I’m a Pixel user. I own a Pixel 7. As a professional photographer, over the years I’ve found the Pixels to give me the best photos, with the most true to life colours and skin tones. I’ve appreciated the cameras on my reviews of several Pixel phones, most recently the Pixel 8a. 

But with the Pixel 9 Pro XL, things seem to have moved in a different direction. And now that I've used it for a few weeks, I have some thoughts about what Google has done with their latest flagship. Read on to find out. 

Variants and hardware

The Pixel 9 Pro XL comes in two variants: one with 256 GB of storage for Rs 1,24,999 and another, which I have, with 512 GB of storage and selling for Rs 1,39,999. Both variants come with identical specs otherwise, including the 16 GB of RAM. I have the off-white “Porcelain” colour with me, but you can also get the Pixel 9 Pro XL in “Hazel” grey, “Obsidian” black, and “Rose Quartz” pink.

Ever since the Pixel 6 line introduced the camera visor look, the Pixels have been gradually evolving. But the 9 series has taken a huge leap forward. I say forward because I personally like how the Pixel 9 Pro XL looks, but I know some people are not great fans of the new design direction. Overall, having used all the Pixel generations in recent years, I would say this is easily the most premium-looking and feeling hardware so far. It’s up there with the high-end iPhones and Samsungs. 

Of course, the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a huge phone. And with glass all around and shiny metal sides, it’s slippery as hell. Holding it and typing on it for long durations is uncomfortable for me. Holding it one-handed for Reels is also a challenge. I would definitely use it with a case if I were to buy one for myself, but then I would have to contend with the phone becoming even larger.

The rest of the phone is generously specced. Sporting the latest Tensor G4 processor from Google, the Pixel 9 Pro XL also features a 6.8” 120Hz LTPO display with a peak brightness of 3000 nits. 

The camera setup is similar to that of the Pixel 8 Pro, with the same 50MP primary sensor, a slightly different 48MP ultrawide and a 48MP 5X telephoto. The selfie camera is all new, bumping the resolution all the way up from 12MP to 42MP, with autofocus included.  

The battery is 5060 mAH, a smidge higher than the previous generation. Wired charging is up to a still slow 37W, but even this speed can only be achieved if you buy Google’s own charger or those specced appropriately. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is IP68 rated for dust and water resistance, and continues the lamentable tradition of leaving out the headphones jack. 

In use

I had the Pixel 8 Pro with me last year for a while and ,I have to say, using this phone feels not very different from that in terms of performance. The Pixel 9 Pro XL features an updated chipset, Google’s Tensor G4, but performance gains from the previous generation are modest. 

In one sense, it appears to be a deliberate choice to sacrifice some performance to have a chipset that runs cooler, and in my usage I can testify that this is borne out. By Pixel standards, this is a cool running phone and even extended 4K video sessions don’t make the phone uncomfortably warm. This is no doubt helped by the vapour chamber as well.

The large size, slab sides, and slippery surface make the phone an ergonomic challenge. But those familiar with the plus-size iPhones will find themselves right at home using the Pixel 9 Pro XL. 

Ergonomics apart, the phone is mostly a delight to use. The chipset may not be a chart-topper but in day to day use, it feels every inch the flagship it is priced to be. Virtually everything is fast and smooth with one exception, and this is specifically an Android 15 issue – the Discover screen is janky and buggy, sometimes taking seconds to load and at other times freezing up completely. I assume Google will fix this in a future software update, but as things stand it’s frustrating.

The huge 3000 nits display is lavishly bright, with the screen not only perfectly readable in sunlight, but even the colours looking vivid. The new ultrasonic fingerprint sensor is one big upgrade from the previous generations and I am grateful they’ve done this. It’s quick and accurate. It’s still not best in class, but I am happy to see the marked improvement.

The speakers are also top-class, loud and punchy. I was happy to watch videos on it, and I even found myself watching them without subtitles, which is a testament to how clear the sound is. 

