Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold Review: 10% Lighter, Still Chunkier Than Rivals in the Hand

The first thing you notice holding this phone isn't how "light" it is—it's that it's still a bit thick. In his review of the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold, Engadget's Sam Rutherford gave it 8.5 out of 10, but landed on a pretty blunt takeaway: every time he picked up the phone, he often found himself wishing he was holding a competitor's device instead.

That line sums up the central tension running through the whole review. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is 10% lighter than its predecessor, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, coming in at 238 grams with a folded thickness of 10.1mm, and it's priced at $1,899—$100 more than last year's model. On paper, that's progress, but lined up against the competition, the gains look a lot less impressive: Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 weighs just 201 grams and measures 9.7mm, while the Z Fold 8 Ultra is even lighter at 215 grams and 8.9mm. Even the similarly-sized Motorola Razr Fold (243 grams, 10.1mm) feels sleeker in hand thanks to tighter bezel work. The review also notes that both Samsung's and Motorola's foldables just feel easier to open and close.

Design and Camera: 10% Lighter, But Rivals Are Still Nimbler

The design hasn't changed much this time around. The back is now made of a fiberglass composite Google claims is "nearly impossible to crack"—a durability claim the review notes comes from the brand itself, not from any drop tests conducted by Engadget. The reviewer's olive green unit with its pale gold trim got high marks for looking and feeling premium. The display setup stays the same: a 6.5-inch outer screen and 8-inch inner OLED, with peak brightness bumped from 3,000 to 3,600 nits for better outdoor visibility. The outer screen now uses ceramic glass, and the phone keeps its IP68 water resistance rating from last year.

The camera remains a consistent strength for the Pixel line, and this year's main sensor jumps to 48 megapixels with a larger sensor size than before, joined by new Camera Looks color profiles and a Magic Capture burst mode that makes it easier to nail split-second expressions in shots of sports or dancing. But the review flags a real gap: Super Res Zoom on the Pixel 11 Pro Fold tops out at 30x, well short of the 120x Pro Res Zoom on the standard Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL. The telephoto (10.8MP) and ultrawide (10.5MP) sensors also fall far behind the 48MP found on the non-folding Pro models. In other words, if you want the best camera experience Pixel has to offer right now, the foldable isn't the one to get.

HiLight Isn't Finished Yet, But Rambler Is a Genuine Surprise

The new HiLight indicator light on the back of the phone is one of this generation's fresh additions—it only lights up when the screen is closed and the phone is sitting face-down, triggered by Gemini activity or calls from designated contacts. The review is upfront that the feature still feels half-baked. Google says text and message alerts are coming down the line, but they're not supported yet, and the light still can't show more practical info like battery level or app notifications.

What actually impressed the reviewer was Rambler, the voice-to-text feature built into the keyboard. It automatically strips out filler words like "um" and "uh," and it can switch seamlessly between Chinese and English mid-sentence. The reviewer, who describes his own spoken Chinese as limited, noted that Rambler still accurately transcribed tricky terms like "wood ear mushroom" and "braised pork belly"—the one hiccup being that it currently defaults to Simplified Chinese output, since Chinese isn't officially on Google's supported language list yet. Paired with the bubble anything floating window feature available across all models, it makes multitasking on the foldable display feel a lot more flexible.

Battery life is one area that clearly took a step back: capacity dropped from 5,015mAh last year to 4,806mAh this time, and in local video playback tests it lasted 27 hours and 9 minutes—trailing the Razr Fold (31 hours), the Z Fold 8 (28 hours 14 minutes), and the Z Fold 8 Ultra (32 hours 11 minutes). On the plus side, wireless charging speed climbed from 15W to 25W, though that's still short of the 50W the Razr Fold can hit with its dedicated charging accessory.

In the end, the review frames the Pixel 11 Pro Fold as "a reasonable upgrade for existing Pixel owners," with software that's still arguably the smartest in the Android world. But stacked up against the slimmer Z Fold 8, the more fully-specced Z Fold 8 Ultra, and the stylus-compatible Razr Fold, it's clearly getting outshined. No Taiwan pricing or release date was mentioned in the source material.