The Pixel 9 is a device you get after generations of incremental progress.
One small update after another doesn’t look like much compared to this time last year. Faster fingerprint sensor? Uniform borders? Not the stuff of headlines. But in the end, it’s the little things that add up to something big. This is how I feel holding the Pixel 9, and I absolutely love it.
The Pixel 9 is currently the only non-Pro phone in the 9 series, which as far as I can tell means it has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB and no telephoto lens. It’s smaller than the Pixel 9 Pro XL, the same size and shape as the regular Pixel 9 Pro, and it doesn’t fold in half like the Pixel 9 Pro. other The 9 Pro does.
But mostly, the Pixel 9 just work. The screen is bright and the battery lasts all day. The fingerprint sensor is fast and accurate, at last. While it’s priced higher than last year’s model at $799, which was $699, that’s basically the going price for non-Pro flagship phones. For the first time, the Pixel line feels like it’s right up there with Samsung and Apple. It only took Google a few years to get to this point.
Let’s start with this: From the front, the Pixel 9 looks just like an iPhone. Rounded screen corners, flat sides—it’s all very iPhone-esque, and that’s a good thing. Compared to recent generations of Pixel, it’s 80 percent less likely to fly out of my hand when I pick it up off a desk, which I appreciate even more than the unique look the curved edges provide. The 6.3-inch screen is slightly larger than the Pixel 8. Its 1080p screen is on the low side in terms of resolution, but it looks sharp enough that it never bothered me.
The Pixel 9 has the same main camera and ultra-wide lens as the Pro phones, but no telephoto lens. Not all flagship phones come with telephoto capabilities, and the Pixel 9’s lossless 2x crop zoom is enough. But you can’t get the 5x zoom effect of the 9 Pro like the Samsung Galaxy S24, nor can you get the beautiful portrait framing effect of the 3x lens. This is the thing I missed the most when I switched from the Pixel 9 Pro to the Pixel 9 — not just a few extra pixels on the screen or some AI-enhanced video or photo features.
Other than that, you don’t miss much. Can’t take out the screen quite As bright as the Pros, but still bright enough to use in direct sunlight. Battery performance is on par with the rest of the Pixel 9 series. By the end of the day, it had enough juice left in the tank that I never felt the need to charge it later in the day, even with heavy use.
Tensor G4 is Google’s latest chipset and is available in all four Pixel 9 models. It does a great job handling day-to-day tasks and doesn’t seem to heat up as dramatically as the previous generation, but if you spend 20 minutes running a media-intensive web page, it will will Still doubles as a hand warmer. But it doesn’t feel like it’s going to catch fire, you know?
All of this adds up to a polished experience that previous Pixels couldn’t achieve. The chipset is hot, the shape feels weird, and the screen isn’t great. Especially the non-Pro Pixel, which has moved from a mid- to high-end phone to a true flagship phone, mainly by increasing the screen refresh rate and adding some small camera features in the process. Both models have also received some quality-of-life improvements over time, including the ability to use face unlock to make payments and, new to the Series 9, a much-improved fingerprint scanner. This is the kind of thing that makes me more likely to recommend it to my parents or my hairstylist.
Google has tidied up the hardware and the software is as clean as ever. But this is a phone launching in 2024, so we have to talk about AI. The Pro series retains some features, such as video enhancement, which uses artificial intelligence in the cloud to improve the brightness of low-light video. That’s not a huge loss, and the Pixel 9 has plenty of other AI features, including Reimagine, Screenshots, and Pixel Studio, all of which you can read about in my Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL reviews. Some things are so good, but have problems! But all in all, it feels like a real mixed bag right now, and the AI features are starting to pile up in a way that gives me a headache.
What should I do with the JPEG format of a children’s birthday party invitation? Add it to screenshot? Get Gemini to put it on my calendar? Or can I find it in my messages every time I need to find the party time or address? Artificial intelligence is supposed to save us from the latter scenario, and Google’s various AI tools A bit That’s how it works sometimes. At this time, the next platform shift has not been confirmed.
The Pixel 9 also comes with something more important but less flashy: seven years of operating system updates. Of course, it ships with Android 14, which is odd since Pixels usually ship with this year’s latest version of the operating system. But the Pixel 9 will launch with Android 15 this fall, so this feels like nothing more than an interesting footnote. Until the Pixel 9 stops receiving software updates, you’ll outgrow it, and that’s how it should be.
That’s what the Pixel 9 is all about: This is the phone the Android ecosystem has been asking for for a long time. It’s straightforward, well-made, and designed to stay in place for years to come. It doesn’t have all the fancy features or the best camera hardware, but it’s good enough to make it a worthy alternative to Samsung’s base model S series, which are more or less the default Android phones.
There’s a reason so many people choose Samsung phones: they’re really good. But they also come with a lot of thing Not needed by most, bordering on bloated. They’re powerful tools if you know how to tweak them to your liking, but I doubt many people buy them for the beautiful hardware and simply live with the software quirks. I generally prefer the simpler out-of-the-box experience with Pixel phones, but the hardware never really felt like Samsung’s level.
This is the phone the Android ecosystem has been waiting for for a while
The Pixel 9 changes that. Telephone. People who don’t care about the difference between optical and digital zoom, don’t want to fiddle with a ton of customization options, and want to avoid the thought of buying a new phone as much as possible. The Android ecosystem now has this option, and it’s a very good one.
Photography: Allison Johnson/The Verge
