Google Pixel 9 Pro Review

Google’s new phones are here, and the Pixel 9 Pro is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch. It shifts the formula, offering the Pro camera setup and hardware enhancements but keeping them in the more small-hand-friendly form factor of the base Pixel 9. At $999, the Pixel 9 Pro is still a pricier option, but it comes with a number of meaningful upgrades over the base Pixel 9 that will be well worth it for photo fiends. And for anyone interested in the latest AI capabilities, the Pixel 9 will be an obvious choice, as its $200 uptick in price over the Pixel 9 comes with one year of Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage with Google One AI Premium, which alone is a $240 value. Anyone not sold on the AI will still get a great phone, though.

The Pixel 9 Pro shakes up the formula Google has been rolling with the last few years. Instead of being a larger model than the base Pixel 9, it’s exactly the same size but features all the key “Pro” upgrades. This sees the Pixel 9 Pro sit at a comfortable size with a 6.3-inch display and reasonably light weight, making it comfortable in the hand and easier to navigate with one hand than prior Pro models. (Meanwhile, if you prefer a larger phone, the 9 Pro is available in an XL variant that offers a larger 6.8-inch display for a $100 premium. Beyond the display and size increase, the 9 Pro XL just increases resolution and battery size but leaves the rest largely unchanged.) Flatter corners avoid creating sharp pressure points in my palm, which is a welcome change from the thinner edges of earlier Pixels.

The big outward difference between the Pixel 9 Pro and its non-Pro sibling is the style – it features a matte back glass and polished metal frame in contrast to the glossy glass and matte metal of the Pixel 9. Though the camera bump on the two phones is the same size, the Pixel 9 Pro fits in a third camera and a temperature sensor.

The Pixel 9 Pro bears some serious resemblance to recent iPhones with its flat metal frame, large-radius corner curves, and flat glass front and back. The camera bar on the rear is its big, stylish differentiator, which has shifted away from earlier designs that saw the camera bar slope down into the phone’s frame. Here, the bar juts up like a mesa rising from the back of the phone. It’s an engaging look, but can snag even more easily on pockets and still can gather dust.

Hiding underneath the display, Google includes an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which the company suggests is 50% faster than prior models, though I found it performed exactly as fast as the scanner in the Pixel 8 in side-by-side testing.

The screen on the Pixel 9 Pro is a great one. Its LTPO OLED offers a handful of upgrades over the OLED display in the base Pixel 9, which was already a looker. It boasts an extra-sharp 1280 x 2856 resolution that looks perfectly crisp. It’s also boasting a 3000-nit peak brightness and remains easy to see in most conditions. It also benefits from a wider refresh rate range, 1-120Hz, offering potential battery saving when displaying more static content. Where the whole display of the Pixel 9 can get a blue sheen when strong light is hitting it, the Pixel 9 Pro’s display remains a deeper black. It’s truly an excellent display, and the Gorilla Glass Victus 2 covering should help keep it intact if it’s dropped. It’s not immune to light scratching though, with some blemishes already showing on my test unit.

In addition to the full covering of Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front and back, Google has given the phone IP68-grade protection against dust and water ingress, so it should be safe around water, as long as you don’t let it sink into the deep end or spend too long underwater. Google claims to have made the phone two times more durable than last year’s model, but it’s unclear what that translates to in terms of drop resistance.

For audio, the Pixel 9 Pro features a set of speakers with one on the bottom and another stealthed away inside the earpiece. They provide bright and loud audio that’s easily loud enough to be heard while taking a shower and more than enough for casual listening with the phone at arm’s length in a quiet room.

In addition to its 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connections, the Pixel 9 Pro gets satellite communication. This will be activated when no other signals are available and a user dials 9-1-1. The service was unavailable for testing at the time of writing, but will be available free to users for 2 years after purchase.

The USB-C port on the bottom of the phone supports fast charging and data transfer, and this year it also comes with support for video output.

Google has launched the Pixel 9 Pro a bit earlier in the year than usual, and as a result, it comes with the same Android 14 operating system as the Pixel 8 before it. That’s not bad news, but it means there’s a little less to get excited about. Since Google is promising 7 years of OS and security updates, it will get Android 15 in due time, and theoretically will see a future Android 21 (though perhaps not Android 22). The software is smooth and effective on the Pixel 9 Pro, offering a stylish and polished interface. I still wish Google was more utilitarian with screen space, as it prioritizes looks over information density, but I can’t knock the Pixel 9 Pro’s swagger with rounded Android styling that blends great with the curves of the phone and screen itself.

