The foldable phone market is in the middle of a huge transformation, but no one told Google.

Last year, Samsung transformed its Galaxy Z Fold 7 with a dramatically thinner design. This year, it made its phones thinner and lighter again, almost eliminated the crease, and introduced a new passport-sized form factor that feels like the future. Next month, Apple is expected to enter the market with a foldable iPhone that, rumor has it, includes all of the above and adds iOS too.

In the face of all that flux, Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold has hardly changed a thing.

Like the other Pixel 11 phones, this is an iterative hardware upgrade, but unlike the others its design feels dated already. It’s a little thinner and lighter than last year’s phone, the main camera is a bit better, the screens a touch brighter. But it’s mostly the same hardware, boosted by software updates like Camera Looks, multitasking Bubbles, and Creator Suite tools.

This isn’t a bad phone at all. The IP68 rating makes it tougher than Samsung’s latest, and the triple camera and solid software are both big draws. Perhaps not changing the design will even work in Google’s favor: The 11 Pro Fold’s aspect ratio sits in between the two extremes of Samsung’s 2026 lineup, its stocky Z Fold 8 and skinny Z Fold 8 Ultra, and despite a price hike still feels competitively priced with either.

That’s enough to mean the 11 Pro Fold still feels like a smart purchase right now, but I’m worried it won’t do for long.

At $1,899, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold is $100 more than last year’s phone. Unlike on the other Pixel 11 models, that’s not masking a storage bump: This has the same 256GB starting storage as last year’s model. You can pay an extra $120 to get 512GB storage, and a further $230 to get 1TB. Every version comes with 16GB of RAM.

That $100 hike gets you a handful of hardware improvements on last year’s phone. The chipset has been upgraded to the new Tensor G6; both OLED displays run a bit brighter, now peaking at 3,600 nits; the 48-megapixel main camera uses a larger image sensor; and the Qi2 magnetic wireless charging now runs at 25W, up from 15W.

That’s just about it in terms of actual performance upgrades. There have been slightly bigger changes to the design though. This year’s phone is 0.7mm thinner when closed and weighs 19g less. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but holding the two generations side by side you can easily tell the difference, and the 11 Pro Fold is more comfortable to use for extended periods.

Still, it might be too little. 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.

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.

Still, the 11 Pro Fold has its own advantages. Unlike those phones, it has an IP68 rating for dust- and 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.

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. Broadly speaking, the 11 Pro Fold camera is about the same as the 11’s and — on paper, at least — a step down from the Pro phones’.

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. These aren’t simply post hoc filters — they change processing at the moment of capture, and so have a tangible effect on the information the camera captures.

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. Then there’s the Creator Suite, a set of tools specifically designed for content creators, including an onscreen teleprompter and the option to save videos and photos directly into project folders for easier organization.

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 Verge