Google Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL review: No other Android phone comes close to the camera, battery, and AI

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Google Pixel phones are often lauded for their cameras and software, but within the Android universe, they haven't been top contenders for some time. Google is turning the tide with the Pixel 9 Pro series, which has a much-needed redesign, helpful AI-powered features you won't find on other phones, and the best battery life we've seen on a big-screen Android phone.

The Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL are enhanced versions of the excellent Pixel 9. They include a dedicated 5x zoom lens camera, brighter displays, more RAM assigned to extra performance, and a free year of Google's upgraded Gemini Advanced AI assistant.

I tested both models for this review. Both deliver the same performance and user experience, except the Pro XL has a bigger display and battery. Our review refers to both phones as the same except where noted.  

Design: A refreshing new look

One of the biggest reasons the Pixel 9 Pro models are more appealing overall than previous Pixel Pros is their refreshed look and feel.

Previous Pixel Pro models, including the Pixel 8 Pro, had rounded frames and curved display edges that looked dated compared to competing devices like the iPhone 15 Pro models and Samsung's Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus. With their flatter frames and flat display edges, the Pixel 9 Pro models look more modern and in line with contemporary high-end phones from Apple and Samsung.

The Pixel 9 Pro models have a shiny polished aluminum frame and a frosted rear glass panel available in Porcelain (white), Rose Quartz (light pink), Hazel (warm gray), and Obsidian (black). I wish the frame also came with a brushed metallic matte texture, like the Pixel 9's, but it's a moot point once you place the phone in a case.

Google's new oval-shaped rear camera design is an evolution of the signature camera bar introduced in the Pixel 6 and contributes to the Pixel 9 Pro's sleek new look. The camera oval protrudes quite a bit, but it's also centered, which means the phone doesn't rock to one side when you tap on the screen while it lies flat; it's a small advantage over the latest iPhone Pros, for instance, which tilt in use when lying flat due to their off-center rear camera systems.

In the Pixel 9 Pro lineup, you can choose a model with a 6.3-inch display (the same as the regular Pixel 9) or a 6.8-inch display. These sizes are slightly larger than the previous Pixel 8 generation (6.2 and 6.7 inches), but the Pixel 9 Pro models' overall dimensions are nearly identical to the Pixel 8 Pros.

Performance: Faster and smoother than benchmark scores suggest

Running Google's Tensor G4 processor, the Pixel 9 Pro isn't a powerhouse if you base it purely on benchmark scores, which are bested by other Android phones that run the top-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, like Samsung's Galaxy S24 series.

In fact, the Pixel 9 Pro's benchmark results are more comparable to 2023's Galaxy S23 running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processors. Here's how the Pixel 9 Pro's Geekbench 6 benchmark results compare with Samsung's Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S24.

But numbers alone don't indicate actual performance. Google has designed its Android-based ecosystem to run efficiently on Tensor processors. Common everyday apps, like social media, shopping, and streaming, open quickly and fluidly. Even demanding games like "Asphalt Legends Unite" and "War Thunder Mobile" run well at the highest graphics and frames-per-second settings.

It's unclear whether the Pixel 9 Pro will maintain its quick and smooth performance in years to come. But, based on my testing history, Google's Tensor processors stay fresh for at least three years. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro from 2021, running on the original Google Tensor processor and updated to the latest version of Android 15, still glide through apps and games as if the phones just came out of the box. "War Thunder Mobile" runs surprisingly well at the highest graphics setting at around 80 frames-per-second, which is still perfectly smooth for most people.

The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro I used for reference are loaded with my usual apps, and their strong performance is surprising considering their lower benchmark scores. My phones still have optimal battery health, but remember that any phone with a severely depleted battery would suffer reduced performance. Still, it's just further proof that benchmark numbers aren't everything.

Display: Exceptional brightness and improved fingerprint unlocking

The Pixel 9 Pro models use Google's premium Super Actua displays, which support up to 3,000 nits of brightness, compared to the Pixel 9's 2,700 nits on the basic Actua display. For reference, the iPhone 16 Pro's display goes up to 2,000 nits, and the Galaxy S24 phones go up to 2,600 nits.

The Pixel 9 Pros are incredibly bright, and everything on the screen is clearly visible in vibrant color under bright sunlight. The iPhone 16 Pro's 2,000-nit brightness is already plenty, so the Pixel 9 Pro's added brightness makes everything even more visible.

