The Pixel 9 Pro Is Great (If You Ignore the AI)

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Google’s Pixel 9 Pro has a lot to live up to: It’s the company’s new flagship phone, coming in as AI competition starts to heat up. As Google faces monopoly charges, this is the company’s chance to justify its unified ecosystem, a task that the Pixel 9 Pro sadly falls short of.

And yet, on its own, it’s an excellent product. While much of the front-and-center branding tries to sell you on tech that probably needs another 10 years in the oven, the Pixel 9 Pro does regular phone stuff better than any Pixel in recent memory. It has all the strengths of older models, but tuned up, with a sleek design that was long overdue. 

The Pixel 9 Pro is finally pocketable

The big draw to the Pixel line of smartphones is usually unique software, but while the Pixel 9 has a few AI tricks up its sleeve to keep up with Apple Intelligence, my favorite change this year is to the phone itself.

That’s because the Pixel 9 Pro, for the first time, now comes in two sizes. There’s the “new” Pixel 9 Pro XL, which is actually about the same size as past Pro models, and the regular Pixel 9 Pro, which when compared to past Pixel Pro models, functions more like a Pixel 9 Pro Mini. Despite having the same naming scheme as those past Pro models, it’s easily the fresher option.

While the XL is more in line with expectations, the regular Pixel 9 Pro finally gives us a Pro Pixel phone that’s the exact same size as the base Pixel. That means no more choosing between pocketability and power. As someone who almost always opts for pro models but tries to get the smallest option I can, I’m ecstatic.

To get the phone to that size, there’s a few compromises—namely, a slightly smaller battery and a predictably smaller screen with a smaller resolution. Everything still feels plenty luxurious, and to me, the tradeoffs are well worth it.

It’s also lightweight, too, at 7 oz compared to the iPhone 15 Pro’s 6.6 oz. The biggest difference here is going to come from your case, which in a neat trick, will also fit a base Pixel 9.

That’s because both phones have the same basic layout, down to the size of the new, redesigned camera bar. Google made the camera bar smaller and more circular this year, and while it still sticks out just as much as the old one, the more minimal look is a bit easier on the eyes.

Also easy on the eyes is the 9 Pro’s matte surface, which is a lot less reflective and much less of a fingerprint magnet than the glossier back on the base Pixel 9. The Hazel color my phone came in is also a nice, deep white with a greenish tint, although you can get a black, white, or pink model if those are more your speed. I do miss the light blue option, called Bay, the Pixel 8 line had.

Still, this is easily the most premium feeling and looking smartphone Google has made to date. There’s also a foldable Pixel 9 Pro, called the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, set to ship next month. I saw a pre-release version of that phone, but haven’t had many opportunities to test it.

Gemini still feels underbaked

Pixels usually thrive on their unique software, like Live Transcribe or Call Assistant, but the Pixel 9’s feature additions are more iterative than usual, with none of the new exclusives really standing out—at least for anything good.

The first you’ll probably stumble across is Add Me, which you can swipe to while taking a picture. Add Me uses local processing to stitch two photos together so nobody has to miss out on being in a shot. Essentially, you take a photo of your friend or partner, then pass the phone off to them so they can take a photo of you. Add Me will then combine the photos to make it seem like you were both in frame at the same time.

It’s a clever idea, and one I was excited to try out on my upcoming honeymoon. Unfortunately, like Magic Editor on previous Pixels, it still feels like a demo.

Google told me that Add Me doesn’t use generative fill, which means you won’t get any melty backgrounds like in Magic Editor, but it does still fall prey to some basic photoshop tells. Figures added into shots tend to look like they were cut out of a magazine and pasted in, with incorrect lighting and shadows being a clear giveaway. Sizing can also be an issue, with people looking smaller or larger than they might in real life. The same can be said for depth: My fiancé tried framing his arm behind where I was sitting so it would look like it was hugging me, and instead it just kind of blended into my shoulders.

Add Me also only works with people, so don’t think about getting clever with it. I tried it on some anime figures I have on hand, and it wouldn’t recognize them.

The new Screenshots app fares better, though I doubt many people will use it. The app uses locally processed AI to add titles and descriptions to your screenshots, helping you search through them more quickly. You could use this for things like concert tickets or hotel wifi cards, and the tool’s descriptions were mostly accurate in my usage. It can also read and summarize any text that might be in your screenshots, which could be useful for school notes or boarding passes.

