I have had a complicated relationship with the Google pixel phones over the years I've always said that at their very core these phones are special they have this beautifully animated friendly customizable software that's always capable of doing a few things so intelligent that they're practically indistinguishable from Magic but at the same time these phones make me rage because so far there's always been a blocker significant enough issues that distract you from being able to focus on that delightful software I've had build quality issues I've had overheating issues I've had signal issues inconsistent camera issues and just generally the phone's being quite a bit slower than the competition issues so that puts this new pixel 9 Pro and the 9 Pro XL which is the one I've been mainly using in a very interesting position they have a lot to prove but if they can prove it then I mean these could basically become my favorite phones ever so this is how the pixel 9 Pro and the pro XL come presented it's a pretty box but sadly it's also a pretty empty box you get the phone you get a cable and there's a Sim ejector somewhere in here well at least it makes my job quicker here's the thing though this is the best built pixel ever it feels almost exactly like an iPhone 15 Pro Max when you pick it up very similar Dimensions very similar flat sides with a slight curve and it's the same weight down to the gram I remember reading a post saying that way more of the people who buy pixels are actually X iPhone users as opposed to X Samsung so I'd be very surprised if this similarity wasn't intentional to even further entice Apple Fans who are still on the fence but either way I mean this as a compliment to the pixel the sides are grippier than their pass phones it looks and feels just really classy especially with these thinner completely even screen bezels and this is also easily the most solidly constructed phone Google has ever made it doesn't Flex one bit and if you haven't already seen it I'd say it very much passed the Jerry rig durability test I've kind of been getting the feeling over the last few years that the pixel would end up as yet another one of those canned Google projects you know the classic downward spiral where things aren't quite there with a tech product so then it doesn't sell well so then it makes less money so then it gets less investment and never improves because of that besides Google is specifically famous for cancelling projects but getting a significant redesign like this feels like a reassurance that Google is still very much kicking around Google is still determined to keep trying to become a definitive part of this Smartphone War and the more that you use this phone the more you realize why that's so important to them but I'll get there oh also I don't normally talk about cases but if you're going to make one this is how it's done this thing is addictively soft it shows up no fingerprints no light scratches it gently swoops around the camera module giving you this soft lip to rest your fingers against there's nice felt on the inside a metal logo and metal buttons which actually match the remaining visible part of the phone and the sprinkle on top is that the fit is perfect every single cutout is exactly centralized which well youd be surprised how often that doesn't happen and you know what design is not the only thing that's on the up here the optical fingerprint scanner that we used to have that was one of my major gripes this new pixel switches that out for an ultrasonic scanner it's basically firing out sound waves instead of light to map out The Ridges of your fingers but the upside of that is that it gives the phone basically a three-dimensional understanding of your prints so it's more reliable and you really feel that I haven't had any signal issues and while it's hard to say anything conclusive about signal because there's just so many factors I do a pretty regular 2 and 1/2 hour trip from Nottingham my hometown to London on the motorway and the signal is famously patchy on this though I was actually flitting between 4G and 5G almost the entire time with only two 5minute bursts of nothing so it's looking likely that the new modem on the inside of this pixel is doing its job the general feel of using the phone is it's Flawless it's the best honestly every single animation has an accompanying feeling generated by the vibration motor even things like a gentle hum as you slide up and down your brightness plus I've not had a single bug which low bar I realized but that automatically makes this the most stable pixel launch in history the battery is actually the battery is not charged so it's on 8% right now let's just plug it into our shiny new anchor Prime power station but yeah the battery life on these Pros is enough I wouldn't call it sparkling I'm talking 6 and 1/2 hours of screen on time on the smaller Pro and 7 on the XL Which is less than my Samsung but enough for almost anyone and it feels like Google's gained control of their overheating problem I mean the solution wasn't rocket science they just finally caught up and put a vapor chamber in the phone like their competitors have been doing for ages that has a lot of KnockOn effects it means that the screen which is bright and pretty Delicious By the way doesn't dim minutes after I take it out on a hot day the camera seems to record continuously without stuttering and games don't dramatically slow down with persistent play in fact I did whip out the good old 3D Mark extreme stress test to put some numbers to this feeling and found that while Galaxy s24 Ultra had 57% stability meaning that by the end of this 30 minute or so stress test it was only running at 57% of the performance it started with the pixel retained 71.7 now that's not the full story cuz while the pixel's stability score is higher its performance to start with is so much lower that even with more stability there isn't a single point in this test where it's better than the s24 ultra every year performance has been a classic pixel weakness that every year Google seems to to keep addressing by just slapping that AI Band-Aid on top and this new phone isn't completely free of that curse either the new tensor G4 chip that you find inside of the pixel9 pros it is still noticeably less fast than the chip inside the best from Samsung Apple OnePlus all of those companies top end phones make basically every action instant whereas the pixel still feels like it enjoys its thinking time you know little things like it taking just a split second for the full resolution image to load when you zoom into it and the phone's storage speed might have something to do