Google's Super Actua display on the Pixel 9 Pros includes a variable 1-120Hz refresh rate (VRR), which makes animations look fluid while navigating the Android operating system, apps, and games. It's common among premium flagship phones, except the base iPhone 16 models, which only support an antiquated 60Hz.

Compared to the Pixel 9's basic Actua 60-120Hz display, the Pixel 9 Pro's VRR is supposed to improve battery life by dropping to 1Hz when the screen is static or when the always-on display is enabled. However, I didn't see any improvement in battery life. In a test where I let both models sit for 12 hours with the always-on display enabled, both had expended 4% battery life.

The Pixel 9 Pro is set to 1080p resolution by default, but it can support higher resolutions — 1280p on the Pixel 9 Pro and 1344p on the Pixel 9 Pro XL, which is comparable to the resolutions on the iPhone 16 Pro models and the Galaxy S24 Plus. If you want to maximize battery life, I'd recommend sticking to the default 1080p option; you could set it to full resolution, see how it affects battery life in your daily use, and adjust accordingly.

The Pixel 9 Pro uses a new fingerprint sensor that's faster and more reliable than the previous Pixel phones' sensors. It also delivers a noticeably better experience than Samsung's fingerprint sensor, which has always struggled to recognize my fingerprints.

The Pixel 9 Pro phones also use facial recognition via the front camera to unlock the phone, which works quickly and reliably. Still, I'd argue that Google and other Android phone makers need to adopt better unlocking technology. No fingerprint sensor or facial recognition from an Android phone has beaten the overall better experience of Apple's Face ID for speed, accuracy, reliability, and convenience.

For example, the Pixel 9 Pro's facial recognition struggles to recognize my face if the phone is at an angle or when I'm not directly looking at the phone. Apple's Face ID also works seamlessly in a dark room, whereas the Pixel 9 Pro's facial recognition often doesn't. And while the Pixel 9 Pro's fingerprint sensor is a vast improvement, it's still unreliable if your thumb is wet.

Battery life: An unrivaled result among Android phones

After our intensive battery test, the Pixel 9 Pro XL had a 70% charge remaining. It's the best score we've seen on any Android phone to date and gives you the best chance to use a phone for multiple days without a charge.

Its score is only outdone by Apple's iPhone 16 Pro Max (74%), but it's a massive improvement over the 62% result from the Pixel 8 Pro with a 6.7-inch display. It also scored significantly better than the Galaxy S24 Ultra (66%), which has a 6.8-inch display and previously held the best score for Android phones.

The Pixel 9 Pro finished our battery test with 62% remaining, an excellent result for a phone with a 6.3-inch display that matches the significantly larger Pixel 8 Pro and the 6.3-inch iPhone 16 Pro while beating the base Pixel 9's 60%.

Only the Pixel 9 Pro XL supports 37W fast charging speeds, whereas the Pixel 9 Pro supports the same 27W charging speeds as the base Pixel 9. Charging times are about the same for both models, as the Pixel 9 Pro has a smaller battery than the Pixel 9 Pro XL.

Cameras: A first-rate system with impressive AI features

Our top pick for the best Android phone camera, the Pixel 9 Pro models have a three-camera system that takes superb photos with natural-looking colors, balanced lighting, and contrast. You can choose between a 50-megapixel (MP) main camera, 48MP ultrawide, and 48MP telephoto (5x optical zoom). 

The base Pixel 9 lacks the Pixel 9 Pro models' dedicated telephoto camera. Photos taken at 5x optical zoom are sharp, but it's amazing how they remain so at 10x digital zoom. It can go all the way up to 30x, and while there's clearly a loss of sharpness and detail, it's still usable.

Pixel phones are known for computational photography features, where software is used to enhance the photos. Tools like Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, and Best Take help differentiate Pixel phones from the competition.

The new Add Me feature is a two-step process for inserting the photographer into a group photo. After taking the first photo, someone from the group swaps position with the photographer for the second shot. Add Me guides the second photographer on inserting a new subject, the original photographer, into that group photo.

Add Me is one of those features that could have been overly complicated and prone to producing bad results, but it's surprisingly user-friendly and effective. Some tell-tale artifacts can be found around the person inserted, but they're not noticeable unless you look for them.

