Google Pixel 11/Pro Review: Poker Face

Introduction and Testing Overview00:16

I've been using the Pixel 11 Pro for the past two weeks all over the world. Spain for a solar eclipse, then Ireland for a World Ultimate Frisbee Club Championships, then Wisconsin for a Pro Frisbee Championships and then back here at home. And it's been great. Super reliable, very good battery life, great cameras, great software, and all of that... should be enough.

The Core Problem01:31

There is still a problem with the Pixels right now. They are all more expensive and they don't have the best hardware. So as a reviewer, I gotta say that's not a great combo.

Build Quality Assessment02:02

When I say they don't have the best hardware, I don't mean that the build quality isn't good. It is actually really good. Like it still has the trademarked visor look, so it has some character and it's recognizable. But that little bump is also a little shallower on the base Pixel. They've also made a nice adjustment of giving the matte black Pro Pixel matte black rails as well, which is so clean. These phones are rock solid. They have the dust and water resistance, they feel great in the hand. So it's not that they aren't built great, but the interior hardware, the specs, they are still a huge weakness of the Pixel.

Tensor G6 Chip Performance02:30

All these new Pixels have the new Tensor G6 chip inside, which has shaped up to be about a 20% faster CPU in both single-core and multi-core versus the G5. And I'd say that's about on par with phones running the super high-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Except for the GPU part where they are still in a completely different stratosphere.

Battery and Charging Limitations03:03

The Pixels to this day also don't have the biggest batteries or anywhere near the fastest charging. It's kind of funny, they introduced this new extreme charging feature on the Pixel 11s this year, which if you have it turned on and your battery is under 50% and you plug it into a powerful enough charger, it'll give you an extreme charge, which means it'll pause a bunch of the background activities and suspend a bunch of thermal management to give you a quick burst of battery. And even that is like 30 to 35 watts, which is not that fast. For context, the famously conservative Samsung flagships charge at 45 watts peak, and the OnePlus 15 I've been daily driving for about a year charges at 80 watts, which is extremely fast.

Camera Hardware Limitations03:32

Even the camera hardware is not so ultra high-end lately in Pixel phones either. There is no full 1-inch sensor like the flagship Ultra phones, no 200 megapixels or 10x zooms. But here's the thing. In theory these are all fine trade-offs to make because these are all things that only an enthusiast would really care about, right? Like a super high-end GPU and the ultra high-wattage charging and crazy camera hardware. It's fine if it doesn't have those things if it's not an enthusiast phone, but if those things are still decent, then this can still be a good mainstream phone.

Performance in Daily Use04:00

Despite Tensor's complete lack of GPU prowess, this Pixel 11 Pro in high resolution mode has been mostly pretty smooth through all kinds of regular use. Social media, emails, a bunch of web browsing. You know, there would occasionally be some frame drops in heavy multitasking or some big full-screen animations and sometimes while scrolling on a super heavy website with a bunch of tabs open. But otherwise, yeah, Android 17 has been running mostly pretty smooth. I also didn't do any high-end gaming or video editing, you know, things that an enthusiast probably will want to be able to do with their phone. But again, if we're establishing it's not an enthusiast phone and then performance was fine.

Battery Life Experience04:30

This Tensor chip is also clearly pretty efficient too because I have been enjoying easily all-day battery life on this phone without really ever second-guessing anything. I've had days with 5 plus hours of screen-on time, 6 plus hours sometimes with this much brighter screen and still 30% left. Now would an enthusiast phone with a huge silicon-carbon battery get you more? Absolutely. But this is not bad, this is not iPhone levels of like pretty bad battery life.

Camera System Details05:01

These cameras are interesting. So base Pixel 11 has a new larger primary and telephoto camera. And these Pixel 11 Pros also have even larger, better primary sensors and 5x telephotos. The ultrawides are unchanged. I spent most of my time daily driving this Pro XL, and I think these are B- cameras is where I landed. Here's why.

The primary camera here is actually a new sensor. It's a 50-megapixel one. I actually switched to 50-megapixel mode, which takes an extra beat to process but once you flip it on, which it stays on every time you reopen the camera, and I think it's totally worth it.

The highlight for me though is the new zoom camera, which I actually think might be better than the main camera. At least I had more fun with it. You could definitely argue that, you know, a 3x might be more useful. But I had a lot of fun taking 5x photos, and the extra reach is very nice to have. But I do find that when you keep zooming beyond the 5x optical, it starts to get a little overprocessed and watercolory pretty fast. So it's definitely not going to be the king of zoom like some other more ultra phones.

