inside of the z fold 6 it’s pretty much gg.