Bigger than the OS itself is the suite of AI tools Google is pushing as a key feature for the Pixel 9 Pro. It has introduced Screenshots, a tool for analyzing screenshots stored on the device and providing insights into them when queried by users. Gemini fills in for Google Assistant, taking over many of its capabilities and adding AI generated responses to some queries. The conversational Gemini Live is perhaps the bigger get, as it’s specific to the Pro models this year and included as part of Gemini Advanced – a subscription which you get a year of with the Pixel 9 Pro. (If this sounds a little overly complex, that’s because it is.) Gemini Live lets you have spoken conversations with Google’s AI.

I found it an interesting tool to talk to as a substitute for Google search. It would dig up details for me about products and sometimes provide useful extra data. Alas, I found it could also provide wrong answers, as it tried to tell me the Pixel 9 Pro had a 12MP telephoto camera. When I corrected it, it apologized for the mistake and corrected itself. When I asked it why it had told me 12MP at first, it then asked me where I’d heard that the Pixel 9 Pro had a 12MP camera. This line of questioning got me nowhere. In many cases, Gemini Live would begin talking and then abruptly stop. I thought perhaps some ambient noise was interrupting it, but whenever I attempted to interrupt it myself, it never cut off quite as quickly. With little visual information in the applications, it’s impossible to tell what’s going wrong. It’s also unclear where the bounds of on-device processing and web requests is. I asked the AI if it worked offline, and it said it could to some degree, but it wouldn’t open if the Pixel 9 Pro was in Airplane mode.

Gemini Live is supposed to only be in English right now, but it actually spontaneously began speaking to me in Japanese (which is one of the languages I have set for my Google account). Questions posed to it in either English or Japanese were still registered, but it continued to respond in Japanese until I asked it to switch back. It was able to switch back and forth with prompts in either language as well. While talking with it, for some reason, it decided that it was a 3rd-year high school student, but when asked its age, it admitted that it doesn’t have an age because it is an AI.

The Screenshots tool is meant to be a repository of data that Google’s AI can sift through and source for answers. Sometimes, it does the job, albeit with mixed results. For instance, using a screenshot of my calendar as a reference, it told me how many work shifts my girlfriend had for September when asked, but it read the calendar wrong and overcounted (adding dates from October as well, presumably because they were visible in the screenshot). Meanwhile, asking it the same question multiple times can cause its cracks to show. In a couple cases, it mistook other events for work shifts and completely ignored the labeled shifts. Asking when a funeral was scheduled in my calendar – which there is only one of – the AI pulled up the screen shot of my calendar but presented me with the wrong answer, suggesting it was today.

I tried almost the same thing Google tried in its Pixel 9 launch demo of Gemini, taking a picture of some event details and asking Gemini to check my calendar and see if I would be available. In one case, it simply reported that I would be free, assumed I was attending all three events in my photo, and then said I looked pretty busy that day – swing and a miss. In a second case, I asked it more clearly to check my calendar specifically for availability (needing to find the right wording to ask a question defeats the value of this kind of service), and it simply said that it couldn’t help me and that I should check my calendar app – strike two. Or perhaps that’s strike three, because even Google couldn’t get this one to work in its demo. Curiously, Google’s demo used a Samsung device, so it seems that the feature’s inability to work is device agnostic.

Pixel Studio is Google’s image generation tool. It often misses the mark on generated images, takes a bit of time to process, and it also doesn’t work when the phone is offline. At this point, it’s becoming unclear what role the phone’s own AI processing capabilities are for if so many features require an internet connection and seem to be offloading to the cloud.

These new AI features are interesting, but I don’t find them a compelling part of the Pixel 9 Pro. They certainly don’t stand out as the reason to choose the Pixel 9 Pro over other phones – thankfully, it has more going on than just these features.

The Pixel 9 Pro runs on the Tensor G4 chip, which is a minor upgrade over the Tensor G3. It’s not offering leaps and bounds of extra performance, but it’s no slouch when it comes to day-to-day use and even some heavier gaming. Given the Tensor G3 was already well behind its Snapdragon rivals, I’m not expecting the Tensor G4 to do much to narrow the gap, but we’ll have to wait until benchmarking software is available for the Pixel 9 Pro to see just what difference the new chip makes (at the time of writing, popular benchmarks like Geekbench 6 and 3DMark were not available for the pre-launch device).

Turning the Pixel 9 Pro to the heavy task of running Zenless Zone Zero at high settings and 60fps, it happily plugged along. It ran the game with relative ease, though it suffered some tanked frame rates during one early sequence, likely as a result of trying to load in large files while playing an animated sequence, and the issue never repeated. Over prolonged gameplay, the phone heats up, but doesn’t get painfully hot.

Overall, the Pixel 9 Pro’s performance is satisfying, and with 16GB of memory, it should also be able to hold up well for some time. But it remains to be seen whether the hardware will continue to keep up as processing demands grow over the years the phone receives software support, or if the gap between Google’s Tensor chips and other flagships’ Snapdragon chips will only grow more apparent as performance demands increase.

