Google Pixel 9 Pro XL: Best in AI capabilities, offers solid camera and smooth performance

Google gave a bit of a surprise at the last pixel event when it announced the Pixel 9 Pro XL. It's not a moniker used by the company under its Pixel lineup of smartphones but it comes as a successor to the Pixel 8 Pro. Priced at Rs 1,24,999, it's one of the costliest smartphones available today, going directly against the likes of Samsung and Apple. I have been using one for nearly a month, and this is how my experience has been:

The phone looks and feels a lot like a Pixel phone with very little aesthetic changes that you can notice at first. At the back, the camera visor has been made into a capsule-shaped closed figure rather than the one that runs throughout the surface horizontally. The back has Gorilla Glass Victus 2, same as the front, with a matte finish that doesn't catch too many smudges and fingerprints quickly. The phone has flat sides made out of aluminium with the power/lock key and volume buttons on the right (volume buttons below the power key); while the left side is left all plain. 

Display

The front has a 6.8-inch (20:9 aspect ratio) display that also houses the fingerprint scanner located around the two-third point from the top. The bottom houses the SIM card tray, primary mic, USB type-C and one outlet for loudspeakers. Available in Porcelain (the one I used), Rose Quartz, Hazel and Obsidian Black colour options, the phone is IP68 dust and water-resistant and weighs 221 grams – it is one big and tall phone but not overly heavy for its size.

The device sports a 6.8-inch (1344 x 2922) LTPO AMOLED display that supported up to 120Hz refresh rates. The display is really bright and usable under direct sunlight outdoors without any trouble. This is a vivid and sharp display that can handle HDR videos and images quite well, better than previous generation high-end Android phones that tend to show too much saturation, but this one handles details better. 

Camera

Talking about the camera, being a Pixel phone, it remains one of the USPs – a 50MP (f/1.68) main camera, a 48MP (f/1.7) ultra-wide camera, and a 48MP (f/2.8) telephoto camera. The phone can take really well-stitched shots in terms of details and colour rendering and has that familiar Pixel look to it if you have ever used a Pixel phone for photography before, including for night shots. The zoomed-in shots have pretty decent details till 5x to 10x zoom for night shots and around 20x for daylight shots. 

Portrait shots are also nice and punchy but not quite as good in effect as Samsung and Apple, in my opinion. The 50MP mode can have a slight shutter lag compared to the regular 12MP mode, which isn't unexpected. The front-facing 42MP (f/2.2) camera takes crispy shots with autofocus in place working well for selfies as well as videos and video calls. The phone has a lot of added features such as ‘Top shot’, ‘Add Me’, which allows you to add a person that wasn't in the original shot from a shot with the same scene with the person, but not the same other persons – works well. Zoom Enhance is another AI feature for the camera that fills in details for zoomed shots.

Performance

The device is equipped with Google's Tensor G4 chipset (up to 3.1Ghz octa-core processor, ARM Mali-G715 MP7 GPU), 16GB LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB (or 256GB of the base model) UFS 3.1 internal storage. I would have liked to see UFS 4.0 at this price point, but the internal storage isn't exactly a bottleneck for performance. I would say the area where the chipset has improved over its predecessor is thermal performance – no longer heated back when using the device with 5G and WiFi hotspot enabled. The phone handles day-to-day tasks without breaking a sweat and handles animations quite smoothly. You can play a game like Wuthering Waves at 60Hz smoothly but isn't a gaming machine like some of its competitors at this price point. 

5G network reception is also improved on the device compared to the Pixel 8 but there's still some way to go; it can reach Qualcomm's Snapdragon competitors for reliable connectivity on the go. The speakers on this thing are loud and have decent depth for watching videos or playing games when indoors. Google promises seven years of OS updates and security patches for the Pixel 9 series, which is solid, if delivered.

GPS and WiFi performance is glitch-free and it worked as you would expect it to. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is powered by a 5,060mAh battery unit that lasted me a day more often than not even with WiFi hotspot and a lot of video playback during the day – many times it had around 10 per cent left at the end of the day. It supports up to 45watts fast charging (no charger bundled in the box) and charges from 1 per cent to full in a little over an hour, which is another improvement over the Pixel 8.

In conclusion, the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL is a much improved Pixel device in terms of battery experience, network reception as well as performance; at the same time, it can definitely further improve its network reception as well as smaller things like charging speeds. So, if you have a Pixel in mind, looking to get your first Google phone, this isn't a bad point to start with. 

Having said that, with Google's chipset plans, there's a big leap expected with the next one, which might improve a lot of things for performance mentioned here. It's not the most value-for-money high-end device but it's certainly among the smartest smartphones in terms of AI capabilities (including Gemini) and Google's regular updates and feature drops.