with that too I ran multiple tests and the pixel comes out as significantly slower in terms of sequential read and write speeds than Samsung which would explain why it takes longer to load things and I'm just going to be brutally honest this disparity felt like an acceptable compromise when Google was charging $900 for a pro pixel but now we're at $1,100 it needs to get on that level that said in a way it's actually better than I thought it would be I was expecting gaming for example to be a flop but this is Zen Zone zero this is as difficult as mobile games get to run and I've played this for an hour at a time on absolutely maxed out settings with no issues apart from some slightly toasty side rails and also this chip combined with now 16 GB of RAM by default seems to drastically speed up AI tasks I'm talking like 50% faster than they used to be which was much needed one of the key things that got to me with last year's pixel 8s was how St the difference was between how easy and instant Google made AI photo editing look at their launch events versus the fiddly reality of it on the phones made many times worse by the 5 to 10c loading time in between every single action and so the fact that this stuff is so much faster here it already starts to alleviate my blood pressure as for all the new AI stuff they announced I'd say most of it feels a little half-baked which is a phrase I think I've used to describe every single AI phone this year but there are three things three things I absolutely love the thing that they spent most of the time talking about was this one called ad me where if you want to take a group shot but you don't want to ask someone to take the photo you can separately take each person's shot and Google software can merge them together into one and while I would say that is very impressive from a technical perspective I just don't think I'd ever use it I've never really had a situation where I've wanted to take a group shot and I haven't been able to find someone to take that shot and if you can find someone then that still feels like the better option to me cuz that way you don't have to do this little fiddle you don't have to take two separate shots you don't have the risk that it doesn't quite turn out the way you expected which as we all know there is a very decent chance of with any AI feature and also you know it's just that your end result then is a photo of a real moment which maybe I'm oldfashioned but I still think that counts for something there's a whole new app now for image generation called pixel Studio but to be honest while it can generate some pretty quick Nic looking images from scratch based on a prompt it's nothing new or better than what's out there it needs wi-fi even though it's supposedly running on device and when you want to use it to mess with photos you've already taken it's extremely limited and fiddly with the selection tool being practically dysfunctional and like what in Earth is this why are the two key options for your next Generation AI photo editing app to add a caption or add a sticker this would have been cool if we were still living in the year 2000 the phone's assistant is in a slightly weird place basically this phone's default assistant is Gemini Gemini is more heavily AI powered it's way smarter but it also seems to have a lot of limitations with how it can interact with your apps and also doesn't do some of the more basic things that Google Assistant used to do so it feels like we're at this pretty clumsy middle phase where you get both and you can switch between them depending on the feature set you want which makes me feel very much like a beta tester oh but the magic editor is starting to get pretty interesting though I was playing around yesterday with the feature that allows you to zoom out of a photo that's already been taken and I couldn't believe it like look at this shot I click the autof framing button and Bam it's understood that this wooden beam along the top has got to continue it's understood that there's an extra step here and it's estimated what it's likely to look like it's understood that the trees are thinning around here so when it zooms out it's making sure that you can see more of the sky there the idea of this feature isn't new the execution of it very much is and you can now reimagine photos which can actually be very powerful and very convincing I remember my jaw practically hitting a floor when I managed to change my cat into a dog I mean what the Google the only thing I would say is it's a real hit to the features usefulness that you can't use it on shots of people there's a new pixel screenshots app which also falls into the category of pretty good I actually think it's great that there's a separate app to manage screenshots cuz the reasons that I want to find screenshots are always very different to the reasons that I might want to browse my gallery and while what the app does is not distinctly different to what most phones can already do by allowing you to search for things within your screenshots it is one layer more intelligent because your phone can not just look at the specific info in the screenshots but also use AI to take one step back and understand what the screenshot is meaning you're way more likely to be able to find it based on a Vaga description the first thing that I absolutely love though is Gemini live it's it's basically the AI that you're used to but in a much more free flowing way than I think we've ever experienced you talk you listen you can talk over the AI there are no trigger buttons or trigger words it allows you to have something that very closely resembles a real human conversation let's do a little live demo I'm debating between going for an Android phone or an iPhone I'm a simple person what would you recommend okay choosing between Android and iPhone can be tough iPhones are known for being really userfriendly and straightforward they're a good choice if you want a phone that's easy to set up and just works all right then Google thank you U but what I also like about it is that when you wanted to stop talking you don't need to say anything or do anything you just say what you want to say and it will slowly reduce its own volume and listen and I actually think that makes it a really powerful tool because it becomes like a a live bouncing board like I was chatting to it last night I said I'm going to have some people over what could I do for dinner that's a bit different it said why don't you theme it I was like great idea we chatted for another 3 to 4 minutes and by the end of it I had a complete menu plan for my Pokémon themed dinner including the salad I would use to