Google Pixel Fold: Details, Specs, Release Date Leave a comment

It might really feel like Twitter is slowly imploding, however the platform remains to be place to go for breaking information. Living proof: On Thursday, Google teased its newest {hardware} machine in a tweet. It is a folding Pixel cellphone.

The cellphone is known as the Pixel Fold, and that is just about all we learn about it for positive. The corporate says it’ll reveal extra particulars on the machine in the course of the keynote deal with of Google IO, its annual developer convention, which takes place in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday, Could 10.

There are some things we are able to discern concerning the Pixel Fold simply from the picture and brief video that Google launched. The identical pictures seem on the Google Retailer on a page that presumably will turn into the product web page the place the cellphone may be bought when it goes on sale.

It folds book-style, just like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, not clamshell-style just like the Z Flip or Motorola’s Razr redux. Additionally, strikingly, the Pixel Fold seems to have a full-size display screen on the entrance. Many folding telephones that collapse like a e-book use a smaller display screen on the entrance, however the Pixel Fold goes huge, with an edge-to-edge display screen like those discovered on common, nonfolding smartphones.

The Pixel Fold’s inside display screen would not seem to go edge-to-edge, however as a substitute is nestled inside a slim black bezel. On that folding display screen, we are able to see some Android widgets and consumer interface parts that look as if they have been optimized for the bigger folding display screen. Little doubt, when the Pixel Fold is revealed, the adaptive Android parts might be an enormous a part of the demonstration.

There are some chrome accents on the sides which might be harking back to the Professional-level Pixel fashions and a few current flagship-level Samsung Galaxy gadgets. There’s additionally a chrome end utilized to the digicam bump on the again of the cellphone. (Chrome accents on a cellphone at all times remind me of the Ford Crown Victoria, and I want corporations would cease doing this, as a result of who needs to be reminded of a Crown Vic eight dozen instances a day? However I digress.) These accents sign that the Pixel Fold might be a premium machine. 

Additionally they sign a really excessive value. Google has mentioned nothing concerning the value—or the rest actually, aside from displaying the photographs and re-upping the date of the IO keynote—however we are able to assume this foldy will include a price ticket significantly greater than the non-folding Pixels.

Google’s information a couple of premium, folding smartphone comes at a time when smartphone gross sales are in a deep slump. Additionally, shoppers haven’t responded to folding gadgets as enthusiastically because the smartphone makers experimenting with the shape issue have hoped they would. Possibly the arrival of a folding cellphone made by the identical firm that makes the software program working on it—the “entire stack” strategy—would be the nudge that will get this nonetheless awkward {hardware} design out of its area of interest and into the mainstream.