The Google Pixel Fold is totally heavy metal

(Image credit: Waqar Khan)

published 23 February 2023

Google's rival to the best folding phones, the Pixel Fold, is expected to launch this year – and a new report says that Google's folding phone is going to be heavy metal. Literally.

According to 9to5Google's sources, the Pixel Fold is going to be the electronic equivalent of Rammstein, Gojira, Slipknot and Ghost combined. Admittedly they didn't say it in those exact words, but that's what I'm taking from the latest leaks: the Pixel Fold is going to be both heavy and metal.

How heavy is the Google Pixel Fold going to be?

None more heavy. Okay, I'll stop now. According to the site's sources, the Pixel Fold is going to be heavier than the Galaxy Z Fold 4, which in turn is heavier than the Oppo Find N2 and even the Pixel 7 Pro. Apparently weight-wise we should be thinking of the Pixel Fold as a small tablet rather than a big phone.

Part of that is for a good reason: it's getting a big battery. The report says that while some rivals make do with batteries of around 4,440 to 4,500mAh, the Pixel will have a battery that's much closer to the 5,000mAh mark.

It'll be interesting to see how that plays out in terms of stamina. The smaller batteries in folding phones do mean less stamina than their non-folding siblings, but any advantage Google's folding phone gains from its extra battery capacity may be cancelled out by the fact that it'll be using Google's own Tensor G2 system rather than the Snapdragons you find in rival devices.

The Tensor G2 promises 20% better energy efficiency than the first generation – but the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 of last year's best Android phones claimed to be 30% more energy efficient than the Tensor, so it's not guaranteed that the bigger battery teamed with the second-generation Tensor means a longer lasting phone.

Then again, that might not matter. The Tensor has been specifically designed for the AI and machine learning on which Google's apps and services increasingly rely, and that could well be what differentiates the Pixel Fold from the rest of the flippers. We'll find out soon enough.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).