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I guess it’s part of any long-term relationship — the anticipation, the newness, the hurdles, the renewed commitments and the unfailing faith in its core strengths. What might be true between people might also be true of those who love the Google Pixel. Over the years, fans of the smartphone line-up, myself included, have fallen in love with its features — the photography, the clean Android interface and sometimes the design itself. At other times, we’ve been left unfulfilled — the year that Google skipped launching the device in India, the last two years’ super slippery design and frequent software niggles. What possibly keeps bringing us back is the promise of an Android smartphone experience that stays true to its core of offering a great photography experience and, now, better generative AI features than ever. I’ve been using the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL over the last two weeks and here’s if it managed to make me fall in love with it all over again.
Design
Aesthetically, the premium flagship looks elegant and classy. With straight, no longer curved sides it looks more like the iPhone than it ever has. I’ve got the very business-like Hazel colour variant and the soft-touch glass back offers a comfy, non-slippery grip. There are Obsidian, Porcelain and Rose Quartz options to choose from as well.
The Google Pixel 9 Pro XL sports a massive 6.8-inch Super Actua display, which is Google’s proprietary display that offers bright, legible displays. The flagship offers a peak brightness of 3,000 nits, which can kick in while we watch HDR content. The display is protected by Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and has been unscathed by an accidental drop or two so far. It also offers a variable refresh rate of 120Hz, which is the status quo for many smartphones in the market, even the non-premium ones.
Camera
The camera setup on the Pixel 9 Pro XL has remained unchanged this year as far as megapixels go. The setup includes a 50 MP wide lens, a 48 MP telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom and a 48 MP ultrawide lens which also offers macro focus for objects as close as 2 cm. While an upgrade would have been great, it’s not exactly a disservice that the setup remains the same as last year’s Pixel Pro, considering it is capable of delivering some of the nicest, sharpest snaps a smartphone can deliver. There are some exclusive Pro-only features — such as Super Res Zoom video, 8K videos and Video Boost — which lets me shoot high-resolution zoomed-in videos. There’s also Zoom Enhance, which uses generative AI to fill in the gaps between pixels. I applied this on a bunch of photos I’d taken while zooming in at 5x or more. Overall, it was able to reduce the grains in each image, improving the sharpness and clarity of each post processing.
The iconic Pixel camera bar has been redesigned this year
The major upgrade with the cameras is the 42 MP front camera.
If you’ve used a Pixel in the last three years or so or read some of my earlier reviews of the Pixel series, you’d know that it’s one of those rare smartphones that capture Indian skin tones exceptionally well. The front camera, just like the rear camera, continues to do an excellent job of capturing detailed images while retaining skin tones and texture really well.
Special AI features
For fans of group selfies, there’s an interesting new ‘Add Me’ feature. If there are two or more people who want to be in the same photo, you can take turns capturing two photos, which the smartphone merges into a single photo — making it look like all of you were in the same frame when the photo was snapped. The feature works really well if you get the poses, angles and planes just right when you’re snapping two different photos.
Foliage, after applying the Unblur and Enhance tools
The ‘Auto Frame’ feature in Magic Editor does a fabulous job of “fixing” the frame of a photo already snapped and making it more balanced, with addition or deletion to elements in the frame. The only downside is one cannot use any of the Magic Editor features unless the photo has been backed up to your Google account.
Portrait taken at 1.5x zoom
There’s also a ‘Reimagine’ feature in Magic Editor, in which I could select parts of a photo and change them. I chose the photo of a restaurant with beige walls and asked the app to reimagine it as light pink, which it unfortunately could not do. It ended up removing some of the original wooden beams instead. However, it did render some nice-looking options when I asked to reimagine the room with blue walls! I guess ‘Reimagine’ needs to stretch its imagination just a bit more.
There’s also Pixel Studio, where I can enter text prompts and generate images from scratch in different styles such as freestyle, 3D cartoon, video game, anime, sketch or sticker. While the generated images look nice and are most true to the prompt, the app doesn’t let me swipe through the different styles mentioned above. If I want “a beautiful sunset with pink and purple hues” to be rendered as a sketch, after I’ve already tried freestyle, I need to go back and re-enter the prompt all over again.
Captured using Night Sight mode
Tech Specs
The flagship Google Pixel 9 Pro XL runs on the latest in-house Google Tensor G4 processor, with Titan M2 taking care of the overall smartphone security. There’s 16 GB RAM on all models but the storage variant starts at 128 GB and goes up to 1 TB. The smartphone functions seamlessly while multi-tasking and heats up considerably less compared to the Pixel 8 Pro which I’ve been using for the last year. Google does offer seven years of software support but ships with Android 14, while the Android 15 roll-out seems just around the corner.
The smartphone packs in a 5,060 mAh battery, which is really efficient and won’t trigger any battery anxiety. With heavy usage that includes lots of camera use, social media scrolling, checking emails, attending webinars or product briefings and a lot of hotspot usage, Spotify streaming, the smartphone would still have about 40 per cent charge at the end of the day. It also supports fast charging and quickly powers up to about 70 per cent in about 30 minutes.
Verdict
While the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL has its premium build, excellent battery life and classy camera chops in place, the spotlight is on something that Google has truly spearheaded in the tech industry — its AI features. Be it the conversational quality of Gemini Live onboard, the fairly detailed information and resources available while chatting with Gemini Advanced or even the multiple AI-edit features married to the camera experience. While not all results are absolutely perfect, accurate or aesthetic exactly the way I want them to be, the AI experiences present a richer and more meaningful experience on this flagship smartphone.
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