Ask Paul: December 5 ⭐

Happy Friday! As we settle into the darkness and coldness of winter, it’s a good time to grab something warm to drink in front of the fire and watch me fumble my way through some great reader questions.
? Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate
LawrenceG asks:

How is the Pixel 10 Pro Fold ownership so far? How do you like it? It will replace a Kindle, an IPAD? How is to keep it in your pocket? How is to talk on it without buds\headphones? You will keep it or return it? Thank you.

I’m probably overdue on a follow-up there, sorry. And while I don’t want to completely stomp all over whatever I do write about this, let alone the review, it’s definitely worth an update.

I am keeping the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, for sure.

Whether it becomes my day-to-day phone will depend in part on my wife, who is also itching to give it a shot, and I figure she should use it for at least a month or so as well. So we’ll see when that happens, but I’d like to get my review out first.

The experience is mostly positive overall. The key here, I think, is that it has to work as well as a standard slab smartphone for those use cases, and also as well as a mini-tablet, like a Kindle or iPad. But there’s also that third more nebulous set of use cases, which are “things that I just couldn’t do before with a normal phone but appreciate having now.” Those things are tied to being able to switch from the outside display to the larger internal display as needs/wants dictate, and I think that’s important. If I just used it like a phone most of the time but only opened it up to, say, read or whatever, then I’m not sure any folding phone justifies the expense.

Stepping through all that, it works fine as a mini-tablet with two caveats. One is Android, sadly, and the quality (and in some cases, availability) of apps there compared to iOS/iPadOS. And the other is personal, given my eyesight, which is just that I’m used to a larger tablet and, as I found when I used an iPad Mini for several months this past year, I find the mini-tablet form factor a bit too small.

Tied to this, I have since gotten used to using my current iPad (an 11-inch Air) in landscape mode as it’s always in the Magic Keyboard. I had previously only used tablets in portrait mode when possible. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold doesn’t really have portrait and landscape modes when you open the internal screen as it’s roughly square, so that has sort of worked out in that it’s not super-different from what I’m used to.

But because of the Magic Keyboard, I’ve likewise gotten used to using the iPad like a laptop, where I navigate semi-exclusively with the touchpad and rarely touch the screen. This is oddly comforting and obviously familiar, but I think this may be related to me preferring computers over devices for whatever reasons. So making it more like a computer is better for me. With the Fold, I can prop it up on a Pixelsnap Ring Stand or whatever, and do. But I have to touch the screen to navigate, and since...