This episode of the
When you debut a new product, feedback from users is always valued, and often helps to guide development for the next generation. George discusses the anticipation he felt when waiting for the first reviews of Pixel Fold to appear – and why he thinks the launch of a device marks a beginning, not an end.
George then gets into some of Pixel Superfans’ questions around the development, design, and utility of Pixel Fold – including the most challenging part of designing a foldable phone.
Hear that answer – and many more – on the
Transcript
Rachid Finge 00:00:02 Welcome back to the Made by Google podcast. I'm your host, Rachid Finge, and it's the final episode of the season and we have something special for you. Rather than me coming up with questions, I'll take questions from our Superfans that we've been receiving. And today's topic is none other than Pixel Fold. It's our first Foldable phone and it's had a great reception. And you had questions, so I'm not gonna keep you waiting. Let's dive straight in. Our guest today is a product manager for Pixel Fold: George Hwang. George, welcome back to the pod. Great to have you once again. The last time we spoke, the Pixel Fold was announced, but not in the hands of people yet, but it is now. So just wondering what does that feel like?
George Hwang 00:00:52 Thanks for having me again. It's really great to be here to actually see it in the hands of users and to even be able to chat with friends and family and, and just people externally is great, but we actually get to get real feedback and the feedback's been really positive, so I'm actually very excited. Uh, and it's been a great, great opportunity to just learn more about how we can continually improve and, and how we're helping people.
Rachid Finge 00:01:18 Now, typically reviewers, they publish their reviews of the device in newspapers on their websites all at the same time. So I'm just wondering how do you experience that moment? Are you like excited? Are you sort of in fear like what's gonna happen? Where were you when those arrived? Online and in print?
George Hwang 00:01:35 Yeah, so how it generally works is we have an embargo. They get the devices ahead of time. Yeah. And so it was on Monday for us and I was sitting beside my colleague and he is like, are you gonna go to this next meeting? And I'm like, huh, I'm gonna be about 15 minutes late. And he is like, why? And I said, well, the reviews come out. So I think I got online around two minutes before and I was refreshing to see
Rachid Finge 00:02:04 Now this is the final episode of this season of the Made by Google podcast. So it's a little bit of a special one where we basically only have questions from our Superfans that are very excited about Pixel Fold. And of course George, no one better to ask those questions than you. So I guess we'll just kick it off with a question from Luke and he is wondering, when was the first time you saw a prototype of the Pixel Fold and what was your initial reaction?
George Hwang 00:02:28 So I can't specifically talk to exactly when I saw it in the duration of the program and things like that, but I can tell you that when I did see it, it was like a mixed emotion. So when I got it in hand, it revealed that we had made some of the right decisions around the form factor and the design mm-hmm.
Rachid Finge 00:03:14 So that initial prototype you saw and the ones the final devices people have in their hands now are, are they like worlds apart?
George Hwang 00:03:21 I wouldn't say they're worlds apart. So the forum is, effectively the same, but the polish. And actually you read in some of the articles, people are saying, oh, it feels really premium. It feels uh, like very thoughtful and uh, to get to that level of thoughtfulness takes a long time.
Rachid Finge 00:03:36 So let's get to the next question from Edward on first. Basically, how do you see the Pixel Fold changing the way people use their devices? Have you already seen, you know, people in the wild using it and how it changes the way they use smartphones?
George Hwang 00:03:50 When I think about the Pixel Fold, you know, I really believe with this new form factor and the decisions that we made, that it's really going to show users that there's really no need to compromise on form or function with this design. Mm-hmm.
George Hwang 00:04:34 And what we've noticed is that because of the decisions that we made with the proportions and the aspect ratios and the feel in hand, you know, you'll often start your journey on the outside screen. Mm-hmm.
Rachid Finge 00:05:08 The next question comes from Andre. What is the most challenging part of specifically building a foldable phone?
George Hwang 00:05:15 Yeah, this one's an easy one for me because we spent so much time on making it perfect and making sure that it was, uh, it was great, was really the hinge, uh, without a doubt. And it was challenging in many ways. Just to hinge in a device like this that you use continuously is challenging. Mm-hmm.
Rachid Finge 00:05:57 Now this might be some sort of a noob question, George, but look, I, I have a door over there. It sort of opens and closes. Why is a hinge on a foldable phone so much harder to make than any sort of other kind of hinge that we're used to in life?
George Hwang 00:06:11 It's a great question because you find hinges everywhere, right? Yeah. You know, I've worked on this for so long now I notice hinges all the time and I'm like, oh, well how's that feel? Right? And I test it out. But to your question, mobile devices are really interesting devices because they are with you all the time and they have all of this stuff inside it. Like if you ever have the chance to open one up mm-hmm.
Rachid Finge 00:07:02 I guess there's always going to be a question about bezels. So here we go. It's from James and he's wondering if there is a technical reason the bezels of the Fold were designed to be wider and if it could have been narrower.
George Hwang 00:07:14 The way that I start with this is not just get into the reasons why, but kind of give you the thinking of it. Sure. So really designing a truly helpful product and what we are striving to do was to design a product that we wanted our users to use day in and day out and really not make them think twice about it. And so for a Pixel Fold, really what that meant was one of the key challenges of that was, like I said, making a device that felt good in your hands as well as in your pocket or purse or wherever you put that device. And one of those ways was to design it to be very thin. So to design an ultra thin device like this is very difficult because like I said, there's many things that need to go inside a smartphone.
