High-end smartphones have been in a strange place for the past few years. The shock-and-awe of what is possible in your pocket is fading away, and we’re all kind of used to having a super computer on us at all times. I recently made the jump from a Pixel 6a to a Pixel 8a, and while the experience is smoother, there isn’t really much ‘different’ about how I use the phone – it still answers calls, sends messages, plays music, connects to Bluetooth accessories, and doom scrolls just as effectively as what I had before.
It’s been a challenge the Googles and Apples of the world haven’t quite figured out how to deal with – why would someone upgrade their two-year-old phone that does everything it needs to and buy the newest, flashiest version? Now, they’re betting on a power of ‘AI in your pocket‘ to solve that problem for them.
By all accounts, the AUD$1,349 Pixel 9 is a fantastic phone: it’s everything a premium Android smartphone should be, and rivals Apple’s devices in terms of build quality (something I can’t say for Google’s prior efforts). If I were in the market for a high-end Android phone, this would be the one I’d pick up.
But with Google putting so much emphasis on its Gemini AI being the centre of its product line-up moving forward, the conversation gets a bit more muddled. I’ve spent the last few days putting the Pixel 9 through its paces – so let’s see how it did.
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Design and Ergonomics
The first thing I’ll say about the Pixel 9 is that it is a beautiful phone. The design does feel quite different from last year’s Pixel 8 series: it’s less rounded, and more premium, even at the base model. The sides of the device are made of 100 per cent recycled aluminum, which if I didn’t know any better feels like it came directly from a MacBook.
The phone has a satisfying weight to it (it clocks in at 198 grams, sitting between the Pixel 8’s 187 grams and 8 Pro’s 213 grams) and feels good in the hand, if not a little slippery due to the glass front and back.
Obviously a good case will fix this, but if you’re one of those people that likes keeping their phone out of a case so you can enjoy the design and engineering that went into make it, beware.
As is par for the course, there is no headphone jack in the Pixel 9. Instead, the phone comes with a decent set of stereo speakers, and a USB Type-C 3.2 port for charging, adapters, etc. That port is important, actually, since the Pixel 9 can be used as a power bank for other phones if you connect them together using a USB Type-C cable. A niche use case? Yeah, but your friend that forgot to charge their phone will thank you.
The phone houses a 4700mAh battery, which (when using extreme battery saver mode) will reportedly last up to 100 hours. Under more usual conditions, the phone promises at least 24 hours of battery life, which is about right. I didn’t have any issues with battery life throughout the week, though I didn’t go around charging other people’s phones.
Also, as a final point here, I personally do not like camera bumps but have accepted that most phone makers have just given up on trying to avoid them. Even by those standards, the Pixel 9’s camera bump is egregious.
My Pixel 8a (and subsequently, my colleague’s iPhone 14) see its camera bump flattened out by a good case to create a flat surface, but the Pixel 9’s bump is so big that the official Google Pixel 9 case still bulges out to accommodate the bigger cameras. I’m all for big, bulky cameras in Pro models, which are ostensibly made for creatives or photographers, but in a base model I think it’s a bit unnecessary. /rantover
The Pixel 9’s Screen is Beautiful
A good screen can make or break a phone, and the Pixel 9 has a very good screen. Google calls the screens used in Pixel devices ‘Actua’ displays, which we guess is its version of Apple’s ‘Retina’ terminology, but what’s important is that the screen is 6.3 inches with 422 pixels per inch (PPI), and can be brightened to 2,700 nits.
It’s also an OLED display, which makes a huge difference when it comes to colours. Blacks will be blacker, and colours will be more vibrant. It also has a max refresh rate of 120hz: a feature that will will probably be most useful in gaming, though also makes scrolling through websites on the device a delight. The first time I turned the ‘smooth display’ feature on it actually made me feel a little sick for a few seconds, before my eyes adjusted. It’s a change from what most phones I’ve used are like, but a welcome one.
If you’re the type of person to end up with a broken screen, the Pixel 9’s display is covered in durable Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which should survive 1m drops onto concrete without cracking. Either way, I’d invest in a case to be safe.
Top-Tier Performance
The entire Pixel 9 series is powered by an improved Tensor G4 chip, but it’s worth noting that the base Pixel 9 comes with 12 GB of RAM, compared to 16 GB in the Pro 9, Pro 9 XL and Pro 9 Fold. That difference in speed will most likely only matter to content creators, though, so don’t stress too hard.
In my experience this week, the Pixel 9 is a very quick phone. Unlike some prior Pixels I have experience with, I never had the device hang on a screen, or crash an app, or saw YouTube become completely unresponsive. I had all of those happen frequently on my recently-replaced Pixel 6a, so it was nice to be playing with some power in the Pixel 9.
I’m not a photo or video editor, but I did want to try to push the Pixel 9 to see what it could really do. So, I downloaded some intensive games and got to testing.
The first thing I wanted to test was the Android port of Grid Autosport – a surprisingly feature-complete port of the auto racer known for its impressive graphics, even in a mobile port. I jacked up all the settings in the options and jumped in to a race, which consistently looked fantastic and ran at a smooth 60 fps.
