“It’s very much a first-generation product,” Sag says. “There are some unique capabilities we won’t see in anything else, but this will be a low volume device.”

The Fold could also be a way to revamp an older form factor in Google’s wide-ranging lineup: tablets. Android tablets have languished in the shadow of Apple’s iPad for years now. Neither consumers nor Google itself seem certain of how an Android tablet is supposed to fit into peoples’ lives. Google is pitching its newly announced Pixel Tablet as a casual device meant for controlling a smart home and consuming entertainment and not as a productive or creative workhorse. To underscore this strategy, the table comes with a charging dock that has a speaker built in; docking the tablet turns it into a photo frame that doubles as a controller for the smart home.

“One of the things they realize is tablets don't really leave the home all that often,” says Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager at the tech analyst firm IDC.

Google could be using insights from the Fold’s large display to spruce up the way apps work on a tablet that stays in your lap. Apps meant to work on a device where you constantly fold, unfold, and spin the screen have to be dynamic enough to match those changes. The Fold could be the testing ground for an ecosystem of apps that are more adaptive and responsive to these actions, seamlessly spinning and scaling to different orientations.

Of course, Google also sees each new product as a playground for its artificial intelligence efforts. Sag points out that many of the company's services are thinly veiled vessels for machine learning algorithms that track your movements, study your behaviors, and collect your data. During yesterday’s I/O keynote, Google executives spent 80 minutes on the topic of generative AI before they even got to the announcements about Android devices. 

But when they did, those announcements were given a sprinkling of AI pizzazz. Android phones are getting AI-generated wallpaper images, AI-powered photo editing tools, and messaging apps that can send AI-assisted texts. Google is sticking AI inside every mobile device for every context. The Pixel Fold and the Pixel Tablet, as odd as they are, will only help Google better learn how the new types of interactions the devices enable should fit into our lives.