Also new is the Reimagine feature in Magic Editor, which lets you replace parts of your image — like the background, foreground, or both — with realistic AI-generated imagery. You select the parts of a photo you want to change and describe with text how you want your selection to be "reimagined." For example, I changed the yard in the photo below to include a river by using the prompt "roaring river."

The feature is interesting, but I struggle to see why most people would want to add fake details to their photos. It could be used for fun, but it could also be used to mislead people, whether harmless or nefarious. There's no watermark or indication that a photo has been altered using the Reimagine feature, so whoever is viewing the photo won't know it's been modified if the results are realistic enough. The only place I found information that reveals a Reimagined photo was altered with AI was in Google Photos on the web in the Info section of the photo. Strangely, a Reimagined photo isn't directly indicated in the Google Photos app on the Pixel 9 Pro.

AI-altered imagery is currently a gray area that could have dangerous effects. With that said, Google's AI has some limits on what kind of details you can add using the Reimagine feature, like its refusal to edit humans or add dangerous scenery to a photo. For example, it wouldn't generate a pack of wolves in a photo of one of my kids unless I used the word "docile" to describe the wolves.

The Pixel 9 Pro's 42MP front camera has a higher resolution than the 10.5MP front camera on the base Pixel 9. Overall, it takes great selfies but falls flat on the expectations of such a higher-resolution front camera, like sharper selfies with more detail and perceptibly better low-light performance.

The front camera also captures a wider 127-degree field-of-view (FOV) compared to the Pixel 9's 95-degree FOV. This discrepancy lets you fit more people in a group selfie or get a wider view of the scenery behind you.

The Pixel 9 Pro is capable of 4K resolution at 60 frames per second (fps) or 8K/30 fps with Google's Video Boost setting enabled (more on that later).

The Pixel 9 Pro produces exceptional video quality with a few exceptions. It can sometimes struggle with overly bright details, which can become white and void of detail, but most phones have the same difficulty handling ultra-bright details. Videos look even better when you enable 10-bit HDR (high dynamic range) and watch the videos on a screen that supports it, like other high-end phones, tablets, monitors, and TVs. One video captured in 10-bit HDR had issues with color, brightness, and contrast balance, but it seems to have been an isolated issue, as every other video I took looked as expected.

My main complaint is that videos can appear choppy at 30 fps compared to videos taken at the same frame rate with Apple's iPhone 16 Pros, the gold standard for taking videos with a phone and our best phone camera system overall. You could switch to 60 fps for smoother videos, but you lose the option for 10-bit HDR (standard HDR remains), and the soap opera look isn't for everyone. Plus, 60 fps videos take up a lot of storage space on the phone and the cloud, especially if you record at 4K resolution.

Enabling Video Boost gives videos slightly richer and more vibrant colors and helps smooth out the choppiness in 30 fps videos. It also enables incredibly sharp 8K video recording, but unless you have an 8K monitor or TV, shooting in 8K has few benefits for most people, especially when it takes up a huge amount of storage.

The tradeoff with Video Boost is that you must enable it every time you unlock the phone to take a video, which is an easily forgotten step. It also requires the video to be uploaded to your Google Photos library and processed in the cloud, which can take some time, depending on the length of the video. You can still watch the unprocessed video immediately after recording it, though.

While it's effective, I didn't feel the need to constantly enable Video Boost, but it's a nice option you won't find on the standard Pixel 9.

Gemini AI: Powerful and continually improving

If you've heard of AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Microsoft's Copilot, Gemini is Google's own version. I go into more detail about Gemini in my Pixel 9 review, but Gemini is an AI assistant that can answer almost any question you might have and provide useful information. It can even carry a conversation on pretty much any topic.

Like other popular AI chatbots, Gemini has processed (and is still processing) a massive amount of publicly available data from books, articles, websites, and more. It also pulls from information you'd find in a Google search, like Google Assistant does, to answer your questions. Yet, while Google Assistant presents a search result and lets you open articles and websites that contain the answers you're looking for, Gemini summarizes the relevant parts of those sources and presents a summarization to answer your question. It also makes some of the sources it pulls from available to view.

