Google Pixel 9 review: A “good” phone

By Alex Angove-Plumb

Last updated 23 August 2024

Google Pixel 9

Our verdict

The Pixel 9 feels like it was designed to hit a price point and nothing more. It has its virtues – like its great rear cameras – but it’s not cheap enough to draw the attention of the budget-conscious crowd and not flashy enough to pass as premium. It’s without doubt a good phone, but it lacks the glamour you might want after handing over $1,349.

From $1,349 RRP

What we love

Great rear cameras
Very responsive
All-day battery life

What could be improved

Gemini isn’t a finished product
Gets warm easily
Feels unexciting for the price

The essentials

Performance

Smooth, fast, and lag-free. But gets pretty warm from even moderate tasks.

Battery

The all-day battery life is better than last year's Pixels, but it's the bare minimum for a modern smartphone.

Screen

Very bright, but nothing else stands out. Crisp, smooth, vibrant – no complaints, no praise.

Camera

Excellent. The best rear cameras you'll get for this price. But photos are a tad over-processed.

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Aside from its fantastic rear cameras, the Google Pixel 9 is a phone neither disappoints nor inspires. It unfortunately lacks the new selfie cam of the Pixel 9 Pro XL, Gemini is a bit of a non-event, and its other much-advertised AI features are kind of just “there”.

Google has addressed the battery life issues of the previous Pixel models, but at a full day’s use, it’s nothing special. All in all, the Pixel 9 is a good buy if you want a functional phone with a fantastic (if somewhat over-tuned) camera – as long as you don’t mind spending around $1,349 or more on a handset that feels more like a reliable tool than it does the most important piece of tech in your life.

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Gemini isn’t ready

First on the list of Google’s marketing for the Google Pixel 9 series is its new AI tool: Gemini, which is basically Google’s response to ChatGPT.

It’s intended to supplant Google Assistant, even coming as the default option out of the box – though Assistant is still the default if you tap the mic icon in the Google search widget, for some reason. But, while Gemini has come far in the fast few months, it’s not ready to take over.

Where Google Assistant has a variety of native uses and non-Google integrations, Gemini still can’t interact with many third-party apps like Netflix and Spotify. It also suffers from the occasional hallucination when trying to answer a query, ranging from funny asides to dangerous misinformation. Google Assistant doesn’t always handle search well, either, but its failures come in the obvious form of un-useful information read verbatim from whatever website it digs up.

And despite its focus on natural language, Gemini seems to struggle with the names of your contacts more than Google Assistant does, though the latter doesn’t exactly cover itself in glory, either.

Google will doubtless continue to update Gemini until it’s a suitable replacement for Google Assistant, but for now you can get around it by hopping into the settings menu and making Assistant your default.

Design

The new look for this year’s Pixels will likely be a love-it or hate-it situation for some. The new camera bump is better described as an island – it’s broad, unusually tall, and the unique redesign demands your attention.

I personally dig it. It has a sort of “World of Tomorrow” vibe without succumbing to comedy. But it’s definitely a statement, and it won’t be everyone’s idea of smartphone fashion.

The matte aluminium sides are comfortably flat and the rear glass plate doesn’t show obvious fingerprints – at least, not on our Wintergreen version. Just don’t expect it to sit still on a couch or bed because this sucker will slide for the floor the first chance it gets, unless you put it in a case like a sane person.

The standard Pixel 9 is available in four colours: Peony (bright pink), Wintergreen (pale green), Porcelain (off white), and Obsidian (black). The aluminium components for each compliment the rear plate, adding an attractive accent to the border and camera island.

Cameras

The rear cameras on the Pixel 9 are some of the best around right now. They’re not without their imperfections, but on the whole the camera app is incredibly responsive and turns out clear results day or night. Even the longer exposures of Night Mode took at most a couple of seconds in our testing, sometimes less.

But you mightn’t need Night Mode a lot of the time, thanks to the wide lenses and post processing. Even with only moderate street lighting, the Pixel 9 delivers photos that far outstrip reality in terms of detail and brightness. But this brings us to a contentious topic.

Pixel phones have always focused on software over hardware. Despite the new camera lenses in the Pixel 9 series being more than capable of carrying their own weight, the photos you end up with can feel over-processed. There’s a little too much contrast, lighting and shadows are too finely tuned, warm colours come out a little too bright, and clouds in particular look like they’ve been airbrushed into existence. It’s not as overblown as the Galaxy S24, but the end result can feel more like stock imagery, rather than your own personal memories. Some photos could even be mistaken as fully AI generated.

Google Pixel 9 camera samples

Check out these camera samples taken on the Pixel 9. Click or tap on any photo to see a larger version.

Now, if you like the look of this, great. The Pixel 9 has about as close to a point-and-shoot camera as you can get, with only the occasional need to switch to Night Mode. But if you prefer a more natural feel to your memories, you might be better served by the now similarly priced iPhone 14.

As for the selfie cam, it’s solid. Despite it being one of the biggest downgrades between the Pixel 9 Pro models and this standard Pixel 9, you can still get good night shots, and anything during the day is great. It still has that AI glean coming through, but that’s not surprising, given the processing is handled by the same system.

