Talking to your phone to look up things on Google feels even faster than ever. The real power of Google Tensor comes into play with its machine learning abilities. Just make sure to buy a phone with all the storage you need as it’s not expandable.
There’s no 1TB option like you can get on the iPhone 13 Pro, but seeing as Google – or Android phones in general – doesn’t have a ProRes or ProRAW-equivalent video format, you should never need that much storage. You can also choose between a healthy 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage when you buy a Pixel 6 Pro.
Thankfully, the 12GB LPDDR5 RAM makes the Pixel 6 Pro a lot better about keeping apps cached in memory, so you rarely have to wait for apps to relaunch themselves completely. Just like on those phones, apps launch almost instantly and the whole interface feels snappy in general, from opening menus to switching between apps. After almost a week of usage, the handset seems just as capable, if not faster than, any top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 888-powered smartphone I’ve used this year. Under the hood, the Pixel 6 Pro rocks Google’s first-ever self-made Tensor chip, rather than one of the Qualcomm chips that’s powered almost every Android device until now.
Google Pixel 6 Pro – Gaming and Performance At the very least, the crop of 120Hz Play Store games has been growing steadily over the past two years. I can see that the Google Now feed and Facebook operate at 120Hz, but Twitter jerks around at 60Hz. Unfortunately, just like the iPhone 13 Pro, you won’t be able to experience everything animating at 120Hz because only some apps have 120Hz support as of this writing. Just like on the iPhone 13 Pro, the new 120Hz screen makes scrolling through apps and news, flicking between screens, and generally navigating around the interface feel incredibly snappy. It also features an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate, which is a step up from most Android phones – including its little Pixel 6 brother.Īlthough the display only hits 800 nits in high brightness mode – which might seem dim compared to the iPhone 13 Pro’s 1,000 nits of sustained brightness – it’s more than enough for me to comfortably use it in bright sunlight. Going back to the new 6.7-inch display, it’s an LTPO OLED with a gorgeously sharp QHD+ (1440 x 3120) resolution and a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, perfect for movies. The camera bar also gives me some extra leverage while holding the phone, which helps keep it from slipping down in my hand. The metal rails frame the whole camera bar and protect it from scratches. Having a glass visor stick out two millimeters out from the rest of the phone might sound prone to breaking, but thankfully it feels plenty rigid. I’ve had to scrape dust out of this area at least once a day in my time with the phone. The flipside of having such a massive camera bump is that it acts as an easy ledge for dust and lint to gather on.
On the plus side, the full-width camera bar props up the phone at an even angle so that it doesn’t rock about like an iPhone with just a corner camera bump. Which is to say, the way it stretches across the entire width basically makes it look like the Geordi La Forge of smartphones. That camera bar is easily the most distinguishing feature of the Pixel Pro 6 it gives it an unmistakable look from the back. But at the same time, it feels like an overdue modernization of Google’s best phone. In many ways, these drastic changes make the Pixel 6 Pro a less distinct smartphone among the sea of glass rectangles. It’s easily as big as the other gargantuan Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (6.5 x 2.98 x 0.35 inches) and the OnePlus 9 Pro (6.43 x 2.90 x 0.34 inches). Coming from the 5.7 x 2.77 x 0.31-inch Pixel 5, Google’s latest high-end phone measures in at a massive 6.45 x 2.99 x 0.35 inches. What’s even harder to get over is how much bigger it is. The gentle curves and modest screen size are all thrown to the wayside to make way for a massive 6.7-inch screen with curved edges, sharp corners, a center-positioned hole-punch camera, and a huge camera bar on the backside. From the get-go, the Google Pixel 6 Pro looks unlike any of the five Pixel phones that preceded it.