represent grass types and the spicy curry I'd use to repres present fire types now as for the other two AI features that I think are amazing they're both within the camera so let's talk cameras the rear set of cameras have almost identical Hardware to last year's phone so that's a 50 map main 48 map Ultra wide and then a 48 map five times optical zoom and so it's probably not shocking news to learn that the base quality of photos feels not that different from last year so that means good color reproduction a very strong ability to handle High dynamic range scenarios and control those bright spots very comparable levels of detail to Samsung's highest end Galaxy s24 Ultra but then a night mode that's good but just a little softer than Samsung's and a portrait mode that I think it's fair to say falls behind like look at the edge detection here versus the Galaxy it really gives itself away as a phone photo and upsettingly many of the frustrations I had with last year's phone are also still present here zooming in and out is still very laggy it makes it feel unpolished the camera preview can still get grainy even if the end photos are not the transition between lenses feels jumpy there's weird limitations like you can't use your five time zoom lens to take portraits nor can you use it for slowo with instead the phone opting for some very poor quality digital zoom and this really cool cinematic blur mode is 1080p only but the front camera is new this is now a 42 map sensor that's the reason for the Fairly large cutout and I'll take it it lets you go super wide if you want to get those group shots I don't think I've ever seen a phone go wider than this but also I was pleasantly surprised by the detail and you can also shoot some pretty solid 4K video because yes Google has put some work in to bring up the video quality on the pixels 2 and that leads me on to the AI feature video boost it's kind of strange but when you're taking video on this phone this only works on your rear cameras by the way you have the option to boost that video If you select the option then your phone will keep the footage largely unprocessed so that the next time you're on Wi-Fi it can upload it to the cloud and get Google's superpowered data centers to process it even better than your phone itself could it improves the colors the dynamic range the stabilization it can completely rescue grainy footage taken in low light which was one of the biggest weaknesses of past pixel phones it can even upgrade the resolution to 8K and it's one of those features that you feel like it shouldn't work it almost sounds like some kind of elaborate scam but but it does I guess you could say there is a hidden cost associated with it though cuz like if you want 8K video boosted content you're going to need a heck of a lot of cloud storage specifically Google Cloud Storage you'll need about 800 mb per minute of it and also you need to be very careful with this phone about joining other people's data hotspots cuz your phone will pick them up as Wi-Fi networks and before you know it you could have burnt through 10 gab of their data obliviously boosting your videos in the background without you even realizing I know this from personal experience doesn't make you popular but it's this kind of stuff that reminds you why Google never stops trying with the pixels cuz I mean like if this phone succeeds so do all of their services and not just Google photos but also their Gemini AI because this phone is the best possible portal through which to funnel people to them it's also very clear that this is why Google is like the only Company still shipping a top-of-the-line Pro phone starting with just 128 GB of onboard storage which to be honest combined with it costing a whole $100 extra just to get to 256 feels lowkey diabolical to me ah but then here is the other thing about this camera the zoom Zoom see the big tin super res Zoom feature that pixels have is already good like when you zoom in 30 times and you take the shot a surprising amount of improvement is made after that capture to the point where I would say the pixel's long-range Zoom shots are already 95% as good as those on Samsung's s24 Ultra and that's one of that phone's key selling points but then add in the new Zoom enhance AI feature on top of that and Samsung gets absolutely murdered now this obviously does open a can of worms cuz what Google is doing here is inventing detail it's not completely consistent and it's perfectly possible that this texture it's creating isn't completely real so is it actually the better zoom camera I guess that's up to you but which image would I rather have that's pretty clear it's the Google the final thing I would add about cameras is the very underrated panorama mode this is the best phone for taking panoramas it makes them really easy to take they're super detailed and each photo is stitched together extremely seamlessly okay so is this phone good yes it is the pixel 9 Pro either improves upon or completely fixes about 70% of my issues with past pixels everything from cameras to Performance to AI it does that with classic Google perks like this joyous software and 7 years of Android updates with then extras that I didn't even know I wanted like this big redesign or well actually forget the redesign look at this case I really like this thing the key cons are just well you're basically paying $1,200 for the XL model cuz no one wants a flagship phone with just 128 GB of storage and it's still not as fast as the competition okay it's been an hour and the phone is on 67% while I've been using it the whole time and you want to know why it's because of the new anchor Prime charging station the company has sponsoring this video but that doesn't change the fact that this is the new gold standard for a setup it's got a total output of 250 wats so 1 cable into here and this thing can happily charge your laptop three phones and two other gadgets all at full speed plus it's got a 2.26 in LCD interactive charging display which gives you immediate updates on charging status and speed but there is more there's a new fusion power bank which is so cool because this is basically a full-on wall charger and then as soon as you want to go somewhere you automatically have a fully charged 9,600 mAh battery pad not to mention the docking station which is this absolutely ridiculous 14 in1 charging and data transfer solution you can turn a desk like this into a desk like this with one of these this stuff right here is no exaggeration currently the top contenders for what we're going to be kitting out are next gen studio with so check out the full anchor Prime lineup in the link below