AI imagery

Among the compliment of AI additions are some image-related features. They all work as advertised, but their long-term usefulness is yet to be determined.

Add Me is a camera mode that can insert someone into a photo. The idea is simple enough: take a group photo, then have someone from the group take another one with you in it. Add a pinch of AI wizardry and ta-da, you were there the whole time. It works fine, though it’s more awkward and less fun than a selfie at arm’s length, and all for a photo of something that never really happened.

Magic Editor I can see sticking around, if only for the memes. Google is confident enough in this new feature that it’s already built into the image editing UI in the Photos app. Tap the Magic Edit button and select an area of your image, then type in a prompt for what you’d like to see. It doesn't always work first try, but it's a low-fuss way to casually generate something you’d DM to a friend for a quick laugh.

Hamish the cat is your new overlord — _{On reflection, maybe AI image editing does have some uses...}

Pixel Screenshots is a new app that can analyse, summarise and categorise your screenshots. While this is something I’ve unknowingly been waiting for my whole life, adding it as a separate app – rather than within the Photos app – doesn’t fit with how modern Google generally handles things. Given the company’s long history of cancelled apps, it doesn’t inspire confidence it will stick around long term. So, if you wouldn’t mind doing me a favour, jump in there once a week and play around to get those usage analytics cranking. Just until Google sees fit to fold it into Photos as a permanent feature.

Pixel Studio is your stock-standard, prompt-based AI-imaging app. It works ok, though some elements are almost carbon copies between pics and it’s all unmistakably AI generated. The real question is: who needs this on a phone? It’s fun to play with for a few minutes, but most casual phone users aren’t in the business of cranking out low-quality stock images as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Three very similar images of animals riding a broomstick — _{You'd get far more variety than this from other AI imaging apps}

Battery

Battery life on the Pixel 9 is a serious improvement over last year’s disappointment, but it’s not exactly impressive. We got a full day out of it with heavy use of gaming and video, but no more than that. All in all, battery life isn’t a dealbreaker, but it’s also not a selling point.

Display

The 6.3-inch display is refreshingly bright. At 2,700 nits, it’s still visible in direct sunlight on a sunny day. Colours are vibrant and scrolling is smooth.

The 1080 x 2424 resolution provides crisp images, but is another example of a good-but-not-memorable feature. Resolutions like this are pretty standard from something like the $599 Oppo Reno 11 F 5G, right up to the base model Samsung Galaxy S24 at $1,399.

Performance

As you might expect, the Pixel 9 is a smooth operator. Apps open and close quickly, scrolling is seamless, and gaming is handled well. We had no stuttering or lag at any point while using it. But there’s one very noticeable problem: heat.

Even from playing a fairly simple game like Brotato, the side of the phone gets warm pretty quickly, which eventually spreads out over the whole surface, screen included. Given heat is one of the biggest killers of battery longevity, that’s not a great indicator for future performance.

But on the whole, this is a zippy handset that should keep up with anything your software or fingers can throw at it.

Storage

It feels odd that a $1,349 phone from a major tech company would come with only 128GB of storage in 2024, but them’s the breaks. If you’re after a Pixel 9 with 256GB, it’ll be $150 on top of the starting price.

And if you want 512GB, you can always get a Pixel 9 Pro XL for $2,199. You could also wait for the smaller Pixel 9 Pro ($2,049 for the 512GB model), but its release date is still TBD.

Android whatnow?

Speaking of device longevity, you’d think a new Pixel release would coincide with a new version of Android – in this instance, it would be Android 15. But 15 is still in beta, so we have a 2024 phone that’s running an operating system from 2023.

This is no mere nitpick. Google guarantees seven years of updates from when its Pixel phones come out. That’s effectively seven Android updates. If the first of those seven updates – Android 15 – is only a few months after the phone debuts, it could mean almost a full year’s less support for your handset than if they were released simultaneously. And Google hasn’t been clear yet on just exactly what support will look like.

It would be nice to see the release cycles for Pixel and Android sync up again to help give clarity around this issue, because potentially losing almost a year of security updates is worth knowing about before you hand over $1,349 or more.

Google Pixel 9 – Final thoughts

Google seems to have thrown all its hopes (and advertising dollars) behind Gemini, which for now should be an auto-disable for anyone setting up a new Pixel 9. At this stage, it’s really just a less-capable version of Google Assistant. And the other AI “magic” Google espouses in its marketing runs the gamut from outright hallucinations to gimmicky to “yeah, I can see that being useful to some people”.

The Pixel 9 itself is responsive, smooth, has a bright screen, all-day battery life, and, most of all, a fast and impressive camera – as long as you like its heavily processed style. Honestly, this is a good phone, but there’s not a whole lot beyond that. It lacks identity and its AI features are unexciting, for the most part.

It likely won’t disappoint its adopters, but I’d personally either spend more and end up with a premium phone like a Pixel 9 Pro XL or Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, or I’d save hundreds by grabbing a Pixel 8a or Samsung Galaxy A55 and content myself with a worse, but still good enough, camera.

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