I also tried Genshin Impact, a terrific free-to-play anime adventure title that took more than a few cues from 2015’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I also jacked the settings in this one, and the game ran extremely well even when rendering a huge open world to explore. It did have some slight dips below 60 fps during the game’s cinematic intro, though.
It really does seem like the new Tensor chip is a pretty impressive upgrade on prior efforts but most of that power will be felt when you start trying your hand at Google’s AI apps.
Lights, Camera, AI-ction
Before we get there though, let’s talk photos. I’ve been a Pixel user since the first phone’s launch, and one thing that the brand has always been known for is its camera. Admittedly, I’m not much of a photographer – but I made it a point to take some shots around the office and nearby parks to show off what the camera can do.
The Pixel 9 features a rear-facing 50 mega-pixel wide-angle lens and 48 mega-pixel ultra-wide angel lens, as well as a 10.5 mega-pixel front-facing lens. You can see the results below.
As you can tell, the Pixel 9 can take a mean photo. But what’s even more impressive, and quite a bit troubling, is the new ways in which you can edit photos on the phone. After taking a series of photos, I clicked through to edit one and the phone prompted me to use something called ‘Magic Editor’.
Using it, I was able to take a basketball we have in the office and turn it into a pineapple. It turned out better than I expected, and so I decided to push it a bit further: let’s try a living animal, a cat. It had a lot more trouble with this, creating some strange combinations of skin and fur, as well as something closer to a rocking horse than any cat I’ve ever seen. I did eventually get one that did look like a cat, and didn’t want to push it much further.
For your sake I won’t share all the strange things it came up with, including what looked like an injured animal, but I think this feature will be coming to more phones than just the Pixel 9 so you’ll probably get a chance to play with it yourself regardless of whether you upgrade or not.
You can also easily remove something or someone from a photo, or even add yourself into a group photo. The results are mixed, though, and show all the hallmarks we’ve come to know from AI-generated images – there’s something unsettlingly un-real about them that you just know when you see it.
Anyway, here’s a composite of me talking to myself made using the ‘Add Me’ feature.
There are some questions floating around the internet as to if such heavily-edited photos can be considered true photos at all, and though it might be more pleasing for your Instagram reel to have an image of only you standing under the aesthetic tree (despite the fact that there actually were plenty of people there), the resulting photo starts to look strangely hollow.
There’s More to Gemini Than Just Removing People
Google, and every tech company on the planet at the moment, is doubling down on AI. During this month’s Made by Google event, where the Pixel 9 was finally shown, the search giant spent a majority of the announcement talking up the incoming age of AI.
Google wants Gemini to serve as a foundational part of the Android experience moving forward, and has started that journey by embedding several AI-powered apps into the Pixel ecosystem.
The first is called ‘Pixel Studio’, which allows you to create images based off your text prompts. Below, you can see my ‘an aurora with a shark breaching’ which was generated in about three seconds. The tech isn’t quite willing to create humans, though, which I found out while trying to see what Ryan Reynolds would look like doing a cartwheel. The app promises that functionality will be added in future, so we’ll find out eventually.
Beyond Pixel Studio, there is a dedicated ‘Gemini’ app that you can open in order to talk or type to Gemini and get AI-generated responses – if you’ve played with ChatGPT or Meta AI, you have a good idea how this will work.
You can ask it, for example, to tell you the history of the Alien franchise as I did and get a rundown of each movie in the timeline. You could ask it for a decent shoulder work out at the gym and it’d just deliver it to you (though, you could also check out the first episode of our new workout series), or where the best coffee is ‘nearby’.
I even asked it ‘how quickly could I get home’, and it was able to tell me based on the fact that I have my home set-up in Google Maps, which was both interesting and scary.
It definitely serves as a decent Google Search stand-in if what you want is just basic answers to questions rather than something specific, expert-led, or explicit. When I asked it about Alien: Romulus, for example, it didn’t tell me where that information came from, and the page is always labeled with a note that ‘Gemini may display inaccurate info’. Not knowing where the information comes from is a bit of a red flag for me, but I wouldn’t use Gemini as a source in the first place.
There are some other integrations, across the phone, like Google’s weather app giving you a more detailed rundown of what today’s forecast will be, but the meat-and-potatoes of the AI revolution still seems to be stuck in content generation (at least on the user end). For what it’s worth, it all works seamlessly and without much issue. I’m just not sold on what the point of most of it is, yet.
Is the Pixel 9 Worth It?
Pulling the AI bits out of the equation, since I think most of them will be coming to all capable Android and iOS phones in the near future, the Pixel 9 is a hell of a good device.
I’ve been using Pixel phones for the past eight years, ever since the first one was launched, and I am left impressed by the hardware. The phone itself is beautiful, feels sturdy, and the aluminum chassis lends the phone a premium finish that I think Google has struggled to deliver before. The screen is stunning, and the performance hasn’t sweated anything I threw at it.
If what you want is a premium Android phone, this is the one to get. If you want an ‘extra’ premium Android phone, maybe look at the Pixel 9 Pro XL that launched on the same day – its the same thing, but bigger and slightly faster with an extra telephoto lens on the rear.
But, if you’re expecting the new AI capabilities to totally change your daily phone experience, your mileage my vary.