The problem is, it’s limited to screenshots, rather than photos. Even if you’re taking a photo of a physical boarding pass, you’ll have to remember to screenshot that photo to get any use out of Screenshots. I tend to screenshot a lot, but I feel that limitation is going to leave this app mostly buried with standard users. Google’s upcoming Ask Photos feature should help more people, but there’s still no word on a release date for it.

Then, there’s what’s likely to be the most controversial app debuting with the Pixel 9: Pixel Studio. It’s essentially an AI image generator with a basic editor thrown in, although you can also use it to touch up your own photos rather than AI-generated ones.

Pixel Studio uses a combination of local processing and the Imagen 3 model that also powers Gemini, but something must have broken along the way. Gemini’s safeguards tend to be pretty strict, but like X’s Grok, Pixel Studio can give you some pretty unhinged results.

There are still some safeguards in place: The bot will refuse to generate images of real people, from celebrities to something as generic as “a cashier at a grocery store.” The issue is Pixel Studio seems to be more permissive of violence than Gemini, and has no issues with depicting copyrighted characters.

I was able to get some almost dead-on images of Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mickey Mouse, and while these alone might not raise their corporate owners’ ire, here are some more compromising images I got of Mickey Mouse with just a bit of prompting:

I was even able to get a version of Mickey depicted as a member of the KKK, although I’ll hold off on posting it for your sake.

Still, it’s not a good look for a brand-new tool, and parents will want to be careful with their parental controls before handing their kid a Pixel 9. Using the tool more as intended, I found the images it created to be pretty boilerplate, and not really worth the carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, I feel the same way about Gemini Assistant, which while not exclusive to the Pixel 9 series, got some upgrades to coincide with its release. It’s supposed to be more context aware now, able to take information from your screen and use it in your responses, although I could never get this to work. More emphasized in ads is the new Gemini Live mode, which is exclusive to Gemini Advanced users and lets you carry on a conversation with a cloud-based and AI-powered voice. Pixel 9 Pro owners get a free year of Gemini Advanced with their purchase, so you’ll be able to try Live right out of the box.

I found Gemini Live to be friendly, but not that useful, since it mostly added an extra step between myself and information I could have found with a quick Google search. It needed frequent redirecting to keep it on the right track, and often cut out partway through talking, requiring another prompt before it continued. Hallucination was also rampant, with the bot saying things like “New Yorkers usually always carry an umbrella just in case” when I asked if it was going to rain today. Given that my friends and I got drenched twice this weekend, that’s either not true or we’re just a bunch of transplants in disguise.

The conversational tone was also a bit off-putting, and while I didn’t have any issues with the bot cutting me off, I didn’t love the overly friendly, PR-adjacent voice it took with me. I felt like I was being handled, being given nonsensical responses like “the tech team has fixed the issue” or “sorry, I lost connection” on occasions where Live became unresponsive and needed to be rebooted. Issues persisted, despite whatever “tech team” was being referenced, and my wifi was stable throughout, so the connection was probably not the culprit.

Overall, I’m still sad to hear that Google Assistant is on the way out, something Google emphasized during the Pixel 9 announcement. Gemini still can’t do simple things like adjust phone settings or set reminders, which Google Assistant has been able to do with ease for years. For what I actually use my phone to do, the more lightweight and basic standard assistant is easily the better pick.

A camera to beat the iPhone’s

As hinted towards by its name, photos are another category where the Pixel series stands out. Camera upgrades this year are a bit more subtle, with rear camera megapixel counts matching the Pixel 8 Pro (50 MP wide, 48 MP ultrawide, 48 MP telephoto), but with improvements to autofocus. The selfie camera did get a noticeable bump, from 10.5 MP to 42 MP, but in practice, taking photos feels a lot better across the board, with shots being near indistinguishable from those taken on my iPhone 15 Pro—something I wasn’t confident saying with the Pixel 8 Pro despite that phone technically having better ultrawide and telephoto lenses.

To start, here’s some daytime shots taken at 12 MP across various zoom and lighting levels. Your phone will default to this level of quality to save storage space.

And here’s some taken at 50 MP, which you can turn on by tapping the cog in the camera app’s bottom-left corner, then the Pro tab, then the 50 MP icon under Resolution.

Shots are vivid and detailed: Close ups especially benefit from Portrait mode, while Night Sight brightens up the night sky. I found the latter to be generally helpful, but a bit artificial at times. This can be frustrating, since Night Sight does turn on automatically by default, but you can disable Automatic Night Sight by tapping the cog in the bottom-left corner of the camera app, and tapping the circle with a diagonal line through it under More light. You’ll still be able to use Night Sight manually by swiping to it in the camera app.

