Google Pixel 9/Pro Review: Gimmick or Good?

- So I really like these new Pixel phones. New designs this year, obviously, but also new specs, new features, also new issues, but of course, new price tags, so we really gotta jump into the nitty gritty of what's actually good about them. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) So we've been hoping for a real, complete, flagship quality competitor from Google for a while now.

And on one hand, it feels like we finally got 'em, but on the other hand. . .

Did you guys watch the Google event announcing these things? Like, I feel like you can learn a lot about how a company really feels about the products that they're presenting by just watching the announcement event, and these felt like a software showcase that just also happened to have some phones to go with it. Which I guess is not insane when you know the history of Nexus and Pixel, but it did the opposite of giving me confidence in these phones.

But now I've been using these phones for two weeks straight, and I actually feel like I can tell you what's good or bad about them. (upbeat music) So, hardware is mostly what I'm talking about when I say these phones feel like flagships, in a good way. Like, it would be easy to dismiss them as almost the same as last year just squared up, but there are a lot of other little things too.

Like, the screens are brighter at their max brightness, 2,700 nits for the Pixel 9 and 3,000 nits for the 9 Pros, and then the even bezels all the way around, that requires some extra consideration, wrapping the edges of the OLED panels under those corners. And there's a new ultrasonic fingerprint reader under here on all of them, finally. It's way faster and more reliable than the disappointing optical ones from before.

The only thing I wish, and it's such a small thing, but I wish I could just unlock at any time when the display is completely off. Like, currently, you have to have the always on display on, or hit the power button or be getting a notification, and then you can unlock with a quick touch. But like on Samsung phones, that spot on the display is always a hotspot no matter what, you can just unlock by touching there, so I kind of wish the Pixel would let me do that from a blank screen, too.

The haptics are really nice again, and the buttons are really clicky this year. (buttons clicking) But then of course, the hardware is what's on the inside too, so that is the new Tensor G4 chip, and a bunch of extra RAM. Now, the Tensor G4 isn't actually that much more powerful than last year's chip, in fact, you probably won't notice a difference for 99% of the stuff you do on the phone, but what's actually significant is a new NPU that's way more powerful and dedicated to AI tasks, and the way more RAM is also dedicated to AI tasks.

I'm told a big portion of the RAM is literally reserved for AI stuff. So I will get to all that AI stuff in a minute, don't worry. But just in the world that we're living in, where the meta for a lot of these major new smartphones is, okay, minor new improvements here and there, but mainly just a bunch of new AI features and capabilities, I'm glad that the Pixel also got a bunch of meaningful feeling hardware stuff, too.

And then obviously, yes, you do have the squared off sides that I just know are supposed to fit in with the iPhones and Samsungs of the world. I've said it before, I like the look and feel, and that also applies to this new camera visor, which is less of a visor and I guess more of like a shelf island now. Kind of looks a bit weird in some renders, but you just kind of have to trust me, seeing it in person, it's fire.

I like it. Even if it will totally collect dust in just the same way as the last year in the corners, it's nice. Oh, and I almost forgot, there is a new size, so you can have a Pro phone, but without it being an XL.

Love the choice. I am a little worried that that one probably won't sell as well as the two extremes, but I'm just, I'm glad we have the choice this year. Be happy about it before it gets discontinued.

So anyway, it all sounds pretty good, but I do have a few gripes, which I'm allowed to, it's $1,000. So, the size of the batteries is about the same as last year, 4,700 milliamp-hours in the smaller size ones, 5,000 milliamp-hours in the big phone, and I've had pretty good battery life, like, A minus battery life with the XL. Consistently five plus hours of screen on time, lots of heavy, high brightness use.

But they still don't charge that fast. Like, the XL is maxing out at like 37 watts, and it's actually slightly slower on the smaller phones. Now, I'm not saying you gotta go thermonuclear level, Realme, 320 watt fast charging, light your phone on fire charging speeds or anything like that, I'm just saying fast charging would be nice.

50, 60 watts, that's it. I feel like that's just not that insane but would be significantly better for using the phone. Now, I also need to say, Pixel 9 has matte sides with glossy back, but the Pixel 9 Pro has glossy sides with the matte back.

We've seen this strategy before. I just think the matte sides look and feel so much better than the glossy, so I kind of wish you could get like a matte on matte look, but that's just me. And then one more thing, of course, these phones start at higher prices, or at least the base one starts at 799, but this is a $1,000 phone that starts at 128 gigs of storage.

Thanks, Apple. I guess that's the standard now, too. But it's 2024.

I would've liked, you know, 256 to start. (upbeat music) So cameras have always been a big part of the Google phone experience, or at least they have for a while now, and on Pixel 9s, that's still true, but not in exactly the same way. So, all across the board, the Pixel 9 and 9 Pro actually share the same primary camera and the same ultra wide.

