After many, many months of rumours thePixel Foldis now official after it was announced during theGoogle I/Oevent earlier this month. And while we’re all very glad to see the phone finally announced (and the end of the rumours!) it turns out that we could actually have had two phones to get excited about. But Google canned one.
There had been the odd report that there were two foldable Pixels in the works in the lead up to the Pixel Fold’s unveiling, but we ultimately only saw one of them announced. However, Google head of design for hardware products Ivy Ross has confirmed that the second model did exist at one point - before Google decided that it probably wasn’t quite ready for primetime. That doesn’t mean that it will never see the light of day, however.
The second Pixel wasn’t good enough
In an interview on the officialMade By Googlepodcast that was spied byAndroid Authority, Ross explained that “there was another foldable model that we had created,” going on to say that the Pixel team “had the discipline to hold back and say ‘nope, it’s not good enough yet.'”
It isn’t clear exactly what that second foldable would have been - could we have seen a Pixel Flip debut alongside the Pixel Fold, for example? Perhaps, and there is still a chance that we might at some point in the future as well. Ross said that the second foldable Pixel wasn’t “good enough yet,” perhaps suggesting that Google could revisit the product later.
The phone that we did get, the Pixel Fold, does look pretty great regardless of whether it’ll get a sibling in the future or not. It has an internal 7.6-inch OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, while the external display is a 5.8-inch affair again with a 120Hz refresh.
It’s still going to be a little while before the Pixel Fold is available for people to get their hands on it, though. Pre-orders are already open with the phone set to ship in June. U.S. carrier Verizon lists its own release date as 27 June, but we’ll have to wait and see if that’s the date for everyone.
Google’s also throwing in a freePixel Watchwhich means you’ll save $349 if that’s something you’ve been considering adding to your wrist. Not that the freebie makes the Pixel Fold a cheap phone - you’ll pay $1800 in the U.S. and £1750 in the U.K. That’s a lot of money, but it also seems to be the going rate for high-end foldables of this type right now as well.
Who knows, maybe that second pixel is a cheaper version that will act as a kind of “Pixel Fold A” device.