I'm finding myself using Gemini on the Pixel 9 phones and online in place of a manual Google search to help with tasks I find dull or uncomfortable doing. For example, I used Gemini to find things to do in a town I'm visiting on vacation instead of clicking through several articles. I even used it to help me word an email I'd find agonizing to write, like bringing up a concern at my kid's school without seeming confrontational.

While the standard Gemini is impressive and shows immense promise, it has shown that it's not consistently reliable, like other AI chatbots, for getting established facts correct. However, its accuracy is noticeably improving over time.

In early testing, soon after the Pixel 9 Pro's launch, Gemini returned factually wrong answers, like erroneous details about the Pixel 9 phones themselves or even the time in a different country. A few months later, Gemini returned the correct answers to the same factual questions I asked earlier. Despite this, my trust in Gemini to get factual information consistently is tainted; I'll need to experience better reliability before I can say Gemini can uniformly replace a traditional Google search.

With the Pixel 9 Pro, you get a free year of the Google One AI Premium plan, which costs $20/month and includes Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage for Google apps. Gemini Advanced is like the paid version of ChatGPT or Copilot in that it's meant to be smarter, more accurate, and more advanced than the standard Gemini that comes free with the Pixel 9. In our testing, Gemini Advanced's accuracy was generally comparable to the standard Gemini's latest iteration, but the former offered more detailed answers and suggestions, as illustrated in the comparison above.

The Google One AI Premium Plan also includes Gemini Live, an enhanced way of interacting with the Gemini AI entity with your voice. It allows you to have a real-time conversation with Gemini without prompting when you're about to speak, and Gemini sounds and speaks almost as naturally as a real person. It's surprisingly effective in its comprehension in that you don't need to think about how to specifically phrase a question for the AI to understand and respond accurately.

Google Assistant, the original smart assistant in Google's Pixel phones (and most Android phones), is integrated into Gemini but remains available separately. If you prefer the older assistant's simpler presentation of search results without extended generative responses, you can disable Gemini and use Google Assistant exclusively.

Other AI features: Organizing screenshots and creating images with words

Google's Pixels have long offered interesting and useful AI features, as previous Pixel phones included notable features like Magic Eraser, Magic Editor, Call Screen, Live Translate, and Summarize that remain available for all Pixel 9 models.

In addition to Add Me mentioned in the camera section, the Screenshots app is another worthwhile new Pixel AI feature. It lets you search screenshots like photos in Google Search. It's an excellent reminder tool if you take a screenshot of something you want to remember, like a movie you want to watch later or a product you saw in an article. Screenshots isn't entirely perfect, as it missed some relevant screenshots in my tests and even added an irrelevant screenshot. Still, it's effective overall, and I'm confident it'll improve over time.

The new Pixel Studio app creates AI-generated images based on your text prompts. It's great if you can't find an image (or type of image) you're looking for in a Google search, whether it's to express a sentiment or you want to visualize a funny thought. Getting the right prompts to achieve what you're seeking in an image can be finicky, but it's a learned skill that comes more easily the more you use it.

Should you buy it?

The Pixel 9 Pro XL, with a 6.8-inch display, is a no-brainer for anyone who prefers larger Google Pixel phones or larger Android phones. I've reviewed every Pixel phone to date and nearly every high-end Android phone available in the US in the last 10 years, and it's easily the best Android phone with a large screen I've reviewed.

I'd recommend the Pixel 9 Pro XL over its main competitors, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus and Galaxy S24 Ultra, because of its superior cameras and battery life. Plus, as a phone reviewer and occasional Android user, I find Google phones offer a more consolidated and less confusing experience than Samsung phones, which contain an incomplete set of Google features on top of Samsung features.

Meanwhile, recommending the Pixel 9 Pro with a 6.3-inch display is a more nuanced affair because the base Pixel 9 delivers a similar experience, and the latter is our best Google Pixel phone for most people. The main reasons you'd go for the Pixel 9 Pro are its dedicated 5x zoom camera and slightly better battery life. Otherwise, minor differences in display brightness, refresh rate, and RAM for performance have no discernible impact.

In our testing, the free year of Gemini Advanced isn't a compelling enough reason for most people to spend $200 more on the Pixel 9 Pro, especially as the standard Gemini available to the base Pixel 9 is continually improving in quality.

See our guides to the best Pixel 9 Pro XL cases and best Pixel 9 Pro cases for extra protection.