Google Pixel 10 review

One of the brightest displays in town

Just like in previous years, the most affordable Pixel from the flagship family gets a regular OLED panel, not an LTPO one. It's still 6.3" in diagonal, fitting a standard 1080 x 2424px resolution and offering a 120Hz refresh rate. The display also retains the ability to serve HDR10+ content, but not Dolby Vision.

As expected, the phone plays well with Netflix and YouTube in delivering high-resolution HDR content, and the phone supports Google's Ultra HDR standard for photos in the native gallery app, which in this case is the Google Photos app.

When it comes to actual performance, the display delivers. It's about as bright as before, and reaches the advertised peak brightness. In manual mode, we measured 1,364 nits and up to 2,030 nits in auto mode. Once again, the Pixel 10 phones are one of the brightest we've measured, so expect exceptional outdoor legibility even in the brightest of days.

Refresh rate

As we already mentioned, the display isn't LTPO, so granular refresh rate control is out of the question. You get either a 60Hz or a 120Hz refresh rate, depending on the scenario. If you choose to go with the Smooth display toggle on, you can enjoy 120 fps in some games, in menus, when browsing, etc.

The display dials down to 60Hz when not in use or when you are watching videos.

Battery life

The new Google Pixel 10 has all the reasons to offer better battery life than its predecessor. The handset runs on a 4,970 mAh battery that's 270 mAh bigger than before and a supposedly more efficient Tensor G5 SoC.

Updated, 28 Oct: We've updated all battery tests after discovering the original lower-than-usual results were caused by excessive location polling by our test automation software. We retested the Pixel 10 with the fix applied and we saw improvements in battery life across the board. The chart below reflects our latest test findings.

Even with our extensive retesting, the Pixel 10 only managed to match the Pixel 9's battery life.

Charging speed

In theory, the charging speed should also be better than last year. The new Pixel 10 has a tad faster charging rate, supporting up to 30W via a compatible Power Delivery charger.

Specs also say that the wireless charging rate has been bumped to 15W, and it now features the fancy new magnetic Qi2 wireless charging complete with the built-in magnets needed to align the phone - it works quite like Apple's Magsafe, but Google calls this Pixelsnap.

The bypass charging feature remains, but reverse wireless charging has been replaced with reverse wired charging.

Updated, 28 Oct: We've updated our charging tests after discovering the original results were caused by excessive location polling by our test automation software. We retested the Pixel 10 with the fix applied and saw improvements in charging speed at the 15-minute and 30-minute marks. The time for full charge improved as well. The chart below reflects our latest test findings.

Unfortunately, even after these improvements, we still weren't able to get better readings than last year's Pixel 9. The Pixel 10 is slower at the 15-minute and 30-minute marks, and it took us 1 hour and 32 minutes to fully charge the battery with the Pixel 30W first-party charger.

Interestingly, this is still somewhat faster than the Pixel 10 Pro and the iPhone 16, albeit negligibly faster.

Even though Pixels are not particularly impressive when it comes to fast charging, Google has allegedly put some extra effort into maintaining battery health.

As far as we understand, there's a built-in system that kicks in after 200 charging cycles, which gradually limits the charging rate over time. This makes charging even slower and reduces the battery's voltage, which in turn limits capacity by a small margin. Google promises that this feature will ensure consistent battery performance as your device ages. Whatever the benefits are, we always prefer features like that to be user-configurable, which is not the case here.

Speakers

The Pixel 10 doesn't stray away from the familiar formula with a hybrid stereo speaker setup - one full-fledged speaker at the bottom and one at the top that acts as an earpiece, too.

In terms of loudness, the Pixel 10 scored ever so slightly lower than the Pixel 9, achieving a "Very Good" -25.7 LUFS loudness score. On the other hand, we can hear a notable change in the sound tuning, and it's for the better. The Pixel 10 provides fuller and warmer sound with more pronounced bass compared to its predecessor, but fails to match the sound quality of its competitors like the Galaxy S25 and the iPhone 16.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.