Google Pixel 6 and 6 Pro review: flagships found | Google’s new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are a reset of its smartphone ambitions, and they have new designs, new processors, new cameras, and new capabilities. | By The Verge | Facebook | Alright, you've been patiently waiting. It's finally here. Let's review the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro. The Pixel 6 6 Pro are a big deal for Google. They're the company's first attempt at making a high-end phone in quite a few years and then the first phones with Google's new custom tensor processor which powers AI and ML and lots of hopes and dreams, I guess. It's also finally updating the camera's hardware after years and years of using the same old sensor in Pixels. These phones are also just big, I mean, just at these things. They're not small phones. If you're coming from Pixel 5 or Pixel 4, it's going to take some adjustment and maybe some bigger pockets. Also big, that camera bar that houses these new sensors. Like Becca said in our hands-on video, it's absolutely massive. But at least the phone doesn't rock on the table when you put it down because the bar spans the back of the whole thing. The Pixel 6 starts at $599. It comes with 128 gigs of storage, 8 gigs of RAM, and has a standard wide and ultra wide camera. It has a flat 6. 4 inch screen a 90 hertz refresh rate and an eight megapixel front-facing camera. Now, depending on how you buy it, it will support either basic sub 65G or the fast but really hard to find millimeter wave 5G. If you're getting it unlocked or from T Mobile, you can expect sub six. If you're getting it from Verizon or AT and T, you're gonna be paying a little bit more but you'll also get millimeter wave. Now, the Pixel 6 Pro starts at $899. It also comes with 128 gigs of storage and it has 12 gigabytes of RAM and adds a four X telephoto cam alongside that wide and ultra wide camera that are on the regular Pixel 6. It's got a 6. 7 inch screen with a variable refresh rate of up to 120 hertz and it has curved sides. Now the front camera on the six pro is 11 megapixels and has a little bit wider field of view. You might be able to fit an extra friend in a selfie. You don't have to worry about any of the fiveG shenanigans with the 6 pro. No matter how you buy it, it will support both sub six and millimeter wave 5G. Now the Pixel 6 comes in two-tone black, green, or red. The Pixel 6 Pro is available in white, black, or a yellowish gold. Now, between them, the sixes color options are way more fun but whatever, you're gonna wanna put a case on these and that's a good idea because they are both big, slippery bars of soap. Now, I've had both models slide off my desk, table, sofa arms, my lap, you name it. Plus, I've nearly dropped them more than once. We even managed to crack one of our review samples even though these have Gorilla Glass Victus on the front, you can still break them easily enough so you're gonna wanna get a case and when I first got my hands on these pixels, I really wasn't so sure about this design. From the front, it's hard to tell them apart from the Samsung Note 10 or Note 20 and from the back, they kinda look like TCL phones to me and after a couple of weeks, the design really hasn't grown on me. Sure, they feel nice and premium in ways that prior pixels didn't but they kinda lack some of the whimsy and fun that the older models had. Alright, let's get into the meat of this. How do these new pixels perform? The answer, very very good. There's very little to complain about with either of them. Both screens are punching colorful, they're bright enough to read in sunlight and the faster refresh rates make the interface smooth when you're scrolling around especially on the pro. If you look closely, you can find some issues like if you look from extreme angle, you might see some color shift or if you're using the Pixel 6 Pro, there might be some visible under light screen areas where the curves are but you have to look really closely to find these things and in fact, it's really even hard to show you them on video. They don't really interrupt my day-to-day use and frankly, I don't have a problem with any of these screens. They don't have any weird bugs or issues like a color cast and low brightness or flickering or really bad color reproduction that we saw on older pixel phones. Now, the tensor chip perform just as great as other high-end Android phones whether I was launching apps, multitasking, navigating the UI, or whatever I happen to do. It's not gonna run benchmarks as fast as Apple's latest chips but it's miles ahead of the processor that was in last year's -Pixel 5 and totally competitive with the Snapdragon triple 8. Also, great battery life. Both phones were able to last a full day of heavy use with plenty left over in the tank. Most nights, I was plugging them in with 35 to 40% battery left. If you're a light user, I could easily see you go in two days with this. Now, a lot of that has to do with the fact that these are big batteries and they're big phones with big batteries. It's a big mood but either way, the problems that Pixel's had with battery life years ago are firmly in the past. Now, on charging, both models support wireless and fast wire charging but neither come with an actual charging bricks so it's BYOB or bring your own brick. They also do reverse wireless charging for things like wireless earbuds. They both have loud, clear stereo speakers and for the first time since the original pair back in 2016. And in something that matters a lot to me, they've got really nice haptics. Bad Buzzy Haptics can just ruin the experience on a phone for me. But Google nailed it here. They're soft and clicky with just the right amount of feedback. But the Pixel 6 and six Pro really drop the ball is with their underscreen fingerprint scanner. It's in a comfortable spot. It's about a third of the way up from the bottom of the screen but it's just slow compared to others and sometimes it needs a few scans to recognize my fingerprint. There's also no facial recognition here. So this is the only biometric security option you got and frankly, it could be a lot better. As you'd expect, the Pixel 6 pair run Google's latest version of Android, the completely redesigned Android 12 and for the most part, I like it. It's very legible. The animations and design elements are fun and whimsical and it mostly stings out of my way when I'm using the phone. It's like Google put all the fun in the software this time as opposed to putting it into the hardware design. There are a few Pixel 6 specific tricks that are worth talking about though and the most significant one for me is in the phone app. The Pixel 6 can make life a lot easier for you when you're calling automated phonetree systems and it can even wait on hold for you. The Phone Tree System attempts to transcribe what's being said and it provides you with easily tapable buttons so you don't have to sit there listening intently the entire time a robot is speaking to you but it's still very clearly in beta and it misses a lot of the words