On a wet London rush hour in 2011, I’d often face a 50-strong queue to get my bus home. And when I joined the back of the queue, as many as 50 BlackBerry screens would look back at me.
I was convinced my co-commuters were the hardest-working in the City. The 15 minute bus wait, once a waste of time, had become the email checking, calendar-inviting, news scrolling, document-reviewing, most productive period of the day. Never were so many tiny Qwerty keys pressed by so few, so fast. But in truth the same scene was playing out at bus stops and train platforms all over the Square Mile: you were not a somebody unless you had a BlackBerry.
Fast-forward to 2014, however, and it would be 50 iPhones, not 50 BlackBerries, looking back at me in the queue for the bus. The device’s crown as the must-have business smartphone had rapidly evaporated, and with it the ubiquity of its tiny keyboards.
Even more remarkable, though, has been how Apple has held on to that dominance for all of the past decade. It has become a rite of passage to get an iPhone when starting a new job, as common as getting a new email address or staff ID card.
But all good things must come to an end, and the cracks are already beginning to show for Apple. In May, the company posted a 10% downturn in global sales of iPhones – and it’s not clear that this is just a blip. The pace of innovation feels slower – and it’s growing harder to tell new models apart from old ones.
It feels, in other words, that the time is ripe for a rival to come in and disrupt the business smartphone market. Google’s new Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which goes on sale today, is the closest I have seen to a serious challenge. It is the first time I have been genuinely excited to try out a phone since getting my first BlackBerry in 2011.
Using a huge 8-inch screen that folds up in my pocket completely transforms the smartphone experience. The visual feel of the apps I use daily is massively enhanced by the increased screen real estate – whether it’s checking emails, reading the news, scrolling through a website, reviewing a slide deck, or, most importantly, watching Premier League games. It feels a natural accomplice for the high-flying City exec – particularly one that’s used to carrying around an iPad that this could easily replace.
The advances from Google’s previous, and first attempt at a folding phone, The Pixel Fold, are significant. This new model is lighter than the old version, with a bigger screen and longer battery life. It feels like a much more serious product – the old one felt experimental and unfinished.
The biggest downside, though, is the price. At £1,749 the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is not a bargain by anyone’s standards. Like the early BlackBerries, this is a device that will see the greatest early adoption in the business world, rather than the consumer one, if it is to take off. And some of the apps I tested did not seem to fully cater to the larger screen – hopefully just a teething problem.
But the innovation that has gone into this device seems miles ahead of Apple, who unlike their biggest rivals Samsung, have yet to produce a single folding phone – while Google’s new Gemini AI tools are an added bonus. Previously a sceptic, I’m now sold on folding smartphones and after playing around on this one for a week, I don’t want go back to a boring, flat-footed, one-sided smartphone. If Google’s latest Pixel doesn’t spark a jump in the popularity of folding phones, it’s hard to see what will.
