The Google Pixel 9 is a big upgrade with a price bump to match

Google’s evolution as a smartphone manufacturer has been really fun to watch. From the original Nexus line of smartphones through the development of the Pixel family of devices, you can draw a consistently upward trending line from the beginning to where we are now and see marked progress along the way. There have been some missteps along the way, as any phone maker will have (can you say “Soli sensor”?), but for the most part Google has been steadily improving its smartphone development for years, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s good for obvious reasons, but it’s also a little bad because early on, the Pixel developed a reputation for being the cheap Android alternative. Can’t afford a Samsung, but you don’t want to deal with Motorola’s lack of software support? Get a Pixel! It was also around the Pixel 6 that Google started to get serious about the design language going into the phone. To make a long story short, fast-forward to today, and the Pixel lineup is one that can stand toe-to-toe with any of the best smartphones out there.

The new Pixel 9 isn’t a wild departure from its predecessor, but it’s toting a whole lot of AI and camera tricks to entice you out of your money, and it’s going to cost you an extra Benjamin in exchange. I’ve been using a Google Pixel 9 review sample for just under a week, and this is my full review.

What we liked about it

Great hardware

One of the hallmarks of the series since the Pixel 6 has been its distinctive look, headlined by. a camera bar across the back of the phone that has undergone little change in the past three years. That changes with this year’s Pixel as the camera bar has morphed into more of a “camera pill” as I heard one Google employee refer to it. The camera pill still extends across the entire back of the phone, but rather than the ramp that wrapped around the side of the phone, the Pixel 9’s camera bar has a rounded edge.

Google’s case that it sells continues the wrap-around edge tradition, but if you carry the phone naked, it’s just the camera bump, and that’s it. You can still hang the Pixel 9 off the edge of a table by resting the camera pill on the edge of the table, which is hilarious, and I promise you, you’ll never look at a squared edge of a table, road sign or the back of a chair the same way again after doing so.

The edges of the phone are more squared off this time compared to its predecessors, which give you a more reassuring grip on the phone. The power button above the volume rocker is still in the wrong order and is maddening when you first switch from a different phone to this one; there are plenty of times when I accidentally turned the phone off when I was trying to increase volume.

You get a modest increase in battery and screen size over the Pixel 8. The most notable improvements come in the form of 12GB of RAM and a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera sensor. Speaking of that new ultrawide sensor, let’s talk about the cameras.

Great cameras — for a base model phone

Adam Doud/CNN Underscored

Adam Doud/CNN Underscored

Adam Doud/CNN Underscored

One of the hallmarks of the Pixel family is the inclusion of awesome cameras. I’m happy to report that tradition continues here. The main exclusion on the base Pixel is the lack of a telephoto camera for good optical zoom, which I miss dearly. Fortunately, if you want to use Google’s digital zoom, you’ll get a pretty good result — as long as you don’t plan to show these photos and videos anywhere but on social media. The resolution doesn’t hold up at a 100% crop, but for Instagramming, you’ll be just fine.

We went on a boating trip during the review period and one feature I had a lot of fun playing with was the long exposure mode which took a normal wake from a speed boat and made it look even cooler.

View this interactive content on CNN.com

Portrait mode is pretty awesome on the Pixel as well. Normally the big thing to look for is what portrait mode does with wisps of hair, and Google handles them with aplomb — most of the time. There are a few exceptions to that rule, but in general, you can count on a great portrait shot from either the rear facing camera or the selfie camera.

Adam Doud/CNN Underscored

Adam Doud/CNN Underscored

Plus, in general, you can count on some great shots from the Pixel during the day, including macro shots, and shots up to 2x zoom. Video capture is also very solid and stable. Here’s a selection of photos I grabbed on that boat trip.

At night, this is still a very respectable camera. The 48-megapixel ultrawide sensor still blows out light sources like crazy. I’d hoped that the larger sensor would have given the camera a little more discernment in that regard. The main camera also treats light sources as if someone smeared Vaseline over them. Every single light has a massive halo around it, which can be particularly distracting. Position your subjects very carefully when shooting at night. One other note — if your subject is far off, the Pixel might have trouble focusing properly, so up close shots will be better.

View this interactive content on CNN.com

One particularly neat thing that Google added was Night Sight Panoramas. Google’s demo took us to a mountain with a scenic view. My hometown of Streamwood doesn’t have anything nearly as picturesque, but I grabbed a panoramic shot of the Village Hall gardens with the Pixel and with an iPhone for comparison purposes. The difference is … stark.