in the context still. Hopefully, this gets better over time. Another thing enabled by the Pixel 6's tensor processors faster and more accurate dictation which is convenient to use but will be a lot more useful when Google figures out how to get it on to a smart watch. Those features plus some photo stuff will get into. I promise I have not forgotten about the camera are the main benefits of Google's custom tensor processor. They're not an AI revolution but that's okay because I'm not ready for the robot overload yet. Lastly, Google says it will be supporting the Pixel 6 and6 Pro for five years which is a lot longer than the typical Android phone gets. But that's only referring to security updates. Google's only committing to three operating system upgrades over the lifetime of the phone. Which means that Android 15 will probably be the last upgrade that these get come twenty twenty-four. Alright, it's time to get into these cameras. These new cameras are a big deal because like the phones, they are big. These are just huge sensors. They're also a big deal because this is the first time since 2017 that Google has put new hardware inside of a pixel camera. And the main camera in both phones is a new giant 50 megapixel sensor. It's hard coded to produce 12. 5 megapixel images. It's set behind an F1. 85 Apture lens and it has optical image stabilization. Next to that is a 12 megapixel ultra wide camera that has 114 -degree field of view and F 2. 2 lens. Now sadly this does not have any macro or close up focusing ability like you can get on the iPhone 13 Pro and lots of other phones but it does have optical stabilization and finally on the six pro you get a new fourX telephoto 48 megapixel camera that spits out 12 megapixel images. It's got an F3. 5 aperture lens and has optical stabilization. Of these cameras by far my favorite is the telephoto camera. It's the first telephoto on a phone that I've actually enjoyed using. It's got longer reach than you get on an iPhone 13 Pro and has better compression and subject so I don't need to use portrait mode nearly as much. It's also way sharper and more usable everyday than Samsung's 10X camera, and thanks to Google's algorithms, you can zoom digitally up to 20X and still have a mostly usable picture. Seriously though, I was on the road to choosing the Pixel 6 between the two of these but that's how a photo camera, it's pretty great. The new main camera is excellent too. It's classic Pixel, high contrast, moody looks with lots and lots of detail in both good and low light. It's very competitive with the best from Apple. I'm not gonna declare either standout winner. Some shots look better from the iPhone, some shots look better from the pixel but both are very good and as we've been saying for a few years now, which one you prefer really comes down to your own personal taste but if there's one area that I would like to see improvement from Google on, it's how long the pixel takes to capture night mode shots. A lot of times you'll be standing there holding the phone for multiple seconds at a time to finish the capture which can be a problem when your subject is moving around or you're just not patient enough to wait for it. A lot of times the iPhone would take half as long to capture the same scene. Now, the ultra wide camera is good but it's clearly the weakest of the bunch. It's got softer details, noticeable distortion. I think it's safe to say the iPhone has Google beat here. The iPhone has also always consistently beat Google with video capture and this year, yeah, that's still the case. The Pixel 6's video is a lot better than older pixels but it's still wonky with image stabilization and has some weird color processing that's very different from how Google processes still photos. Reds and oranges and any highly saturated colors in particular look way saturated in the video. But you can easily record 4K60 FPS video for as long as you want without it overheating which is a big improvement over the Pixel 5A from earlier this year. Google is making a big deal this year about how it's adjusted its image algorithms to work better for darker skin tones. And it's great to see the company addressing this problem that's long played the photo industry. Now both Nicole Nguyen at WSJ and Julian Chikatu at Wired were able to test the camera with a wider range of skin tones and came to some really interesting conclusions. I encourage you to check the articles out, we're gonna link them below. If you look at all the photos, it's clear the pixel is still doing pixel things. It's high contrast with a dose of over exposure to compensate for it and very sharp details. Some folks might like that look but not everyone will even if you have darker skin. Lastly, it wouldn't be a pixel camera with a couple of neat software tricks that make hard things a lot easier than they used to be. The first is Magic Eraser. It lets you move distracting people or objects from your photos that you just don't want there. It's a fun trick but it can be really hit or miss. This isn't gonna put any skilled Photoshop editors out of work. You can also get very similar results from third party apps so it's not totally necessary to buy a pixel for this. But the thing that really impressed me was a new motion capture mode which lets you mimic a panning shot or a long exposure with a single snap of the shutter and no tripods or neutral density filters or extra equipment involved at all. These are things that take years of practice and lots of equipment to capture with a traditional camera and the Pixel makes it as easy as snapping a selfie. I love it. We're gonna be doing a lot more with these cameras too. Becca's gonna be commanding them head to head with the iPhone 13 Pro in the next episode of Full Frame so be sure to stay tuned for that. Okay, so that's a lot of stuff. What's the take away here? Well, the takeaway is that the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro are excellent devices and among the best phones you can buy right now. In fact, I'd say that they're the best Android phones full stop. They have a great value. The Pixel 6 in particular offers a lot of phone for $600 and there's no show stopping bugs or issues to be worried about. If you could deal with the fact that they are just giant phones, you're probably gonna be happy with them. Now, if you're trying to decide whether or not that $300 extra for the six pro is worth it, that's a tough call. I really prefer the regular sixes flat screen and slightly smaller size but I know I'd miss the telephoto of the six pro if I went without it. At the end of the day, it feels like Google really did it this time. It's produced flagship competitive phones without any glaring issues or omissions and it's priced them under the competition. Okay, so what are you getting? Fast speeds, competitive prices, and excellent camera plus that telephoto on the six pro, some of the best software you can get on a phone anywhere, and great battery life. What happens when Google tries to make an excellent phone is it ends up making an excellent phone.