For comparison, here are some similar shots with my iPhone 15 Pro, with night shots in particular coming out much darker—although I am limited in how dark my testing can get by the general ambient light where I live.

And here are a few taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Overall, despite the mostly unchanged lens hardware, I found I had to do a lot less tweaking to get subjects to pop in frame this time around, likely due to this model’s upgraded sensors.

Performance still falters

Performance is the Pixel 9 Pro’s Achilles’ heel. Boasting the brand new Google Tensor G4, it still falls behind competing pro phone models in non-Google apps.

That’s because the Tensor series is built to power Google AI and other Google-developed experiences like Magic Editor, and for those, it works great. It also doesn’t get in the way of light tasks like browsing, but if you’re a gamer, or you edit video on your phone, you might notice some slight hiccups.

In the synthetic benchmark Geekbench 6, which gives a general idea of performance, I got a score of 1,924 on single-core tasks and 4,628 on multi-core tasks, which is just barely above the Pixel 8 Pro’s numbers and far below the 2,938/7,250 I got on my iPhone 15 Pro. Synthetic benchmarks can’t tell you everything, but it’s not a promising start.

To test out real world performance, I took the phone into Genshin Impact, a graphically demanding open-world game. Here, I was only able to get a smooth 60 fps when using the game’s lowest settings, which make what should be sumptuous 3D anime graphics look like borderline pixel art. Bumping the settings up dropped the fps to about 45–60, but also caused the phone to heat up quite a bit, with the maximum settings pretty quickly making it too hot to handle.

That’s a shame, as these results are about on par with what I got on the Pixel 8a, a budget model running last year’s chip. My iPhone 15 Pro, on the other hand, can play at high settings at 60 fps with little issue.

While the Pixel 9 Pro is not a gaming phone, the numbers here don’t paint a kind picture for other demanding apps. If you want to stay in the Android ecosystem but don’t see yourself using Google’s Pixel-exclusive software much, consider an alternate flagship like a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra instead.

Battery life

I haven’t had the Pixel 9 Pro long enough to test its battery properly, so I’ll update this section with more details when I have them. For now, Google promises an average 31 hours of battery life for non-constant mixed use and with the default battery-saving features turned on. 

A brighter display

Before wrapping up, it’s worth touching on the slightly brighter display. While it still tops out at 120 Hz with the same HDR support and aspect ratio, its peak brightness has been upped from 2,400 nits to 3,000 nits, which I found I needed quite a bit. Maybe I’m getting older, but in direct sunlight, I had to put the brightness to about 93% before the screen really popped. Inside, I was able to get away with a more modest 65%.

That’s higher than I felt I needed on the Pixel 8a, so it’s likely my standards have just risen. This screen is definitely better than on prior models, capable of displaying more vivid colors with its doubled contrast ratio. If not for the small size, I could see myself watching whole movies on this, as I was tempted to do while watching a scene from The Super Mario Bros Movie.

Should you buy the Pixel 9 Pro?

Using the Pixel 9 Pro hardly feels different than using past models, but this is still a great way to get in on the Google flagship phone, which starts at the typical $999.

Part of the reason I haven’t picked up a Pixel for personal use is because of the size, as well as what I considered a pretty ugly camera bump. While the camera bump is definitely still noticeable, both of those issues are more-or-less solved now. The base Pixel 9 Pro feels like a massive improvement when just carrying the phone around in your pocket or having it out on a table.

The camera also definitely makes the Pro model worth it, even without much of an improvement with app performance. The specs are better on paper than most phones from companies not named Samsung, and Google’s post-processing takes the phone’s lenses that extra mile. It’s nice to finally have high-level Pixel cameras in a pocketable form factor.

The one worry I have about this phone is the AI. Google really wants Gemini to take off, for obvious reasons, but it continues to falter when stress tested. There’s some borderline irresponsible things you can do with the image generation, and as an assistant, Gemini still struggles with basics that Google Assistant had solved years ago. Longtime Pixel favorites like clear calling still work great here, but the Pixel 9’s newest AI offerings are not worth upgrading for.

That could put the Pixel 9 line in jeopardy with Apple Intelligence right around the corner, although even Apple doesn’t seem quite comfortable with AI yet, as it’ll reportedly be holding back several key features for next year.

With that in mind, the Pixel 9 Pro is probably a safe upgrade, as it’s likely to avoid being outclassed for a while. And if AI isn’t your cup of tea—I still can’t find more than situational use cases for it—this phone could work for you for years to come. It’s stylish, functional, and finally compact: everything a little rectangle for your pocket should be.