Apart from the Discover screen bug, Android 15 on the Pixel 9 Pro XL is also a pleasure to use. I still have my old grouses with stock Android, such as the fact that it takes too much effort to switch between wifi networks or between SIMs, but I guess I’ve made my peace with them now. 

The Pixel 9 Pro XL comes with a raft of AI features, most of which are still very much in the realm of gimmicks. The Gemini assistant is capable and more conversational than the old Google Assistant, but I didn’t really encounter scenarios where I thought “wow, this is amazing”. If you’re the sort of person who gets excited by ChatGPT or Midjourney, then perhaps the built-in generative AI features may be of interest to you. But to me, the images and text they generate are uninteresting and useless. 

The Magic Editor is now even more powerful than before. You can completely reimagine images but here again, a more low-key but practical image editing tool would have been of more use. For instance, I can reimagine the sky above my apartment to look like the aurora borealis, but I can’t change the colour of my walls to pink, or the colour of my t-shirt (at least not without all kinds of random artefacts). The former may wow you for two minutes, but the latter is likely to be far more useful in the long run. 

The Add Me feature, where you can insert yourself into a group photo, is also a good gimmick that is fun to fiddle around with when the phone is new, but I don’t see myself ever making use of it in the real world.

Overall, the AI frenzy sweeping the world of consumer technology continues to be a lot of hype and razzmatazz and not very much practical utility, but again – your mileage may vary.

As tends to be the case with huge phones, the battery life is incredible. Virtually every day I would go to bed with 30-40 percent charge left. And on one day of exceptionally heavy usage, I racked up 8.5 hours of screen-on-time and still had around 8-9 percent left in the battery. The charging is rated at 37W but you need Google’s own charger for that. With the chargers I had at home, I could get what seemed to be a 20W charging speed, which means it took ages for this 5060 mAH battery to charge. 

As always the Chinese flagships are wiping the floor with the American phones when it comes to charging.

The Pixel 9 Pro XL offers the now-standard seven years of OS and security updates, which is reassuring for longevity.

Camera

I opened this review talking about the camera, and this is the key thing that sets the Pixel 9 Pro XL apart from the Pixels that came before. And, I am afraid, not in a good way. 

Don’t get me wrong, the Pixel 9 Pro XL packs a very capable camera setup, perhaps more outright capable than the Pixels that came before and at least as good as the iPhones it competes with. But the new imaging pipeline that Google is using makes the whole thing so frustrating to use, and the default end-results so different from what they used to be like, that I am deeply unhappy with this. 

Firstly, the Pixel 9 Pro XL tends to overexpose images and brightens up the shadows too much. Pixels were famous for their contrasty look that held on to dark shadows without making them look too HDR-y, but that philosophy seems to have been thrown out the window, particularly when it comes to pictures of people. Every image is made to cleave to a standard of “bright and even” irrespective of what the actual scene looks like. And far too often this means heavily brightened skintones and shadows.

The end result is still a bright, pleasing, detailed image with great colours, and many people would be happy with them, but I personally am not. 

Secondly, the preview image looks nothing like the final image. Perhaps this is a limitation of the chipset, but what is the point of offering a “Pro” model with manual controls if I cannot accurately preview the image that I am manually tweaking? On the Pixel 9 Pro XL, you have to manually tweak the sliders and then say a silent prayer that the resulting image will be what you have in mind, because it sure as hell is not going to look like the preview. 

When the stars align, the photo often looks superb, but the path to getting a superb photo shouldn’t be this fraught. 

To make matters worse, the Pixel 9 Pro XL forgets your carefully selected settings as soon as you shoot the image, so you have to once again fumble around cluelessly. And to add to the fun, none of the sliders have any numerical markers to show you what values you had dialled in, so if you want to replicate what you did the previous time, you’re just going to have to guess your way around.

The ultrawide and the telephoto are both equally capable, but again suffer from the same issues as the primary camera. The selfie camera also falls in the same bracket, with great detail and sharpness, but brightened skintones. 

