Google has built something that it can, and should be, proud of. With GenAI devices set to become the main differentiator between the brands that thrive over the next three years, and those that don’t, Google has shown that it is firmly ready to operate within the former camp.
There’s not much to fault with the phone’s hardware and software, both of which deliver handsome results. Add to it a sub-A$1,500 price tag, and the premium phone market is a segment that Google is going to fiercely compete within over the next couple of months.
--GenAI features that are very easy to use and helpful
--Battery life is very good
--Excellent value-for-money and at a price point that broadens its appeal
--Software update straight out of the box keeps you waiting when setting up the phone.
--Might not have the same amount of screen real estate as some of the larger Pro models, but it’s plenty enough.
Déjà vu. That was my very first thought as I tore open the packaging of the new Google Pixel 9 phone and held it in the palm of my hand. The reason I had a sense of familiarity with the form factor of this device is because I once owned an iPhone 5s.
Of course, the Pixel 9 is vastly different from that Apple device which landed a decade ago, but holding the Pixel 9 reminded me of how comfortable it is to once again grip a phone that has eschewed sharp edges in favour of rounded ones and has a comforting thickness to it that allows it to snuggle into your palm rather than slip out of it, which is the case with most slimmer devices.
The Pixel 9 is a visually stunning piece. Turn it around and you’ll see an oblong protruding shape that houses the camera that can elicit stark opinions – some of my colleagues who I showed the phone to loathed it, while I quite liked it as one of those really strong design elements that isn’t just ripped off from existing phone designs.
I powered the phone on and unfortunately as part of the setup process, there was an update that had to be immediately downloaded on the phone that took more than 15 minutes. Given that this is a brand new device that launched just a few weeks ago, you’d imagine that it would come with all the latest software updates and wouldn’t be required to update it immediately out of the box. But my mild irritation at it was probably due to the fact that I was eager to get started with the phone.
Within a couple of minutes, the update was completed, I entered my Google account details and the phone was ready to go. Soon enough that 6.3-inch display came to life with vivid colours even though my screen brightness was not set to the maximum. Google’s taken the max brightness on this device to 2,700 nits, up from 2,000 nits on Pixel 8.
This Pixel 9 is the entry-level among the remaining Pixel family of smartphones which were revealed by Google a few weeks ago, the others being the three Pro devices – the Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold. But this Pixel 9 doesn’t lack anything even though it is at the base of the Pixel 9 family.
It features 12GB RAM, 128GB of storage (with an option of 256GB too) and a Google Tensor G4 Chip which is the same chip used in the Pro devices. You certainly aren’t being shortchanged with this phone.
But what really impresses is the use of AI on this device. A few years ago, AI conjured images of robots taking over the world. Now though, it has come to be associated with ‘cognition’ and Generative AI (GenAI) which aids and assists with everyday tasks. That’s exactly where the Pixel 9 scores massively.
Take, for example, Google Gemini. With Gemini, powered by AI, you don’t have to go on repeating yourself with the system able to comfortably pick up different accents. It worked well as a conversational chat tool and was able to, for example, solve a maths riddle for me and even give me some ideas of what I can make with the apples and bananas that I had lying on my kitchen table.
But then the AI gets even smarter. I pulled out some apricot almond cheese from the fridge, opened the Pixel Studio app and took a picture of it. I then asked the AI to help me with a recipe that uses it, without telling it what it was looking at. Right enough, the AI I suspect read the text on the covering of the cheese, correctly identified it and offered some helpful recipe tips (Apricot and Almond Cream Cheese Tartlets, if you were wondering!)
I then decided to challenge the AI system a little more. I got a bag of Rice Krispies and put them in a transparent bag with no labelling whatsoever and took a picture of it. The AI kicked in here too and correctly identified the contents of it!
And that’s just the beginning of the AI features on this device. There’s the Circle To Search Function which is great feature to have on your device. If you see a product and want to know more about it, for example a handbag of which you don’t recognise the brand or where it is available, just long-press the home button, circle it and Google will throw up related search results of the product. You can even use this function in the middle of a video or reel, and not necessarily just within an image on your phone.
