The beginning of a new direction Firstpost

Pros:
– Premium build and finish with IP68 ingress protection
– Excellent main and ultra-wide cameras
– Sharp and vibrant 120Hz OLED display
– Smooth and clean Android experience
– A handful of AI feature with more expected over time
– 7 years of software updates promised
– Good overall performance with relatively lesser throttling

Cons:
– Slow charging; no charger in the box
– No telephoto camera yet
– Expensive

Price: Rs 79,999
Rating: 4/5

The Pixel 9 arrived a lot earlier than usual; in fact, even before Android 15 showed up. Thankfully, we had it with us long enough to experience two major versions of the OS on this device. So how does it stack up against its predecessor and the competition? Are there any major upgrades this time? Is it worth buying yet? Time to answer all those questions and more.

Google Pixel 9 Design: Not as compact as before but more sturdy and polished

There is a noticeable change in design this time and largely for the better. The curved edges of the frame have been replaced with iPhone-esque flat ones, and the edge-to-edge camera band at the back is now a pill-shaped island; it still protrudes quite a bit. The phone does look better, and though still fairly compact as compared to most phones around, it isn’t as compact as the Pixel 8. But it still feels great in hand thanks to its rugged build and a premium finish without any rough edges.

The Pixel 9 has an aluminium frame and a glass back and the weight is just under 200 grams. The IP68 rating for dust and fluid resistance has been retained. The screen is perfectly flat and merges seamlessly into the frame; no curved edges this time. The bezels are narrow, and that includes the bottom bezel too. The display and the back are protected against scratches by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2. The frame and the camera island have a matte finish, while the back is glossy. Despite that, fingerprints or smudge marks were barely visible on the Peony (pink) variant that we got for review.

The volume rocker as well as the power button are placed along the right edge. Their placement as well as that of the in-display fingerprint scanner are spot on, and one can access them without stretching the fingers much. The scanner is easily the most responsive among the past three generations of Pixel phones. The SIM tray is located at the bottom along with a USB-C port and a speaker. One can use an eSIM too. A memory card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack remain absent.

Google Pixel 9 Display: Slightly larger and brighter with 120Hz refresh rate

Google reduced the size of the display from 6.3-inch to 6.2-inch on the Pixel 8 but is back to the former again on the Pixel 9. The HDR10+ compliant OLED display still sports Full HD+ resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, but is a lot brighter now with a peak brightness of 2700 nits. You do not get granular refresh rate adjustments like in case of phones with LTPO displays and you can only choose between 60Hz (default) and 120Hz after enabling Smooth Display from the bottom of display settings, something I would advise you to do.

The screen is bright and sharp with excellent colour reproduction and contrast out of the box. Pixel displays are generally tuned well, which is more of a necessity as you hardly get any colour adjustments. You just get two modes – Adaptive and Natural. The former makes the colours look slightly more vivid, while the latter does what the name suggests. Try both and choose one that suits your taste. Always-on display feature is also available if you like.

Google Pixel 9 Hardware and performance: Evolutionary upgrade in performance

The Pixel 9 is powered by Google’s fourth-generation Tensor G4 SoC that powers the entire Pixel 9 series. The company has dropped the extra core used in the Tensor G3 and gone back to an 8-core architecture. Despite that, there has been a jump in overall performance, even if it isn’t a big one. In terms of raw processing power, it is still no match for Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip but has certainly caught up with their Gen 2 SoC in synthetic benchmarks.

I must add that synthetic benchmarks aren’t the be-all and end-all of performance. Also, it is hard to gauge the AI crunching capabilities of the Tenson G4 using our current set of benchmarks, and those abilities may get even better with time. That said, the Tensor G4 breezes through day-to-day tasks like accessing social media or chat apps, watching videos, browsing the internet, opening multiple tabs on a browser and switching between them without a hiccup.

The Pixel 9 comes equipped with 12GB RAM and 256GB internal storage. It is great to see 256GB on the base variant itself (given its price tag), however, the company has still stuck to UFS 3.1 storage instead of moving on to UFS 4.0. Even some lower-priced phones from competing brands have been flaunting the faster UFS 4.0 storage for almost a couple of years now.

Moving on, the phone generally stays cool but does get a little warm after 30 minutes of gaming or if you click dozens of photos at a go. It doesn’t get alarmingly hot but the performance does throttle as the temperature rises. But there has been a noticeable improvement on this front, with the performance dropping to about 70 per cent and not to 50 per cent as in case of the Tensor G3. The performance throttling does impact the frame rates in gaming but isn’t noticeable in day-to-day tasks.

We ran a few synthetic benchmarks to gauge its performance and compare it with that of its predecessors and last two generations of OnePlus flagship phones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Gen 3 chips. You can check the exact scores of the Pixel 9 in the image below, while I paint a comparative picture. In Geekbench 6, the Tensor G4 managed to outscore the G3 on the Pixel 8 by 13 per cent in single-core performance and by a strong 24 per cent in multi-core. Interestingly, the scores are neck and neck with the Pixel 8 Pro that is also powered by the Tensor G3.