Overall, the camera on the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a frustrating combination of extremely capable and bewilderingly unpredictable to use. 

When it comes to video, the Pixel 9 is solidly good. By default the quality is not quite up there with the iPhone, but Google does offer the Video Boost and Night Site Video features whereby the videos you shoot are uploaded to the cloud, and AI enhanced. The resulting videos look superb: noise controlled, lens transitions smoothened, the frame cleaned up, and the results are up there with iPhone video and perhaps even better in darker scenes and scenes with high contrast. But it’s worth remembering that this process takes hours, and is therefore not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. 

Pixel 9 Pro XL vs iPhone 16 Pro Max: Camera comparison

Which brings me to the comparison I did with iPhone 16 Pro Max belonging to my friend Hari. 

In the past, while I have enjoyed the iPhone’s photos, I have generally found the Pixels to offer a more accurate image, with better dynamic range, good contrast and shadows, and true-to-life skintones. 

This year, the philosophies appear to have been reversed. We shot a range of scenes using both the Pixel 9 Pro XL and the iPhone 16 Pro Max. While images of objects were mostly a tie, between the two, when it comes to pictures of people, the iPhone decidedly pulls ahead by providing more true-to-life exposure and shadows.

Have a look at these images side by side. On the left is a portrait shot from the Pixel 9 Pro XL and on the right is the same shot from the iPhone 16 Pro Max. The iPhone does a better job in delivering a realistic depiction of what was before my eyes. The Pixel photo is still a good looking photo and you’d probably be happy to share it on Instagram, but in Hari’s skintones and the colour of his t-shirt, the Pixel has brightened up the scene. And this is consistently what the Pixel does, especially when it comes to pictures of people.

The one area where the Pixel does a better job than the iPhone is retrieving blown out highlights, with even bright skies rendered quite well, as you can see in the example below. 

The other great thing about the iPhone 16 Pro Max is that it remembers your exposure settings. So once you dial in the camera to underexpose by a stop or two (and you have numbered values you can see), it stays like that until you reset it. 

The camera control button is a bit of a gimmick, but the range of adjustments offered and photographic styles feature the camera app offers makes the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s camera a photographer’s delight. 

Conclusion

Usually it is after three years of owning a phone that I start to wonder about upgrading. My Pixel 7 is now almost two years old and I was idly wondering whether the Pixel 10 might be something I could consider buying next year. But having seen the direction that the Pixel 9 Pro XL’s camera has taken, I am at a bit of a loss.

I have always preferred the Android OS (as you can see from the iPhone review that I did), and I personally can’t imagine switching to an iOS device as my daily driver. But the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s camera was so much nicer to use than the Pixel 9 ProXL’s that I did think about it, for a moment. 

For people less fussy about the cameras, especially about dialling in the perfect image, the Pixel 9 Pro XL is an excellent all-round phone. There’s virtually no major drawback. Performance is snappy, the screen is gorgeous, the sound is great, the battery life is tremendous and the camera, for all its flaws, is extremely capable and produces pleasing images. And if you like all the AI wizardry, that’s probably even more reason to consider buying it.  

Since the Pixel 9 Pro XL sells in the rarefied Rs 1 lakh plus category, the competition is mainly the iPhones and the top Samsung models and in many ways it holds its own. That said, if you're someone who likes to use iOS, I would tell you to simply just pick up the iPhone 16 series. If you’re an Android loyalist like me, it’s worth looking at last year’s Pixel 8 Pro, or wait for the new flagships from brands like Oppo, Vivo and Samsung, before taking a call on whether to buy the Pixel 9 Pro XL or its siblings. 

This Google Pixel 9 Pro XL was sent to the reviewer as a loaner unit for review purposes. The unit will be returned on completion of the review. Google has been given no advance information about the content of this review and exercises no copy approval.

Contact the author on X @vinayaravind.

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