The Pros just get that extra telephoto, the 5X zoom. And the primary camera that they all share is basically the same as last year. The ultra wide is new, it's 48 megapixels instead of 12, but it bends down to 12.

So, look, shooting with these new cameras, it's great, it's a quick smartphone camera app, there's a bunch of easy to use modes, it's responsive, focuses quick, it's easy to get consistent good pictures that process pretty quickly. What I mostly notice about these photos is they still look very processed to me. Like, this is the Pixel look now these days, with the last few generations, just lots of HDR, lots of contrast, lots of dynamic range.

Also, lots of sharpening. It's just not as natural of a look as we've seen in some others. It's just more on the punchy side.

Which is honestly great for just sharing a photo on social media, but some may prefer a more neutral photo. The new selfie camera on the Pro actually feels like the biggest improvement as far as detail and color over the regular Pixel 9, which doesn't get this, but I'd say this is a pretty nice selfie camera, just so much dynamic range. But if you wanna see and hear what video footage from the Pixel sounds like, I shot an entire video on the auto focus channel on the Pixel 9 Pro XL in 4K30 with, actually, no external hardware.

I didn't even plug in a mic. This is just the built-in mics. So yeah, just me holding a phone.

If you don't zoom in at all, the videos look great. They're sharp, but obviously still very processed, and you can see it, like, prioritizing segmentation and, like, lighting on my face and shifting colors around. So, I'll leave a link below if you wanna watch that whole eSprinter review when it goes live.

And you might as well subscribe over there while you're at it for other car videos. But this is all part of the Pixel experience. Just like, they're still tuning these cameras, they may end up looking a little more natural in the future, even though it's been a generation.

That's one of the things that you can get outta this phone, but also, when they present these things, it's all about the features, the smarts, the crazy AI magic editor and all this AI stuff on these phones. There's a lot to the Pixel experience. (upbeat music) So, Google makes Android, Google makes their own Android phone, therefore the Google Android phone should be the vessel for showing off the latest and greatest from Android, right?

I mean, Android 15 preview just got shown off in February. It's coming out by the end of the year. These phones launch with Android 14.

That's not a joke. All these Pixel 9s are running the second latest version of Android out the box. Obviously, they should be first in line for 15, and then the seven years of promised software updates, but that's still hilarious.

But every time I go back to using a Pixel, you know, I'm reminded of all this stuff that I miss when I use other phones. Like call screening. So good.

I mean, I know Samsung kind of has like a janky Bixby version of it, but it doesn't work as well. I've tried. The now playing feature also.

that just kind of ambiently tells you what song is playing in the background wherever you're at, love it. And now there's all this new stuff that they're adding that also may or may not hook people to the Pixel. So, Call Notes is a new one.

Pretty useful. Summarizes phone call that you're on with a recording. And the new Pixel Weather app.

Originally, I wasn't gonna give that much of a chance to it, but honestly, it's turned out to be just as good as basically any other Android weather app I've tried. So you can get to it by tapping the weather widget on the home screen, and it's got this really pretty UI where you can rearrange the big tiles and put the ones you care most about closer to the top. It doesn't let you change your weather source, but I mean, I'm already nitpicking at a level that only weather nerds will really care about.

And they also threw in an updated panorama UI in the camera, and I don't know if anybody cares about this, but the temperature sensor in the Pros works on people now. I don't know if you caught that. And it gives these live temperature readings now as you move around an object.

None of which is medical advice, by the way. I'm actually impressed by Google's commitment to this particularly useless app. Like, Google, I know you get a lot of heat for killing things typically, but I give you permission to stop working on the thermometer app.

I think you've done it. But there's one thing that, again, if you watched Google's event, that is really supposed to stand the Pixel out from the rest of the world of smartphones, and that is because this is where Gemini lives. This is this deep, deep integration with Google's newest assistant here.

Literally, the boot up animation on this phone is the Google logo, and then it turns into the Gemini logo before it starts up. Like, these are basically Gemini phones, so let's talk about it. (upbeat music) So, ignoring the fact that Google has this horrible habit of rebranding and renaming things in the most confusing way possible, it seems clear that Gemini is the thing we should be focusing on here.

Like, there's a lot of pressure on this little box to be as useful as possible. And it actually delivers. Like, I have found Gemini to be very useful, and also rapidly improving over the past couple weeks and gaining new capabilities, and it's still, it's very conversational, it remembers context, it gets questions correct most of the time.

It's good. I clearly need to do an updated assistant battle, because the last one I did was with Google Assistant, not Gemini. But see, that's the weird thing.

Google introduced this huge, new Gemini assistant to everyone, but also, Google Assistant still exists alongside Gemini on these phones, too. Like, it's two different assistants. Matter of fact, for a little while, Google Assistant was actually better than Gemini at a lot of things for what regular people were doing with it, because Gemini couldn't set timers, it couldn't get directions to places, it couldn't do basic home controls.