AI all the things

In addition to the usual clean Google experience, the company packed a ton of AI into its software including improvements to Magic Editor, Pixel Studio and Reimagine. These are all fun features which could be genuinely useful depending on your use case. Magic Editor isn’t particularly new, but it has gotten some new capabilities, such as reframing your shot, and expanding the canvas to “capture” more of the shot, or recenter your subject — whatever you need. Magic Editor will use generative AI to fill in the gaps either behind your repositioned subject, or to fill in what used to be out of the frame. Of course, this is Google “guessing” at what might have been out of the frame, but and the results are frankly a little hit or miss. Sometimes it crops the photo nicely, but when you ask it to generate a portion of the picture to fill in some details, you end up with your daughter wearing black socks and white shoes which are also buried in the sand for some reason.

Pixel Studio is basically like most other image generators you’ve seen. You can use a text prompt to get the photo to generate a photo or graphic for you. It’s fairly straightforward. Let’s say you want to generate an album cover for your latest sick tracks, the Pixel can do that for you. For my part, I tried a few more off the wall images, and for the most part I was pretty happy with the results.

It’s worth noting two things about Pixel Studio. First, the output of Pixel Studio is not watermarked as AI. These examples are obviously AI, but we’re at a delicate stage of generative AI and more notice is better. Second, Pixel Studio cannot generate pictures of humans … yet. When you try, you get an error message saying that human generation is coming soon, but there’s no more information about the subject, such as whether specific humans will be able to be generated. Combine that with the no watermark thing, and it doesn’t strain the imagination to think about what bad things could happen here. But I digress.

Reimagine is a little bit of the previous two combined. With reimagine, you can take a photo and … well … reimagine it. Take a photo of your friends, and you can make the sky sunny, or put you and your friends on a Hawaiian beach. In my case, I took a photo of a roll of duct tape on my desk and told Google to reimagine it as a tire swing … with mixed results.

View this interactive content on CNN.com

What’s cool about reimagine is that it works on any photo you’ve taken, as long as it’s in Google Photos. I grabbed a selfie at Made By Google’s event with Jason Howell of Techsploder and Android Faithful fame, and I reimagined it as us on the beach in Hawaii. These generated background are also not tagged with a watermark, which also seems problematic. Then again, I also asked Reimagine to put us at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, and not only did it not know what Wrigley Field looked like, I’m not sure its ever seen a baseball game at all.

Great battery life

Overall, the battery life on the Pixel 8 is superb. With light usage (sitting in my office working, on Wi-Fi all day), I saw a full two days on a single charge. When I stepped things up a bit, I got a solid day and a half. This is a phone you can absolutely forget to plug in at night, and you’ll be ok in the morning. Unfortunately, when it comes time to charge, you’ll be doing so at a maximum of 27 watts.

That’s fine, but this is 2024, and while Google wants to brag that you can get up to 55% in 30 minutes, OnePlus would like to remind you that in that 30 minutes, you can charge the OnePlus Open to full and still have time to brush your teeth and put on your shoes while you wait for the Pixel to get to 55%. So, while I appreciate that the Pixel is a long-lasting phone, American phone makers need to get on board the fast charging train pronto, and Google is not an exception to that.

What we didn’t like about it

Add Me isn’t done cooking

One of the highlights of the Pixel launch this year was the introduction of “Add Me,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Take a photo, have one person in the group disengage and come take the phone while you join the group (in a space that was left for you). The second person takes the shot and AI stitches you into the photo. Seems simple, right? Well…

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a cool feature, but the UI isn’t quite there. I tried this with my Uncle who was taking us on the aforementioned boat trip. I handed him the phone and asked him to take a photo of my daughter and I. He did and went to stand next to her while I took the phone. At this point, the UI superimposes the previous image on top of the live scene while at the same time directing you where to hold the camera to get things to line up properly. Despite the fact that I was standing in the same spot (and that we’re roughly the same height) the camera kept telling me to move to the right and aim the camera further to the left.

Ultimately, I couldn’t get it to line up, so I figured we’d go the other way with it. I took the first photo, and then handed the phone to my uncle who took a moment to figure out what was required and after I hopped back and forth a couple of times, we finally got the second shot to take. The stitched together image is pretty cool, with the exception of my daughter’s disappearing and reappearing arm. It’s also worth noting that my old school uncle then just handed the phone to a bystander and asked them to take a photo. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best, as long as you can avoid a National Lampoons situation.

