Google Pixel 8 & 8 Pro hands-on review

Software

The Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro ship with Android 14 out of the box with Google's exclusive suite of software features that it reserves for the Pixel devices. The focus this year is unsurprisingly on AI, with most apps getting at least some level of AI enhancement.

Google Photos gets most of the new AI-assisted trickery. The new Audio Magic Eraser feature can automatically remove background noise from your videos while maintaining focus on the subject. That... sounds pretty cool.

But then there is the new Magic Editor, which not only lets you remove background distractions but also move entire subjects around the frame, swap backgrounds, and change the lighting. The final result can look essentially nothing like the original picture, should you so wish.

The Best Take feature goes even further. Take a burst of a group of people and should you not like someone's expression, you can swap their entire face or head with one of your liking. Reality can literally be whatever you want. We could sit here and argue all day about what even is the point of taking candid photos in the moment or visiting specific places at a specific time anymore if you can just change them to whatever you want later with AI-generated versions but perhaps that's a discussion for another day. Everyone is entitled to have their own opinions about this and the features are, after all, optional.

It's worth noting that features like Magic Editor first require you to back up the image to the Google Photos cloud before they work. Also, the new Magic Eraser feature works better on larger distractions and more complex structures but only on the Pixel 8 Pro.

Google also announced two more features for the Pixel 8 series that will be arriving later. One is Video Boost, which uploads your videos to the cloud and processes them further for even greater dynamic range and detail. We can't test this now but the company did compare it against the video from the iPhone 15 Pro Max during the keynote, where the Pixel 8 Pro Video Boost video looked a lot better. Then again, it's hardly fair to compare a locally processed video against one cooked overnight on the cloud and not really the slam dunk Google thinks it is.

The other feature is Assistant with Bard. This is simply Google integrating its AI chatbot with Assistant that works in a way where it can combine data from multiple Google apps on the device to provide relevant results for your queries. This is also something that we cannot test for now.

What we did test is the new temperature sensor and the Temperature app on the Pixel 8 Pro. It lets you pick from a variety of surface types and then point the sensor on the back towards it. The phone needs to be fairly close to the subject to take a reading and for now, does not work with humans or animals as it is awaiting approval. We can't quite vouch for its accuracy but it was fun to check the temperature for things around the house. However, without skin temperature check, the app would quickly become a gimmick, so hopefully, it arrives sooner rather than later in a future update.

Temperature app

Google has also managed to come up with a secure new face unlock feature that works with just the front camera. It allows you to access apps locked behind your phone's device lock to be unlocked with just your face, similar to the iPhone or the Pixel 4. You can still use the fingerprint sensor but if you also add your face data then instead of asking for your fingerprint the phone will just scan your face and unlock the app. We tried this with password manager apps and it worked perfectly. The apps themselves don't need to change and aren't even aware of the new face unlock feature; the device handles everything automatically.

The rest of the software experience is pretty much carried over from the previous Pixel phones. The default Android UI design hasn't changed much recently and it feels like déjà vu every time you pick up a new Pixel phone, something iPhone users are already familiar with. If you upgrade to this from a Pixel 5 or 6, you will feel right at home but also maybe a bit disappointed that things are mostly the same.

Android 14 UI

Google is also lagging behind other Android manufacturers in terms of customizability. Take the launcher for example, which is still very basic. You don't even get the option to move or uninstall multiple apps at once, something even iOS has. Google is also very stuck in its ways of adopting new features and technologies that others have, so things like Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and Bluetooth LHDC are all absent here even though they are quite common on other phones.

But few things compare to how annoying it is to update the software on Pixel phones. Most other Android phones will wrap things up within ten minutes or so but not the Pixels. Every single software update, even minor ones, can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to install. For most users, this isn't an issue as it's just something that happens in the background but if you care enough about your updates to manually install them, you are going to waste countless hours over the course of owning these devices.

Speaking of updates, Google has promised a rather ambitious seven years of update cycle for the Pixel 8 series. We have no real reason to doubt the company as so far it has kept up with its promised updates for previous Pixel devices. However, seven years is a long time and one has to wonder what the state of the hardware will be in 2030 when the phones get their final update. Will the phones even be usable then remains to be seen and that concerns us more than whether or not Google will follow through with its promise.

Performance

The Pixel 8 devices run on the new Google Tensor G3 chip, which is based on Samsung's 4nm manufacturing process. It features a nona-core design with 1x 3.0GHz Cortex-X3, 4x 2.45GHz Cortex-A715, and 4x 2.15GHz Cortex-A510. The GPU is an Immortalis-G715 MP10.

The Pixel 8 comes with 8GB of LPDDR5X memory and the Pixel 8 Pro comes with 12GB of LPDDR5X, with no further variants. For storage, you get a choice of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1 TB UFS 3.1 on the Pixel 8 Pro and only 128GB and 256GB on the Pixel 8. However, the storage options depend on the region; in India, for example, both phones only come in 128GB configuration, which is laughably small by today's standards, especially on the flagship Pixel 8 Pro.

In terms of synthetic benchmark performance, the Tensor G3 is handily beaten by the latest generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which has double-digit percentage gains in every area. And then there is the Apple A17 Pro, which we aren't even going to bother comparing as it's not even in the same class. All you need to know is that even the A14 Bionic was faster than the Tensor G3.

Synthetic benchmarks are one thing but real-world performance is another. Unfortunately, things aren't exactly great here either. The Pixel 8 phones really don't feel any better to use than the Pixel 7 phones, which themselves weren't that great to begin with. The issue still seems to be of optimization, as most third-party apps on Android are optimized for Qualcomm chips, which is why even something like the Nothing Phone (2) with a slightly older chip and similar benchmark scores feels a lot smoother to use.

However, the worst part is that the Pixel 8 phones don't even feel great to use in Google's own apps. Scrolling side by side on the Pixel 8 Pro and the aforementioned Nothing Phone (2) in the Google Play Store, the latter was night and day better with a far smoother and consistent scrolling experience. The Pixel 8 Pro, on the other hand, was very jittery with consistent stutters that never went away no matter how many times the app was opened and loaded. In the Google Photos app, the Nothing Phone (2) also loaded image editing features like Magic Eraser faster than the Pixel 8 Pro and the results looked the same on both.

One could dismiss these as teething issues of new phones but after having lived with the Pixel 7 Pro for a year, we beg to disagree. The experience on that device was much the same, where it would routinely get lapped by Snapdragon devices costing a quarter the amount, often in Google's own apps but also in most other Android apps in general.

Gaming performance also wasn't great. The Pixel 8 Pro struggled to maintain 50fps in Genshin Impact at the highest setting when the newest iPhones can hit 120FPS on similar settings, especially with MetalFX image upscaling that looks indistinguishable from native on a phone's screen. There's also no support for ray tracing so if that's something you care about then you are out of luck here.

At this point, Google's decision to stick with the Samsung-manufactured Tensor chips seems inexcusable. The performance simply isn't there, neither in benchmarks but more importantly, in real-world usage. The phones mostly feel fine in use if you don't mind the jittery scrolling but this is simply not the desired experience of flagship devices. The chip also still runs fairly warm most of the time and while we didn't do battery testing here, we aren't expecting great things.