The original Pixel Fold could have started the upcoming”wide” foldable trend years ago

A few days ago, I wrote about how excited I am for the upcoming “wide” foldable revolution. Devices like the soon-arriving Huawei Pura X Max, along with incredibly solid rumors of Apple and Samsung’s upcoming designs are finally abandoning the awkward, square internal screens in favor of a landscape-first, small-tablet experience.

But as some of the commenters on that first post noted, Google already kinda did this. Looking back at the original Google Pixel Fold from a few years ago, it is incredibly obvious that Google was thinking differently about the folding form factor; and I think they were on a good track, but instead of refining it, they abandoned it to follow the more-standard square screen model.

The polarizing passport

When the original Pixel Fold launched, it was incredibly polarizing. It was short, wide, and heavy. The cover screen was often criticized for being a bit too stubby, but it never really bothered me at all. I for one miss the days of 16:9 slab phones that were “smaller” in measure, but larger in screen size relative to their diagonal measure. Remember the Nexus 6? It was just 6-inches in diagonal measure, but that was still a big screen! Newer 20:9 aspect ratios sound great at 6.9-inches, but you don’t get nearly the same screen real estate you expect when you do the math.

Anyway, back to the Pixel Fold. Unlike the Galaxy Z Fold series of the time, the original Pixel Fold opened directly into a landscape orientation. You didn’t have to rotate the device to watch a YouTube video without massive black bars. Games felt naturally immersive. It was a very different experience than I have on the Z Fold series, for sure. Google understood that the inner screen’s primary purpose was media and multitasking, and a wider aspect ratio served that purpose far better than a square in many cases.

The pivot to square

The problem is that the first generation wasn’t perfect by any means. The bezels were pretty chunky, the device was heavy, the folding mechanism didn’t open 100%, and it was already using a year-old Tensor processor to boot.

But instead of iterating on that unique DNA year over year, Google pivoted pretty quickly to join the movement towards a more-standard outer display and a very squared-off inner screen. Again, depending on what you want to do with a folding phone, this could be a good or bad thing, and the industry was moving this direction. While the Pixel 9 Pro Fold fixed a bunch of the complaints around the original, it lost the one thing that made the Pixel Fold special.

Playing catch-up to their own idea

Fast forward to today and the industry is currently buzzing about the shift toward “wide” foldables. And yeah, I get it; not all of you are sold on the idea. Still, that’s where we’re headed for now, and the form factor that the industry is pushing looks a whole lot like a refined, modernized version of the original Pixel Fold. There’s no escaping it.

Oddly enough, from the leaks I’ve seen around the web, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold won’t be hopping on the “wide” train, and I just find that so interesting. At one point, Google clearly saw the logic and worth of this sort of form factor, and now they’ll once again be playing catch-up if it takes off.

Regardless of what you think of the wider form factor, the fact that Apple and Samsung will both have one means they’ll be pretty popular and lots of people will adopt and love them. In that possible future, I’d bet Google wishes they would have simply stuck to their guns and kept iterating on the passport-style foldable. Time will tell.