Design & Build
Recommending a phone to Creative Bloq’s discerning audience is a tricky proposition. Readers who are at home with thunderous tower PCs full of GPUs, or sleek laptops that nonetheless carry the computing power of a whole room of computers from a decade ago, are not going to be impressed by a phone, no matter how fast the CPU inside runs.
What Google has done with the Pixel 9 Pro, however, remains interesting. It takes an excellent camera array and puts it behind a bright OLED screen, then packs the software with AI tricks and gives it a long battery life. There may be phones out there that do better in the benchmark tests, but there are few that are as easy to live with, making the Google Pixel 9 Pro one of the best camera phones on the market.
Key Specs
- CPU: Google Tensor G4
- Graphics: Mali-G715 MC7
- Memory: 16GB
- OS: Android 15
- Screen size: 6.3in LTPO OLED
- Resolution: 1280x2856px
- Refresh rate: 120Hz
- Storage: 128GB – 1TB
- Cameras: 50MP f/1.7 wide, 48MP f/2.8 5x periscope zoom telephoto, 48MP f/1.7 ultrawide, 42MP f/2.2 front-facing ultrawide
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, Ultra-wideband, NFC, USB 3.2 Gen 2
- Dimensions: 152.8 x 72 x 8.5 mm
- Weight: 199g
Features
The big news right now is AI, and while the Pixel 9 Pro comes with Android 14 installed, it quickly updates itself to Android 15 and inherits the newest features from Big Daddy Google. Inside the Tensor G4 processing cluster that drives the phone, you’ll find an NPU to handle the machine-learning heavy lifting. It all looks largely unchanged since the Tensor G3 in the Pixel 8 phones, though that was a nine-core chip and the G4 ‘only’ has eight, but they’re a bit faster. What matters more is that the G4 is paired with 16GB of RAM, the same amount Apple has only just started putting in its laptops as standard, and AI apps love RAM.
Many AI apps come integrated into Android 15, so you get Add Me to blend together two photos with an AR overlay to help get them lined up, so photographers never need to worry about not appearing in photos they’ve taken. There’s Reimagine too, part of the Magic Editor tool, which can completely change the composition of an image, adding and removing elements as you want. This is a very weird thing to use, and makes you wonder what it’s going to be like in a few years time when the technology has matured, become accepted, and improved.
Performance
The Pixel 9 Pro’s benchmark results are a bit unusual. We ran them twice, just to be sure, then looked up online charts to check we weren’t hallucinating. Despite the Tensor G4 processor boasting all the sort of tech you’d expect in a 2024 flagship (eight cores, one of them particularly hot, 16GB of RAM and varying amounts of UFS 3.1 storage) it posts scores lower than you might expect.
Price
At $/£999, the Pixel 9 Pro is expensive, sure, but it’s also in about the same sort of place as all the other 2024 flagship smartphones. An iPhone 16 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S24+ cost exactly the same amount. You get a lot for your money, especially with the new toys Android 15 brings with it, and as it’s a phone that could last seven years the outlay starts to look less outrageous. Still, you could pick up two phones from the likes of Motorola (or budget Samsungs) for the same price, and you’d be able to replace that after three years without feeling the same kind of guilt you’d feel for sending a flagship to the recycling early.
Who is it for?
Flagships are always good all-rounders, and with the upgraded cameras the Pixel 9 Pro brings with it it’s easy to see this phone coming into its own as the kind of visual notebook many creatives like to keep. The fact that it’s not a huge XL variant means it’s going to find a home in pockets, fashionable bags and other places the larger phones couldn’t fit, and it’s a highly capable choice for everyday use, streaming, gaming and doing clever AI tricks.
Should I buy it?
Buy it if:
- You’re in the market for a new flagship phone
- You don’t want an XL model
- You want some of the best cameras
Don’t buy it if:
- You’d prefer something cheaper
- You’d prefer something bigger
- You’re an Apple fan
Also consider
- iPhone 16 Pro
- Samsung Galaxy S24+
- Motorola phones
- Budget Samsungs