Yet another Google App

Yes, Google introduced another app for the Pixel — the Pixel Screenshot app, which seems like a huge miss in my book. The theory is, if you have a piece of information you want to remember, you can grab a screenshot of it. This can be anything from a text message to a shopping website. Google will load all your screenshots into this app which, by the way, is not the main purpose for the app.

The main purpose for the app is to use AI to make your screenshots searchable. So if you want to find those pants you took a screenshot of, you can type “pants” and the Screenshots app will pull up that pair of pants you were looking for. It can even remember the URL where that screenshot came from and take you to it. Cool. But why the half step?

Wouldn’t it be cooler if Google integrated this AI intelligence into its Photos app? To be honest, most of the time when I want to remember something, I take a photo of it — where I parked my car, Christmas ideas for the kids, etc. Why not have screenshots added to a special section of Photos, and then make everything indexable? People, places, things, text and so on.

My angst here is two-fold. Not only is this a half step toward something that could be genuinely useful to a lot of people, but this is Google we’re talking about. What’s to say I won’t integrate Pixel screenshots into my workflow, only to have the app killed in a year? Google hilariously has almost as many dead projects as it has living ones. I’m still bitter about iGoogle. Fool me once.

Oh, and that price

At the end of the presentation, Google mentioned that, oh by the way, the Pixel 9 will cost $100 more than last year. When asked why during a briefing, Google cited the increase in base RAM as one contributing factor. Super. 2024 has seen a trend of rising smartphone prices by an extra hundo, so this isn’t terribly surprising (even if companies like Motorola are keeping things where they were), but it’s still disappointing.

As much as I like the Pixel 9, I’m just not sure if there’s enough here to justify the price increase, especially if you already have a Pixel 8. The increase in sensor size for the ultrawide doesn’t yield that much more of an impressive result. 4GB of extra RAM is nice, but certainly not required. The screen is slightly larger and the battery a tad bigger, but that’s about it.

The new AI features are cool, but a lot of them can be accomplished with existing tools — they just can’t be done on the phone. The Pixel 9 democratizes a lot of those features, which is very nice of course, but in my world, that doesn’t add up to an extra $100. Your mileage may vary.

How it compares

Bottom line

I’ve been overall quite happy with the Pixel 9 — more than I am usually for a base model phone when there is a “Pro” model as well. This is a very well-rounded phone. I love telephoto cameras more than ultrawide cameras, so that’s the only thing I’m missing.

But the Pixel really is an optimized Android experience, and Google adds enough Pixel-exclusive features that make you not want to go to other phones. It’s also worth noting that aside from Samsung, Google has built itself a nice little ecosystem of devices including the Pixel Tablet, the Pixel Buds Pro 2, and the Pixel Watch 3. So if you like symmetry between your devices, the Pixel is a compelling option.

As for the competition, you’ll draw the closest comparisons to the iPhone 15, Samsung Galaxy S24 and OnePlus 12. If you want AI, skip OnePlus who has (somewhat refreshingly, if I’m totally honest) eschewed AI features for just making a really solid phone with awesome cameras. This is the U.S. though, and most people still haven’t heard of the company, so let’s move to the popular choices.

The iPhone 15 is still a great phone with its own great features. You’ll find comparable cameras, comparable software support, and, as long as you’re willing to play by Apple’s rules, you’ll have a fine phone. Apple is even bringing in its Apple Intelligence AI features, which have their own unique perks compared to what you’ll find on a Pixel or Galaxy.

Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy S24 comes with an even deeper ecosystem of devices it plays nicely with — watches, buds, a ring and even laptops sporting Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite processors. Samsung also plays very nicely with Windows computers. Personally, I’m not a fan of Samsung’s software, but again, your mileage may vary.

I don’t like the price increase on this phone; but I understand it. Aside from an increase in RAM (pardon me while I roll my eyes) Google added a ton of new features to this phone, and even more features on the Pro models. That takes a lot of development and let’s face it, prices haven’t exactly been trending down in 2024. All that being said, $799 isn’t a bad price for this phone. It’s just not as easily a no-brainer as it would be at $699.

Pixel phones aren’t cheap, because they’re not meant to be anymore. That’s just where we are and what the family of phones has matured into. So the good news is, Pixels are awesome. The bad news is, now they cost like it too.