A Google employee has confirmed that the company was working on a second foldable to accompany the Pixel Fold, but that it remained unreleased because it wasn’t deemed good enough.
Speaking to the official Made by Google podcast, Google’s head of design for hardware products, Ivy Ross, confirmed that a second foldable was in the works at Google HQ.
As reported by Android Authority, Ross had this to say about the mystery foldable: “I’m really proud of the team because there was another foldable model that we had created, that we had the discipline to hold back and say ‘nope, it’s not good enough yet,’ and really wait until we felt like we could do something that was good enough or better than what was out there already.”
It seems this second foldable simply wasn’t up to the standard that Google managed to reach with its debut foldable, the Pixel Fold, which was announced at Google I/O on May 10 and is expected to hit the market in June.
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All of which invites speculation as to what this inadequate foldable design looked like. The smart money would be on a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 equivalent, with a more compact clamshell form factor.
It’s interesting to note that the official Google attitude to this second foldable is that it’s “not good enough yet”, which suggests that a future release is on the cards.
You have to trust Google’s decision making here, given that it’s significantly upped its hardware game in recent years. The Pixel 7a is the company’s latest release, and it’s a superb effort. “Google’s mid-range series of smartphones has never been this good,” we said in our review.