The AI goes absolutely all out with the images and image editing on this device. But before we get to that, it’s worth noting here that Google has massively improved the camera on the Pixel 9 compared to the Pixel 8. The ultra-wide lens on the rear has been bumped up from 12MP on Pixel 8 to 48MP on Pixel 9. The 50MP main lens and 10.5MP selfie cam though remain the same from a year ago.
To play around with the camera, I took the phone on a Saturday morning to my 5km parkrun at the Patawalong River Parkrun in Adelaide. The spot is excellent to run along the edge of the river where you often spot a couple of dolphins and, ever so often, overhead, you have planes less than a 200 metres above you roaring as they come in to land at the airport which is only a few hundred metres away.
As you can see from the images below, I used the 8x zoom to capture a close-up of a man in his canoe coming up the river. See the difference between what I could see before I began to zoom in, and the details that I could see as I zoomed in. The difference is astounding.
Then when I whipped my phone out a couple of times to capture some of the planes landing, even though I did so in a hurry, the images were not blurred as I suspect some algorithms came into play to compensate for the rushed movements of my hand.
Later on, when it gets to editing the images is where some brilliant AI kicks in. The Magic Editor feature allowed me to edit the images to either ‘Erase’ certain features (I got rid of people walking on the path in front of me), while the Reimagine feature is much more fun to use and allows you to edit in enhancements to your image that are as far-fetched as your imagination with the help of a text prompt.
All you need to do is select the Reimagine feature, tell the AI what modifications you want made to the image and the AI does the rest – in my case I asked for a flying saucer to be added to the image, and within seconds it built out an image of a UFO over a Qantas aircraft that I had photographed.
The Photo Unblur feature was faultless too. To see whether I could use historic images, rather than images captured with the device, and have the feature work, I pulled out an old 2017 photo of my son which had a significant blur to it, and the software managed to unblur it without missing any details in the scene. The Auto Frame option is really good too and auto adds details of the scene into the image background to deliver a richer ambience around the subjects in the image.
Another entertaining function on this phone is Add Me. On a night out, you no longer have to ask a random stranger to hold the phone and get a picture of you with your mates. The Add Me feature combine two photographs. So the first one has your mates in it while you click them, and the second one is when they photograph you standing next to where they were. The two images are then combined to look as though all of you were standing together in the same image.
Want more AI? Pixel Screenshots is another useful feature on this phone with which you can, for example, take a photograph of a receipt or to-do-list and the AI will auto read the text on it and help you pull it up from the hundreds of images on your phone when you want to pull it back up with the help of nothing more than a vague prompt.
The hardware on this phone is impressive too. The sound quality of the speakers is fully immersive. The video quality is sharp and the screen provides plenty of real estate for you to enjoy your media.
App management on it is great as the font and layout on the screen is neat and easily discernible. It has a full suite of Google products including Drive, Gmail, and Files, making using this phone as a business device a viable proposition.
The battery life on this device is particularly strong. The 4,700mAh battery is a workhorse. When I took the device out to the park to shoot a couple of images, I had forgotten to charge it the previous night. Still, even on a dangerously low battery level, the phone’s camera operated brilliantly and I was able to cram in a few videos too without the phone dying on me.
When I managed to get the phone to a charger back home, it came on almost as soon as I plugged it in to the socket and just 15 minutes of charging was good enough for me to get another couple of hours squeezed out of my phone.
The Pixel 9 is currently available at retailers including JB Hi-Fi and The Good Guys. The 128GB variant costs A$1347, while the 256GB version is priced at A$1,497.
Google has built something that it can, and should be, proud of. With GenAI devices set to become the main differentiator between the brands that thrive over the next three years, and those that don’t, Google has shown that it is firmly ready to operate within the former camp.
There’s not much to fault with the phone’s hardware and software, both of which deliver handsome results. Add to it a sub-A$1,500 price tag, and the premium phone market is a segment that Google is going to fiercely compete within over the next couple of months.
--GenAI features that are very easy to use and helpful
--Battery life is very good
--Excellent value-for-money and at a price point that broadens its appeal
--Software update straight out of the box keeps you waiting when setting up the phone.
--Might not have the same amount of screen real estate as some of the larger Pro models, but it’s plenty enough.