Battery performance is as expected, with the large 5060mAh battery happily chugging along all day with modest use, including gaming, some video playback, browsing, and some conversations with AI.

The Pixel 9 Pro may be the same size as the Pixel 9, but it fits in an even better stack of cameras. While it shares the wide and ultra-wide sensors with its cheaper sibling – sensors which are, in turn, little different from those found in last year’s Pixels – it gets a bumped up selfie camera and a 48MP telephoto sensor with 5x optical zoom. This array allows for some properly diverse shooting capabilities that all benefit from that knack Google has for smart photography.

Here are the cameras the Google Pixel 9 Pro packs:

The Google Pixel 9 Pro offers up a superb camera system. The main sensor captures wide scenes with loads of light, excellent color, and plenty of sharpness. Scenes look natural, with vibrance where it’s called for and tamer color in all the right places. Zooming beyond 2x on the sensor isn’t a compelling option, with noise readily showing up, and some will even turn up at 2x if you look in the right areas (usually untextured surfaces).

The ultra-wide sensor is a great complement to the main sensor, giving you even more range to work with. It pushes the center of the scene back quite a ways, but lets you capture a ton in one shot. The colors and lighting line up nicely with the main sensor as well, so it feels like zooming out more than it feels like switching to some wider but inferior camera – a common experience on many phones.

Now, since the Pixel 9 Pro relies on the same main and ultra-wide cameras as the Pixel 9, it’s really offering no upgrades from that main sensor and shots on each phone look all but identical. But the Pixel 9 Pro gains a 5x telephoto sensor that really steps up its photographic potential. Where the Pixel 9 struggles to push past 2x, the Pixel 9 Pro can snag great shots of more distant subjects. Signs and buildings that were hard to make out in shots on the main sensor can come right into sharp focus with the telephoto camera.

With a tighter aperture, much less light is reaching the telephoto sensor though, and Google appears to overcompensate a bit, resulting in shots that brighten subjects a bit more than those taken with the main or ultrawide sensor snapping the same subject. It’s not egregious, but the noise in the images becomes easier to spot when zooming in on the photos. It can also lead to slightly washed out visuals for especially zoomed-in shots. Comparing back to even old shots I took on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, I still see the benefit of its 10x sensor over the Pixel 9 Pro zooming into 10x on the same subjects. Google now offers a Zoom Enhance photo editing tool meant to upgrade even these zoomed photos (though it works on other shots as well), and while I found it does sharpen the images and up the contrast, it’s nowhere close to making the photos appear as though they were shot with optical zoom.

The selfie camera on the Pixel 9 Pro provides a straightforward upgrade over the Pixel 9, going sharper and wider without any notable sacrifices. It gets a broad 103-degree FOV ready to capture you and your surroundings or a couple friends. While the color is nearly identical to the Pixel 9 – which is to say quite good – the extra sharpness is evident when zooming in on fine details, which remain crisp under a closer magnifying glass. This isn’t to say the Pixel 9’s selfie camera is bad, but the 9 Pro’s is simply better and makes for truly great solo shots.

The Pixel 9 Pro also benefits from more nuanced control over the cameras with the Pro mode introduced on the Pixel 8 Pro last year. It allows manual lens selection and focus, both of which can prove incredibly handy. That manual lens selection can also be set as a default, so the phone never tries to use the main sensor at 5x or beyond – a handy feature. The Pro mode can be a little finicky, though, as it likes to bury away lens sensor selection once you enter it.

Google is plugging yet more AI into the cameras. The hyped Add Me feature stitches together two photos effectively, but requires a pretty steady hand keeping the phone framed up between shots. The new Panorama mode can also link a series of photos into a pretty good looking wide shot, though people and moving objects in those shots still end up with errors. The photo Magic Editor also gets a “Reimagine” feature, which can turn selected objects into other things. It did a poor job turning the lake into lava, but did a more satisfactory job turning a statue on a building into the Stanley Cup.

In addition to photography, the Pixel 9 Pro is able to tap into some extra video recording features, but they are more than a little confusing. A feature called Video Boost is particular to the Pro models and allows you to get footage that goes beyond the 4K limits of the camera hardware, but it comes with some weird trade-offs. For one, all the raw footage appears to end up recorded in 1080p even though the phone can record in 4K properly. It then also takes time to process before you get a final result. With even a couple seconds of video not seeing upgrades minutes later, it’s a bit too nebulous to rely on when 4K HDR recording is available right on the device. The phone’s Night Sight for video is more promising, as it took some grainy, dark video and readily improved the quality, smoothing out the noise and making for more pleasant footage. The phone also uses “dual exposure” on the main sensor while recording in dark settings to boost brightness effectively.