Top pick
The Pixel 9 offers a bright OLED screen, a fast new processor, useful AI features, all-day battery life, and one of the best cameras on a smartphone. It also promises security updates until fall 2031.
The Google Pixel 9 is a premium phone that offers the best Android experience. The new Pixel has been redesigned with flatter sides, thinner bezels, a brighter display, and a new oval-shaped camera bar, though the result of those changes and upgrades is a slightly heavier phone. It has a beautiful OLED screen, a new Tensor chip, an excellent 50-megapixel main camera, a sharper 48-megapixel ultrawide camera, a faster fingerprint reader, useful AI features, and an all-day battery. And Google guarantees software updates for its latest Pixel phones until the fall of 2031.
The Pixel 9’s hardware looks like a flagship phone. Google’s phones have been made with premium materials since the Pixel 6, but it was hard to tell by looking at them. The Pixel 9 changes that, with a soft-touch matte back, a matte metal finish, rounded corners, flat sides, and a new elongated, brushed metal camera bar protruding from the rear. The Pixel 9’s redesign adds a few grams in weight from its predecessor, but it feels more luxe than any other Pixel phone has.
However, it does make the Pixel 9 more likely to slip out of your hands and its rear more prone to picking up scratches from keys, both of which happened several times throughout my testing period. The phone also has a new modem that should alleviate issues some users had with poor connection and dropped calls. Although we haven’t experienced these problems, we’ll continue to do long-term testing and share our results.
It has a slightly larger and much brighter display. The Pixel 9’s screen is slightly larger than that of the Pixel 8, growing from 6.2 inches to 6.3 inches with a 1080 x 2424 resolution. This updated OLED screen has the same deep blacks and 60 to 120 Hz refresh rate. And it’s also received a noteworthy boost to brightness, now reaching up to 2,700 nits of maximum outdoor brightness—a big increase from the Pixel 8’s 2,000 nits. (A nit is the unit of measurement that describes the brightness of a screen—the higher the number of nits, the brighter the display.)
Google’s latest chip uses more RAM to run more AI-based features. The Pixel 9’s new Tensor G4 processor and 12 GB of RAM (up from 8 GB on the Pixel 8) provides a nearly lag-free experience with Google’s many AI features, which includes voice typing, Audio Magic Eraser, Pixel Studio, and Gemini Assistant, to name a few. The Tensor 4 chip hasn’t gotten a meaningful performance bump over the Pixel 8. Yet it still does an excellent job of powering the Pixel’s speech recognition, Google Assistant and Gemini AI features, image processing, multitasking, and playing graphic-heavy games, like Call of Duty: Mobile and Diablo Immortal.
The Pixel phones continue to take the best photos. The Pixel 9 utilizes the same 50-megapixel main camera as the Pixel 8, which remains our favorite phone camera in terms of color temperature, reliability, polish, and ease of use. But thanks to its new 48-megapixel ultrawide sensor with a slightly lower aperture, wide-angle photos captured by the Pixel 9 are now sharper than ever. The Pixel phones continue to shine with crisp and bright low-light photos, although at this point, the Pixel 9 takes only marginally better photos than the competition. The Pixel 9 also gets a new UI in its Panorama mode to guide less experienced photographers, and it adds Night Sight support for low-light, wide-format shots.
Add Me is our favorite new photo feature. Add Me allows you to take group shots without a tripod or someone else shooting photos. The process involves taking a first shot, then passing the phone to someone else. Then Google uses a combination of AR and AI to create a transparent template of the first shot to frame the second shot. This feature isn’t perfect—sometimes you have to retake the first shot, and if the subjects are too close, you can see the two images merging awkwardly. But when it comes together, the results are impressive.
Reimagine is a new feature in Google’s Magic Editor software that allows you to change a selected part of your photo. You can add fireworks or mountains to your clear skies, change your road into water, and more options, but in practice, it works better on backgrounds and objects rather than on people.
The fingerprint reader is now faster. Replacing the optical fingerprint sensor on previous generations of Pixel phones, Google has equipped all Pixel 9 phones with a new ultrasonic under-display fingerprint reader, which uses ultrasonic pulses to bounce off the ridges of your fingerprints. It’s more accurate, and it makes unlocking your phone faster.
All Pixel 9 phones will get updates until 2031. Google continues to provide longer software support for its flagship smartphones to help keep your phone safe and up-to-date. All Pixel 9 phones will receive feature, software, and security updates until the fall of 2031.
It has solid battery life and charges faster than the Pixel 8. The Pixel 9’s 4,700 mAh battery gets a modest increase from the Pixel 8’s 4,575 mAh battery. The new battery can tackle an hour of playing Call of Duty: Mobile, half an hour of website navigation, some text messaging, nearly an hour of YouTube videos, and a few phone calls with under 20% of juice left before bedtime. It retains the 27 W wired charging speeds from the Pixel 8 when using a 45 W charger, but the Pixel 9 charges a bit faster, hitting around 55% in 30 minutes.
It adds several new apps and features to Android 14. The Pixel 9 includes three new apps: Pixel Weather, Pixel Studio, and Pixel Screenshots. The Pixel Weather app gets an updated UI and adds a helpful AI-based weather summary. The Pixel Screenshots app will house all your screenshots to recall relevant links, calendar events, and more accessible information, but I didn’t find any particularly compelling use for it. The Pixel Studio app is an AI-based image generator that uses text-based descriptions (but currently doesn’t create human images), or it creates stickers from selected items from a photo within your camera roll.
Also new is the Call Notes feature, which allows you to record and create a transcript of your phone calls; this is useful for situations like getting a shopping list. This feature doesn’t activate automatically; instead, you’ll have to toggle the feature on when you connect your call, and Google will then audibly notify you and your caller that the conversation is being recorded. The clearer the phone call, the better your transcription results are likely to be. I got around 90% accuracy during my testing. The Keep Notes app can also create a checklist or itinerary from a text or voice query; this has been useful for building grocery lists.
Our previous favorite features are still present and accounted for. They include the Recorder app, the Call Screen feature for monitoring spam calls, Magic Editor, the Audio Magic Eraser, Best Take (which lets you create a composite photo from multiple pics to grab the best faces from your subjects), and Guided Frame and the Magnifier app (for people who are blind or have low vision). Google is set to release Android 15 as a software update for the Pixel 9 later this fall.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
It costs more than its predecessor. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 started at $600, and the Pixel 8 went up to $700. Google has again hiked the price of its base model Pixel by $100, so at $800, it is the same price as the base model iPhone 15 and Galaxy S24. This means the Pixel smartphones are on a par with competitors’ pricing—they’re not the more affordable option anymore.
Its videos leave something to be desired. Despite the camera’s 50 megapixels, video recordings can often look grainy, though you’ll still see good color reproduction.