And so Google Assistant would be the thing that it would fall back on and that people would continue to use. It was confusing. Even now, on the Pixel 9, you can hold down the power button or swipe up from the corner to get to Gemini, but the permanent Pixel home screen widget on everyone's phone, if you tap that microphone, that's the old Google Assistant.

But today, now, Gemini can actually set timers and alarms, and it can listen and tell you what song is playing in the background, when it couldn't before. And it can do home controls like changing my Nest thermostat temperature and turning smart lights on. But for some weird reason, when it's doing all of these new capabilities, it's showing me a little Google Assistant logo in the corner, as if to tell me, like, okay, it works, and we have this new capability, but Gemini is doing this through the old Google Assistant, which, why even tell me that?

Just do the thing. So anyway, then also, in the settings, you'll be able to have these Gemini extensions, which when you enable them, will let Gemini see more into your actual life, like, through other apps like Google Docs and Drve and your calendar. And to me, that's really where it becomes the most useful.

Like, I start asking it to find emails for me and tell me the traffic to my next calendar event and things like that. That is just like talking to a normal person, and it's super useful. But then Gemini Live gets into this slightly less comfortable sometimes, but also sometimes very useful, fully conversational mode with Gemini.

So you just open it like this, and let's full screen. So, okay, I've got this wasp nest in my studio, and I need to get rid of it. What do I do?

- [Assistant] Wasps are pretty aggressive, so getting rid of the nest safely is the priority. Do you know what kind of wasps are in the nest? That will help me figure out the best way to help you remove it.

- I have no idea, but they're all really active all the time. - [Assistant] Okay, that makes sense. To start, it's best to try and figure out what kind of wasps you're dealing with.

Are they yellow and black with a narrow waist? If so, they're probably yellowjackets. Or are they more brown or gray with a wider waist?

Those would be paper wasps. - You know what, I don't wanna get that close to 'em. How about I just find pest control nearby?

Can you do that? - [Assistant] Okay. - So this is all at the mercy of your internet connection and it not hallucinating and getting everything right, but when it does, it's actually, it can be super useful.

Especially when you have, like, a bunch of follow up questions about something and you wanna just keep going, then it's less of a bunch of typing Google and just talking to it. It's fine. So I do think Gemini is actually really good at this point.

I will plan on doing a comparison to the new Siri, of course, probably ChatGPT, and probably some others in some updated assistant battle. Feel free to get subscribed if you want to see that when it comes out. But as of right now, yeah, I'm a fan of what assistant, assistant, of what Gemini is doing.

But the thing is you can do any of this with Gemini on any Android phone. Matter of fact, Google literally demoed Gemini with a Galaxy S24 Ultra at their own event. Like, they didn't even try to hide it.

So if that's not unique to Pixel and it's basically the Gemini phone, like, what's the point of all this new NPU power with the Tensor G4 and all this extra RAM dedicated to AI tasks, what exactly is that good for? Well, there are a bunch of other AI tasks. (upbeat music) So here's how I wanna go through these.

There's a bunch of new AI features on the Pixel 9s, and I wanna just sort of divide them into useful, meh, and gimmicks, based on my own experience with them over the past couple weeks. I've been trying 'em all, using 'em, putting 'em through their paces, and I have some thoughts. So, some of 'em are really good and add to the Pixel experience, and others, not that great, kind of overrated.

So, under useful, I'm putting Gemini, of course, just the assistant overall. It's quick, it gets things right. Fine.

Then I have Call Notes, Video Boost, and Add Me. So, Video Boost actually seems to make a surprising difference at how good the video quality comes out of a Pixel and what you can get outta these. Call Notes is convenient, because if you have the guts to turn it on on a phone call, it can record everything, ingest it all, transcribe it, summarize it, and give you that after the phone call, which, it's just useful.

And then Add Me. (chuckles) Oh, Add Me. Add Me is interesting.

It's good, it works pretty well, I just, I'm not sure if people are going to actually use it or if they're gonna, like, try it once and then forget about it and go back to taking selfies, but it does what it's supposed to. It's right there next to the portrait mode. It's easy to access in the camera.

And so if you need to take a group shot and you actually have no one to take it for you, this feature is genuinely useful. It just combines two pictures, and boom, everyone's now in the photo. In case you were wondering, yes, you can do Add Me with yourself, and yes, if you pixel peep, you can tell that it's not perfect every single time.

There are fuzzy edges. Like, it's clearly using the base frame from the first photo and then compositing in the last person. But in general, like, the fact that Google has leaned this far in and created a genuinely useful feature out of thin air by just abandoning reality in the Pixel camera app, I guess, yeah, you gotta give 'em credit.