The bigger sensors here versus last year, it just means things like Night Sight are way faster because they're letting in more light, and photos are generally sharper and a bit less noisy in bad lighting conditions. And it does all of this while keeping the contrasty, punchy look that we all know Pixels for.

Camera Criticisms06:31

The ultrawide is unchanged and it's kind of showing its age. It's not pushing particularly good. And the main cameras also very much suffer the same point-light problem as the new iPhones as well. Especially in lower light, and photos and videos, you get these little floating points, these little flares, and zooming between lenses while video recording. I feel like it's slightly unnatural. Like when you tap a new focal length, it does this ramping thing which I don't love.

Also, for some reason, out the box they turned off double tapping the power button to open the camera. Not sure why. So pro tip: you can dive into the settings and turn that back on. It's way faster than any other way to get to the camera.

Overall Camera Verdict07:00

Overall, not the best cameras, or the absolute sharpest photos, or the biggest zoom, or 200 megapixels or anything. But really good software chops, B+ camera. So I hope all this is painting a pretty clear picture now that you know, these new Pixel phones are good phones and they're fun to use. If you're looking to them for enthusiast things, then you're looking in the wrong place. Like, you won't find bleeding-edge specs or silicon-carbon batteries or hundreds of megapixels, but what you will find is software.

Software Features and Polish07:30

Lots and lots of really good software. I already did my top five features of Android 17 video, so I'm gonna link that below. So if you don't already know what using the latest version of Android on a Pixel is like, boom. You can watch that video.

But even beyond all of those top features and all the other stuff they've been adding over the years, there's just so many little things that make the Pixel so clever and fun to use. Even from like, the way the volume slider has this extra little momentum, this little bounce when you pull it all the way up or all the way down. The new camera looks also, even though they're a couple of taps away, it's fun to change the way the character of the camera looks, which makes bigger difference than the new sensor sizes ever could. Also, have you noticed the My Pixel app icon on the Pixel changes for your specific phone color specific. I mean, you'd never notice that unless you had another Pixel next to it to check, but it does! And if you do have another Pixel, you also know that the tap to share with Android Quick Share has this super clean animation now, kind of like AirDropping between two iPhones. It's stuff like that.

And then being first in line for whatever other software stuff Google comes up with in the next six to seven years, or however long it's got software updates for.

The RAM Shortage Crisis08:30

So what's the problem? Why did I say there's a problem with Pixels right now? So it's not even a new problem or even a problem unique to the Pixels specifically, but it definitely applies to them, which is that during this RAM shortage crisis and the price increases across the board, it's become more obvious than ever that Pixels are software-defined phones. And so, and there's nothing wrong with that, but that means, weirdly, you can't expect to get a bunch more premium hardware by paying extra.

Value Proposition Analysis09:02

I feel like the only Pixel I can reasonably recommend to the masses right now is the base Pixel 11, and it's already $900. So it's not like some fantastic deal. But this, it's all the new stuff. It's the Tensor G6, it's the new brighter screens, it's the triple cameras, it's the seven years of software updates. It's great, but so then there's the Pro, right? This starts at $1,100 now. Same size. It's the slightly better cameras, yes, but what else do you get? Same spec, same RAM. You get Highlight, which is that little glowing LED on the back that lights up only for incoming calls. It's borderline useless, honestly. And then you actually get a slightly smaller battery because it had to make room for those slightly bigger cameras. It does not feel like an $1,100 phone to me.

Pricing Structure Issues10:01

To get a noticeable screen upgrade with the larger screen and to get the 16 gigs of RAM that last year's phone started with, you end up having to go all the way to the 512 gig Pro XL, which is now $1,400. Now, I know there's crazy trade-ins and I know people finance these and pay them off in monthly chunks, but still, just as a reviewer, I feel the need to point out that you can get basically all the phone you need with the base Pixel 11, and then if you're gonna get $1,200 $1,400 worth of phone, I feel like you should be getting the ultra high-end, more premium enthusiast-grade stuff along with all that too. And that's just not something that the Pixels have.

Final Assessment10:30

I've said this before. Pixel phones are all in on the software and they always have been. They're the smartest smartphone and so if there were ever a time for Google to switch it up, turn over a new leaf and go way harder on the hardware, this would be it, right? But they haven't. And then with the higher RAM prices and skyrocketing costs across the board, this is officially the scariest time to be a software-forward phone. So either Google really believes in this stuff or that poker face is really good.