Last year, Samsung slimmed its Z Fold 7 down dramatically, and pushed that even further this year, echoing similarly slim designs from Chinese rivals Oppo and Honor. Google’s foldable still feels big and bulky by comparison, like hardware that’s a generation behind.

The same is true of the display’s crease, which is pretty obvious even head-on, and easily noticeable when swiping from side to side. Oppo and Samsung have both worked miracles to make their creases almost invisible unless the light’s just right, and it feels like Google has a lot of catching up to do.

If you want a foldable that’s shaped like a regular phone when closed, this still fits the bill. Android 17’s Bubbles really come into their own on a foldable.

The square inner screen made me miss the Galaxy Z Fold 8. The almost square main display is well-suited to multitasking, helped by Bubbles, a new Android 17 feature that’s available on every Pixel but comes into its own on the foldables.

Multiple apps can be opened in floating bubbles, allowing quick access to a smaller window that can be minimized just as easily. On the 11 Pro Fold’s larger display, those bubbles can float perpetually in a dedicated dock in the bottom-right corner for unobtrusive access.

It’s ideal for hopping into Spotify to skip a song, diving into Todoist to tick off a task, or pulling up WhatsApp to reply to a message, all before getting back to whatever you were working on. But in the wake of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, this square screen feels a little behind the times.

The industry seems to agree: Huawei has adopted the same design, Apple is expected to, and both Honor and Oppo are rumored to have wide foldables in the works. I enjoyed Samsung’s passport-sized form factor for its pocketability and natural feel when reading or watching TV and miss it while using this.

By contrast, the 11 Pro Fold is tall when closed, and boxy when open. I do find it more comfortable than the unnaturally skinny Z Fold 8 Ultra though, and anyone split between Samsung’s two shapes may find this a happy medium.

Google says this new composite back material is much more durable than before. The 11 Pro Fold is Google’s thinnest foldable yet, but comfortably thicker than the competition.

Still, the 11 Pro Fold has its own advantages. Unlike those phones, it has an IP68 rating for dustand water-resistance, following the similar score on the 10 Pro Fold.

For a phone that can cost upwards of $2,000, that extra level of protection is worth more than mere peace of mind. Google also boasts that the new glass fiber composite back is three times more durable and “nearly impossible to crack.”

Google’s foldables remain the only ones to support Qi2 magnetic wireless charging, here upgraded to faster 25W speeds. The necessary magnets are part of why the phone is thicker than rivals, a tradeoff which will make sense for some.

This may have Qi2, but it doesn’t have a silicon-carbon battery, unlike Samsung’s new foldables. As a result, in slimming the phone, Google also shrunk the battery.

The 4,806mAh capacity is only a little smaller than the 10 Pro Fold’s 5,015mAh though, and battery life itself has been fine, routinely lasting until the end of the day with a little bit to spare. This is still an all-day phone, it just isn’t especially close to being a two-day one.

This is HiLight — you won’t see it trigger very often I’m afraid. You get the same five color options for every contact, and that’s it.

The biggest design tweak is HiLight, Google’s attempt to reinvent the notification light by repurposing the camera flash into a multicolor LED. As a long-term notification light stan, I was excited to see Google resurrect it, but if this shambling corpse is the result, it should have stayed dead.

HiLight is currently only used for two things: a multicolor glow when you talk to Gemini, and a monocolor glow when one of your favorite contacts calls. Neither works unless the phone is lying flat and face-down with the screen off, and customization is limited to a measly pool of five colors for call alerts.

Support for message notifications is coming later, Google says, with no word on whether it will ever be usable for notifications at large, serve as a charging indicator, or offer deeper customizability. If HiLight was going to be this basic, why did Google even bother?

More worthwhile is the single camera upgrade. The new 48-megapixel main camera sensor is the same as on the regular Pixel 11, and the two phones share matching 5x telephoto lenses too, with similar (though not identical) ultrawide and selfie cameras.

1/19The larger main camera is the only change from last year’s 10 Pro Fold. I’ve enjoyed shooting with this camera, especially on the main and telephoto lenses (the ultrawide shows its limits more, in both dynamic range and detail).

The main sensor is big enough to deliver solid results even in dim lighting, helped by Google’s typically capable processing. The 5x telephoto is crisp at a distance, though fuzzy when pushed anywhere near its 30x maximum.

Google hasn’t confirmed the telephoto’s minimum focus distance, but it feels like a few feet or so. Combined with the smallish sensor, which doesn’t deliver the natural bokeh of larger periscope sensors, this isn’t a great lens for closeups; instead the inferior ultrawide camera handles macro photography here.

Still, with Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 dropping the telephoto entirely, having any third lens here — and a pretty good one, at that — is now a big boon for the Pixel foldable. Google has bolstered the camera app with a whole suite of software upgrades, which might matter more than the hardware changes.

I won’t go into them in too much detail here, since my colleague David Imel does a great job of exactly that in his Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL review, but I’ll give you the gist. New Camera Looks are the biggest tweak, similar to the Film Simulations popularized on Fujifilm cameras.

There are four default looks, which subtly change the style of an image, and another six with more dramatic effects, and each can be further tweaked with direct control over contrast, vibrance, sharpness, and more. 1/9The default four Looks can be subtle.

This is on the phone’s standard settings. Also new is Magic Capture, a clever camera mode that records video and uses AI to pick out the best frames, giving you a video clip and photos without having to think about both.

It’s a great option when you just want to capture kids and pets in action, and aren’t too stressed about lining up a perfect shot. 1/3Magic Capture grabbed these three shots of my cat Loaf from a 30-second video I took.

Software improvements elsewhere are focused on AI. Rambler is a dictation tool capable of interpreting meandering monologues and creating concise summaries instead.

The bigger addition is Proactive Assistance, an upgraded version of Magic Cue that pops up with prompts for tasks it can help with. When it works, that is; the feature isn’t available in the UK at all, so I haven’t been able to test it, and my US-based colleagues reviewing the other Pixel 11 models found it hard to reliably trigger.

With Samsung rejigging its foldable lineup, and Apple’s first foldable iPhone seemingly imminent, Google might have picked the wrong year to be iterative. I wrote in my review that Samsung’s wider Z Fold 8 feels like the future of foldables; by extension, this might be the past.

The 11 Pro Fold is far from obsolete though. This is still, for now at least, this year’s only foldable with an IP68 rating and magnetic charging.

Including a triple rear camera at the same price Samsung offers a double is a major selling point, and the suite of software updates — especially Camera Looks and Bubbles — might draw me back to this phone over either recent Galaxy. Whether they’re enough to compete with whatever Apple is about to offer is another question entirely.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The VergeAgree to Continue: Google Pixel 11 Pro FoldEvery smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements.

But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate. To use the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, you must agree to: Google Terms of ServiceGoogle Play Terms of ServiceGoogle Privacy Policy (included in ToS) Install apps and updates: “You agree this device may also automatically download and install updates and apps from Google, your carrier, and your device’s manufacturer, possibly using cellular data.”

There’s also a variety of optional agreements, including: Provide anonymous location data for Google’s services“Allow apps and services to scan for Wi-Fi networks and nearby devices at any time, even when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is off.” Send usage and diagnostic data to GoogleGoogle phone number verificationGoogle Gemini Apps Privacy Notice if you opt in to using Gemini AssistantGoogle AI Prohibited Use PolicyLet contacts nearby find and share with youOther features, like Google Wallet, may require additional agreements.

Final tally: four mandatory agreements and at least seven optional agreements. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

Vikram Rai is a veteran in the aerospace sector who joined GE Aerospace in 2012. He has held several important positions within the company over the years, incl...