It's just will people actually know to use this or will they just go back to taking, like, a selfie with everyone behind them so they get everyone in the shot? I don't know. Only time will tell.

So then there's meh, there's, like, the okay stuff. So, I have the new weather summaries in the new weather app. They're AI generated.

So right at the top of the app there, it gives you some text to describe the day for you, so you don't have to look at all those confusing numbers underneath. Honestly, it's actually kind of useful sometimes. But is this really AI?

Like, maybe the sentence structure is coming from an LLM or something, I don't know, whatever. It's fine. It certainly didn't tell me about all this clouds coming in, probably gonna dump some rain and also ruin my lighting.

But then Magic Editor got this Reimagine feature that lets you highlight any part of an image and then enter some text to turn it into something else completely different to have your photos look like, I don't know, a fantasy land or something that also never happened. It does outright refuse to do some of my more dramatic edits, like, it doesn't seem to wanna reimagine people ever, but it'll happily add objects to the background or change the setting entirely, if you're into that. I don't know.

What is a photo anyway? And then the last meh, but not least, or whatever, is the Screenshots app. Am I missing something here?

I mean, I get the premise. You have some screenshots on your phone that you've taken, where you want to save some critical information in them, so they built a place where you can organize 'em all into collections, which is convenient. You can search through them.

You can have it remind you at a certain date and time of a specific screenshot, and even link you back to the webpage that you took a screenshot of. And it makes all this information searchable. But I'm sitting here thinking, shouldn't this have been built into Google Photos?

Like, did you know that Samsung's Photos app already built in the smart linking to any website you take a screenshot of? I mean, don't get me wrong, it works. It does what it's supposed to.

My theory is they're probably doing slightly more analysis, more processing of all the bits of text and information in each photo than they would with the normal Google Photos app, so that is what enables all the indexing and everything. And then maybe if it goes well, they'll also bring all that to the Photos app, maybe? Or if it doesn't go well, then they can kill it easily.

I don't know, whatever. It's fine. That's not, though, as bad as my gimmicks section.

So, Zoom Enhance. Have you heard about this? There's a new edit feature finally shipping in the Photos app that encourages you to zoom all the way in on a photo and then let it do its Pixel magic, where it plays this whole animation like it's gonna reconstruct your photo and find some hidden details, but it kind of never does.

At the end of the day, all it does is sort of turn up the clarity filter and maybe add what feels like some fake texture where it thinks there should have been some. I'm not buying it. And then there's the Pixel Studio app, which is just this neat little app to generate new images completely on device.

And again, what I'm not saying is that it doesn't work, it actually does work impressively well. In like three seconds on device, it can generate whatever you want. It's just that I don't.

. . I guess I don't really see a real genuine use for this other than just messing around.

Which, hey, honestly, that's fine too. If you just wanna mess around and make a meatball sub with legs, then you got it. Knock yourself out.

(upbeat music) So, before it starts pouring rain, the meta with new smartphones in 2024 is, you know, slight improvements across the board, but then also some splashy new AI features that are only available on the newest one because the new chip and the new neural cores and it's just special for that reason. So, that's what's happening. And if you want, you could easily throw these new Pixels into that camp.

But the reason you'd buy this phone is really just the same as ever for a Pixel. It's the smartest smartphone in the room, and it's now also in a piece of kind of nice hardware that's a pleasure to hold and use. And then there's a bunch of AI stuff on top that you can try and either take it or leave it.

It's kind of just up to you if you wanna get a bunch of use outta that stuff or literally never touch it at all. I'm curious if you leave a comment down below what sort of stuff you think you would use or buy the phone to use, or which stuff you don't think is that useful at all. At the end of the day, we'll have to see how it ages, but I'm thinking Pixel 9 and 9 Pro is some of their finest work yet.

Also, shout out to Anker for sponsoring this video. Their new Anker Prime lineup is their most advanced multi-device fast charger they've made yet. That includes three charging stations, one docking station, one wall charger, one power bank, and one new cable.

So the two that stand out to me the most are the Anker Prime charging station and the Anker Prime power bank. The charging station is this desktop accessory that can kick out 250 watts in total among its four USB C and two USB A ports, and then it has a display that can show you how much power each port is drawing actively. And then it lets you customize charging priority on each port, so you can let it just sort of auto adjust and make the highest demanding items get the max charge that they can take.

And then the power bank has a 9,600 milliamp-hour capacity, and there's two USB C ports on it, and up to 65 watts output from this thing. But it can also be a wall charger, too. So, that 1.

3 inch display is gonna show you how much battery you have left and how much power each of those ports is outputting. So you can check 'em out, and the rest of the Anker Prime lineup, in the video description. But either way, that's been it.

I got this in before the pouring rain started, so I'm pretty proud of that. But let me know what you think in the comments below. Talk to you guys in the next one.

Peace.