Google's Pixel Fold offers a compelling take on the foldable phone. Here's a hands-on look and how to preorder.

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Google announced its first-ever foldable phone, simply called the Pixel Fold, during the company's Google I/O event on Wednesday. It's available to preorder now and will go on sale in late June.

The Pixel Fold is designed to be a premium phone with the best performance, cameras, and screens Google has to offer. The Pixel Fold also has a total of five cameras, including three rear cameras, a selfie camera on the exterior, and a selfie camera on the interior.

With a 5.8-inch phone screen when closed, the Pixel Fold opens up to become a 7.6-inch tablet for watching videos and multitasking with multiple apps. You can also partially open the screen and keep it open at an angle to rest it on a flat surface for hands-free use.

Google says the hinge is rated for 200,000 folds and unfolds, and the phone itself is rated for IPX8 water-resistance, which means you can submerge it in up to 1.5 meters of fresh water for up to 30 minutes. However, like the majority of folding phones, including the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, the Pixel Fold is not dust resistant.

In many respects, Google's Pixel Fold offers a design and functionality similar to its main competitor, Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 4.

Google Pixel Fold: Hands-on impressions

I had a small window of time with the Pixel Fold, and I was impressed by its build quality and the potential of its software. 

The first thing that struck me was the Pixel Fold's wider exterior display, which looks more like a regular (albeit, small) phone screen compared to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4's unusually tall and narrow exterior display. 

I can see the Pixel Fold's exterior display being more usable for basic tasks where unfolding the Pixel Fold would be cumbersome, like checking directions on Google Maps, scrolling down social media apps, picking a song, writing an email, or even reading an article.

I noticed the screen crease down the middle of the unfolded screen, but that's typical for foldable phones. It doesn't detract from the viewing experience. The interior screen feels solid with very little perceivable flex, in fact.

The hinge has consistent stiff resistance when unfolding and folding, which gives it sturdiness. It also adds versatility by letting you unfold the screen to any angle to place it on a surface for taking hands-free photos or videos or for streaming video.

In my hand, the Pixel Fold in the folded position felt like a relatively small but chunky and heavy phone. When you unfold the Pixel Fold into tablet mode, however, your mind shifts from phone mode to tablet mode, and it no longer feels like a heavy phone. Instead, it turns into a lightweight tablet that's also incredibly thin.

Google has optimized several of its own apps, as well as some third-party apps, for the Pixel Fold's unfolded tablet mode, and everything seemed intuitive enough. For example, I was able to attach a photo from Google Photos to an email in Gmail simply by dragging it from one side of the screen to the other, with the apps side-by-side.  

The company said it's working to get more apps optimized for the Pixel Fold so they don't just look like stretched out phone apps, which is a common complaint with Android tablets.  

Google Pixel Fold: Price and release date

The Pixel Fold is available for pre-order from Google's Store online now for a starting price of $1,799. It'll be available in regular retail in late June, but it's still unclear exactly when.

The Fold is available in two storage tiers: a 256GB version for $1,799, and a 512GB version for $1,919. 

Google Pixel Fold: Specs