George Hwang 00:07:56 And so one of the ways that we realized that was impeding, that was actually the hinge itself from making the device thin. So as we looked at, you know, how traditionally it was done and how it could be improved, that we realized that the hinge itself had mechanisms all across it and that was actually impeding us from making it a thinner device. And so we realized, well the smart engineers realized that there was, uh, an interesting way that you could actually pull the hinge mechanism to the ends of the device mm-hmm
Rachid Finge 00:09:00 So I guess hardware design is all about compromises all the time. So are you saying the slightly larger bezels lead to a much thinner device and that was sort of the preference above thinner bezels?
George Hwang 00:09:12 In short, yes, but we also looked, there were other things that helped along the decision path and additionally putting those at the, at the ends of the device, the hinge mechanisms also allowed the device to get more durable. So we thought it was a worthy design decision.
Rachid Finge 00:09:26 Sounds great. We have a question from London, from SJ and he or she wants to know what your favorite Easter egg or feature is in the Fold. So are there any Easter eggs maybe to start there and are you ready to reveal them?
George Hwang 00:09:40 I don't think we're ready to reveal them just so that people can actually find it themselves totally. But I can just say generally for myself, a feature that I really enjoy beyond the folding and unfolding and kind of that experience is really the split screen because I use it all the time. The example that I was using last night is I often work with colleagues in Asia and so I'm on late night calls here being in California, but I have kids and I have, and I'm doing multiple things at that time. And so I'll often be multitasking and so be prepping dinner on a call, a video call, which is usually on the top and then on the bottom, which I'll use, either have a document or I'll be planning something 'cause I'm always planning things. And then often what I do find is if I need those extra couple of minutes to actually get dinner ready or prep something up, I'll often uh, use the device as well. 'cause the kids love it as well to kind of prop it up in front of them and maybe put on a short television show so that can get through them to the next, uh, interruption.
Rachid Finge 00:10:36 Amazing. Let's get to Emily. And she's wondering how the specs of Pixel Fold compare to, I presume she has one a Pixel 7 Pro.
George Hwang 00:10:45 I think first and foremost we're really excited to say that with our focus on Pixel Fold was really to bring that great Pixel experience forward. And so a lot of those experiences are nearly all of those experiences that you get on, uh, the Pixel 7 Pro and the Pixel 7 all come forward. And that's not just a promise from Pixel Fold, but across the lineup we really do want to allow all our users independent of viga to get great experiences. I think particularly around Pixel camera, the same computational photography that is used in, you know, Pixel 7 Pro or even Pixel 7 is brought forward. And so some of the great experiences that you experience there, like Night Sight or Magic Eraser or Super Res Zoom, you know, coupled with the great hardware that we put in there, the five times folded telephoto really allow you to do some amazing things, but there's even more that we can do, right? Just for the fact that it's a foldable, it has a mm-hmm
Rachid Finge 00:11:59 I guess also having just Tensor G2 in there, just like in the Pixel 7 Pro is a big deal because I know some other foldables, they might not have like the state-of-the-art chip in there.
George Hwang 00:12:08 That's the secret sauce that enables us to bring all of that forward, right? Like I said, the computational photography, right. All the Call Assist experiences, everything from Call Screen, Direct My Call, things like that and for specifically for, for the foldable allows us to get performance out of it to do things like the multitasking, many different apps open as well as some of the smart things that are, that are coming in the future, like dual screen interpreter mode and things like that.
Rachid Finge 00:12:32 Now of course at Google we never speculate about the future, so I'm not going to ask you to do so, but I'm just still wondering now that that product is out. Like what keeps you busy then now that it is, uh, in the hands of people
George Hwang 00:12:45 This product, it's so funny. Yeah. I was talking to one of the engineering leads and he is like, oh George, good work, you know, and really excited about it. You can relax a little bit. I'm like, I cannot relax for another year or more
Rachid Finge 00:13:26 Yeah. I guess that might be one of the largest misunderstandings so people think the product is out. So now sort of the journey has ended, but maybe it sort of started now.
George Hwang 00:13:35 It does. Right. It becomes real now for us it's just, for a long time it's been just continual refinement, but we try to learn from what we've done and then continue to build upon it and listen to our users and, you know, they know better than us. Right. They use it in ways that we could never imagine.
Rachid Finge 00:13:49 Now as you know, George, we always end, and especially of course this episode, the final episode of this season of the Made by Google podcast with a top tip from our guest. Uh, so now that people can actually finally try Pixel Fold, what is the top tip you would give them? What is the one thing they should definitely try with a device you created?
George Hwang 00:14:08 So it's not one that you'll see in marketing ads or, but the thing that I find often because I have kids and things like that is I often prop the device kinda like a book, but slightly open on a table mm-hmm.
Rachid Finge 00:14:43 It's probably the most flexible camera in that sense that we have to offer them.
George Hwang 00:14:47 That's right.
Rachid Finge 00:14:48 Excellent. George, thank you so much for joining us once again on the Made by Google Podcast and hope to have you many times more.
George Hwang 00:14:55 Thanks so much. I appreciate the time.
Rachid Finge 00:14:59 Thanks again, George. It's been an honor to have you in the final episode of this season of The Made by Google Podcast and what a way to close things. We'll do more episodes with questions from our Superfans. And a big thanks to you for listening to The Made by Google podcast. It's been another great season where we got to know a lot more about the people behind your favorite Google products, taking a little break, but don't worry, we'll return with season 4 maybe in, I dunno, how does October sound? Make sure you're subscribed to the Made By Google podcast so you get notified once we're back. I hope you'll enjoy a great break as well. Really looking forward to meeting you again next time. Take care and talk soon.