I am holding thePixel 8 Proin my hand, carefully shifting it around as a methodical jeweler inspects a diamond’s purity. This theatrical pantomime, the annual dance of novelty and comparison, is particularly important for Google’s latest phone not just because the company wasamong the few to actually grow its market sharein an otherwise dismal second quarter, but because the device actually looks quite different from its predecessor. In a smartphone ecosystem where annual refreshes of the latest Galaxy, iPhone, and OnePlus can be measured in millimeters and Action Buttons, the even-minor physical changes to the Pixel 8 Pro feel significant — and are entirely welcome.
Google Pixel 8 Pro
The Google Pixel 8 Pro is still a good deal in 2025, with plenty of software support and a premium flagship experience. The Tensor G3 is powerful enough for most tasks, and you’ll enjoy plenty of Pixel extras on Android 15. If you’re in the market for a Pixel but don’t want to pay flagship prices, the Pixel 8 Pro is worth a look.
That’s not to say the Pixel 8 Pro is a redesign. The most striking update is one of the angles; the screen is now flat to match the $300-cheaper Pixel 8 (and Pixels XL one through four). That change, along with corners rounded at a considerably more liberal radius than the 7 Pro, lends the Pixel 8 Pro a stolidity that lends itself well to the idea that this is an object to be used, even without a case. It’s something practical and down-to-earth — inviting, even. That it’s a few millimeters shorter than its predecessor also helps it feel more wieldy and balanced; while the bezels around the OLED display at first appear more pronounced because of the flat sides, they’re not symmetrical, and the “chin” at the bottom has been reduced.
At this point, I’ve only spent an hour with the Pixel 8 Pro, but it’s clearly what you’d expect from the third in a series: a sequel that repeats many of the narrative ideas that worked in the first two but far better understands what its audience wants to see. The Pixel 6 series was such a design departure that, in its sequel, Google just needed to fix the obvious mistakes; with the third, the company is comfortable undertaking more confident changes.
Around back, you’ll see another shift: the Cylon-style camera bar has a cleaner, shorter metal bar, into which all the camera lenses are once again united. Google has returned to the approachable nature of curves, but combines the best of thePixel 6 Proand 7 Pro designs. New this year is a temperature sensor that is, notably, not approved for any medical purposes — Google’s marketing suggests using it to test the temperature of one’s baby formula — but can be used for fun and experiments.
In the few minutes I played with it, accessed by a Pixel-exclusive “Temperature” app that’s not yet available at the time of writing, temperatures fluctuated wildly. They appeared extremely inaccurate, so their presence here confuses me more than interests me. If the module is ever to get FDA approval, which I doubt, Google has alotof calibration work to do.
Staying on the back, Google claims the three rear cameras are “fully upgraded,” but that statement needs qualifying: the 50MP primary sensor is identical to the one in the 7 Pro, but the lens has a wider f/1.68 aperture (compared to f/1.85), which allows for more light to creep in per shot. The 0.5x ultrawide camera has moved from a 12MP to a 48MP sensor, and its aperture has also widened somewhat to f/1.95, but the 125.5-degree FoV is unchanged from thePixel 7 Pro(and remains slightly wider than the S23 and iPhone 15 Pro series).
The 48MP telephoto, my favorite lens on the previous two Pro Pixels, remains at a 5x zoom (120mm equivalent), but has a wider f/2.8 aperture and facilitates an even better macro mode this time, which I’m excited to dig into.
The selfie camera has also received a spec bump, with a not-quite-ultrawide 95-degree FoV (up from 93 degrees on the Pixel 7 Pro) and, for the first time since the bathtub notch of the Pixel 3 XL, autofocus. (If you recall, that phone had two selfie cameras, a 75-degree wide lens with autofocus, and a 97-degree ultrawide fixed focus lens.) In my brief time with the selfie camera, the improved lens captured me at my most haggard, which is a compliment to the camera and an ardent reminder to myself to get more sleep.
By a mile, my most anticipated camera upgrade has nothing to do with hardware, though. It’s the addition of dedicated “pro” controls on a Pixel phone for the first time. Limited to the Pixel 8 Pro (and presumably not being backported to previous Pixel devices because, um, reasons), the manual control toggle rests at the bottom right of the redesigned camera interface and provides modifiers to settings you’re likely very comfortable tweaking if coming from basically any other Android phone: white balance, focus, shadows, focus peaking, and more.
It’s a long time coming, and its exclusivity to the $1000 Pixel 8 Pro flagship is objectively vexing and capitalistically brilliant. Still, I give it a week before some intrepidXDA Forumsuser ports it over to the rest of the Pixel line as a custom APK. That’s the beauty of Android.
Then there are the camera-slash-post-processing features Google hasn’t let us try yet:Magic Editor, previewed at I/O this year, takes Magic Eraser to its uncomfortably stochastic conclusion. The photo you take, the pitch goes, no longer has to be the one you end up with since Google’s data centers can modularize and compartmentalize the individual tenets of your image to not justremoveobjects but augment them — enlarge, shift position, and ultimately transform. The implications give me goosebumps, but given that we already live in a world of DALL-E, Adobe Firely, and many others, Magic Editor no longer seems disruptive, merely pragmatic.
The clearest example of Google’s post-processing magic isn’t Best Take, which purports to let you swap out faces inside photos from other frames taken in the same burst, but Video Boost, which combines on-device wizardry with cloud processing to improve video quality, color grading, and, HDR consistency.
Best Take is how they get you in the door; Video Boost is how they seal the deal. Neither of these features, nor the aptly-named Audio Magic Eraser (it removes errant sounds from your videos) and Night Sight Video (do I have to explain this one?), are available to use yet, so I’ll take Google’s word that they’re as impressive as they are, but the takeaway is that, once again, Google is leaning intofeaturesover specs.
Is Best Take theideal feature for parents everywhere, or anightmare hellscape of AI overreach? We took both sides of the debate.
TheiPhone 15 Pro Maxnow has a 5x telephoto lens, but Google’s new phone can swap your son’s group photo-ruining outstretched tongue or make your evening videos look like they were shot in daytime. Call them features or gimmicks — but I use Magic Eraser far more than I expected. But remember that, despite debuting as a Pixel exclusive, Magic Eraser is now available to all Android and iOS users through aGoogle One subscription. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the above eventually make their way into Google Photos the same way. The Pixel advantage has an expiry date.
Speaking of that, I would be remiss not to mention theothermost impressive thing about the Pixel 8 Pro (though this one is shared with the smaller $699 Pixel 8): Google’s new commitment to seven years of platform updates, security patches, and feature drops. Current Pixels get three years of OS updates and five years of security patches; this change puts Google above even Apple for commitment to device longevity.
(A brief aside: as impressive as the number is, my concern is with the hardware: Apple’s software commitment is backed up by an impressive ecosystem of physical stores and third-party repair centers trained to deal with the travails of the average iPhone user; the same can’t be said for Google’s Pixel line. I want more than anything to see millions of working Pixel 8s getting upgraded to Android 21 in 2030, but Google needs to step up its post-device hardware support game before that is realized.)
I’ll run through the rest of the specs here, but they’re largely meaningless until we dig into the device for a full review: theTensor G3contains a 9-core CPU with a single Cortex-A3 prime core clocked to 2.91Ghz, four Cortex-A715 cores at 2.37Ghz, and four Cortex-A510 cores at 1.7Ghz, which do the majority of the less onerous work. This year’s GPU is the Mali-G715, a fairly minor spec bump over the Mali-G710 inside theTensor G2. There are no official benchmarks yet run for the Tensor G3, but judging by Arm’s own approximations, the prime core should see a 20-25% jump in performance, while the Cortex-A715 efficiency cores come in at 20%moreefficient than the A78s in the Tensor G2. The Mali GPU should see a nice 15% bump in per-clock performance if it has the same seven cores as its predecessor.
What’s unclear at the moment are two things I’m very curious about: whether the G3 emits less heat than the G2 and whether it throttles more evenly (the 4nm Samsung manufacturing processshouldhelp in this regard) and whether there’s an improved modem inside the G3 that results in stronger 5G and LTE signals and fewer dropped calls. Anecdotally, I had fewer signal problems with the Pixel 7 Pro than the disastrous 6 Pro. Still, its Samsung-made modem was notably slower, and its signal was clearly worse than anything made by Qualcomm.
There’s also 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and though the base storage remains at 128GB, this year Google is making a 1TB variant available for some reason. The battery is an ever-so-slightly larger 5050mAh, though charging speeds remain depressingly slow at 30 watts for wired and 23 watts for wireless, though only through Google’s overpriced Pixel Stand. The Pixel 8 Pro’s display remains an LTPO OLED panel — which means it can hustle between 1Hz and 120Hz refresh rates — but its peak brightness has risen from 1500 nits on the 7 Pro to 2400 nits, and is covered with the newer, hardier Gorilla Glass Victus 2 (as is the back glass).
Another nice bonus: while Google isn’t claiming improvements to the speed and reliability of the optical fingerprint sensor (it’s fine; I tried it), it is boosting the biometric authentication threshold of the face unlock, which now means it meets the criteria to unlock password managers and make payments. It’s a small but important milestone in the quest to balance biometric convenience and security, and I’m gratified it’s made its way to the Pixel.
The only other spec worth mentioning are connectivity-focused: this is the first Pixel to support Wi-Fi 7, though only in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia — Google’s other regions are stuck with variants of Wi-Fi 6 or 6e. There’s also Bluetooth 5.3.
Even from the short time I spent with it, it’s clear that the Pixel 8 Pro is Google’s most coherent idea of a flagship handset yet. But it’s also receiving a $100 price increase to $999, putting it right in line with the iPhone 15 Pro andGalaxy S23+. For many Android users, the Pixel is the platonic ideal of what a smartphone should be in 2023: powerful enough to be used as a tool and smart enough to be leveraged for more than just that. It’s also clear that this year, Google is leaning especially hard into the idea that the Pixel, particularly the Pro variant, is the only way to use Android the way it’s been overhauled to work: do the secure stuff on device as quickly as possible and pass off the computationally difficult stuff, the AI stuff, the video stuff, to the cloud, and make it work seamlessly between the two.
Google spent a fair amount of time talking about AI when it told me about the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Still, it spent a lot more time talking about it when it introducedAndroid 14, and these are the first phones that will run it out of the box, with as many value-added features as the company can stuff in there. Faster search? AI. Smarter, less judgy Google Assistant? AI. Mad Lib wallpaper generator? AI. Ridiculous new camera features? AI. It’s a story we hear every year: all Android phones can be upgraded to the latest version, but only Pixels get it first and get it best.
Whether you believe that or take the path far,farmore trodden, is up to you, but Google’s hoping a flatter display, better cameras, and all the new features Bard can generate will change your mind when you get to that inevitable fork in the road.
The Pixel 8 Pro isn’t the only product Google’s launching today; there’s the smaller, cheaper Pixel 8, which gets a 120Hz display (yes!) and… basically none of the 8 Pro’s other features (except for the $100 price increase); thePixel Watch 2builds on what made the first one great while replacing everything that made it mediocre; and newPixel Buds Procolors and features, including conversation detection, a low-latency gaming mode, and better call quality on Pixel devices with the new LC3 codec.