One thing to note here is that the G4 has one less core than the G3, so fewer newer cores do the job better. As compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 on the OnePlus 11, the Pixel 9 scores 21 per cent and 3 per cent better in the single-core and multi-core benchmarks respectively. Similarly, in the PCMark Work 3.0 benchmark, the Pixel 9 manages to score 12 per cent higher than the Pixel 8 but is more or less at par with the Pixel 8 Pro and OnePlus 11.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip manages to steer clear of the competition by a big margin with a 20 per cent and 44 per cent lead in Geekbench (single and multi-core respectively) and a 20 per cent higher score in PCMark as compared to the Tensor G4 here.

Lots of catching up to do for Google. On the bright side, the Pixel 9 became the first Google phone to max out the 3D Mark Wild Life benchmark. But in the Wild Life Extreme benchmarks, the results weren’t impressive with the Pixel 9 just getting its nose ahead of the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro while lagging behind the OnePlus 11 and 12 by a big margin of 40 per cent and 90 per cent respectively.

Having said that, the real-world gaming performance of the Pixel 9 is perfectly acceptable, and you can play most of the games out there on it. You may have to lower the graphics setting in some cases for good frame rates. Moving on to other things, the sound output is pretty good. The two speakers on the phone produce a loud and punchy sound output with good stereo separation. The phone is Bluetooth 5.3 compliant and has tri-band WiFi with support for a/b/g/n/ac/6e/7 standards. The call quality and reception on this 5G-compliant phone were perfectly fine during the course of our testing.

Google Pixel 9 Battery backup: Improved battery life but not the charging speed

The battery capacity has seen a marginal increment from 4575 mAh on the Pixel 8 to 4700 mAh here, but the actual battery life is noticeably better. The battery lasts well over a day of moderate use, and closer to a day and a half if there is no gaming or lots of photography involved. What hasn’t changed at all is the charging speed. Just like its predecessor, the Pixel 9 supports 27W fast charging using USB-PD 3.0 chargers. Google still does not include a charger in the bundle; just a USB-C cable.

We tried a bunch of third party 30W and higher USB-PD chargers including the Raegr RapidLink 1180 GaN charger that can go as high as 65W. The fastest time we clocked for charging the Pixel 9 from 1 per cent to 100 per cent was 88 minutes – exactly what we got for the Pixel 8. That makes it one of the slowest-charging phones around. The only saving grace here is that the Pixel 9 has a slightly higher-capacity battery. Most phones priced at half of the Pixel 9 get the job done in less than half the time. A faster charging solution is long overdue for the Pixels.

Google Pixel 9 Camera performance: Excellent main camera, upgraded ultra-wide camera

Just like Pixel phones from the past three generations without the Pro suffix, this too has two cameras at the back. There’s a 50MP primary camera with dual-pixel PDAF and optical image stabilisation (OIS) that seems to have been carried forward from the Pixel 8, and its performance isn’t too different either. The ultra-wide camera here sees a big change. The 12MP camera on the Pixel 8 has been replaced with a 48MP unit here with dual-pixel PDAF; this one has been borrowed from the Pixel 9 Pro models, which is great.

The ultra-wide camera also doubles up as a quality macro camera. A dedicated telephoto camera present on the Pro models remains an absentee. The main camera captures some excellent shots in bright as well as low light conditions. The colours are fairly accurate and the dynamic range is excellent, and the same goes for the contrast in images. The captured images have ample detail in normal as well as low light. It is hard to say if it performs any better than the Pixel 8 (which itself was great) but it certainly isn’t inferior.

The phone automatically switches to Night Sight mode when the light is low or you can do so manually. It brightens up the dark areas in the image just enough without going overboard or compromising on the detail. Pixel phones have been great at portrait photography and the Pixel 9 is no different. In portrait shots, the edge detection is spot on with a near-perfect background separation. It works well with humans as well as other things like flowers and animals.

As I mentioned, there is no dedicated telephoto camera here but the camera app does give you a 2X zoom toggle, which can be termed as hybrid or digital. While they aren’t exactly lossless, the 2X zoomed shots come out sharp, almost what one would expect from an optical zoom. The phone lets you zoom in till 8X, but things start to get noticeably soft beyond 5X with a sharp drop in detail. The AI does its trickery to an extent but don’t get too ambitious.

Moving on to the 48MP ultra-wide camera, the output is impressive and the colours and dynamic range are comparable to that of the main camera. The biggest improvement over the Pixel 8’s is its low light performance, and the colours and details are a lot closer to that of the main camera as compared to its predecessor. This is one of the few ultra-wide cameras you can use in low light without worrying about drop in quality. The ultra-wide camera has auto-focus and can capture some very good macro shots from up close.

The 10.5MP selfie camera seems to be ported from the Pixel 8 but it now gets auto-focus which boosts its performance. The front camera captures some noticeably sharper selfies with natural skin tones. It has a fairly broad FOV and is good at clicking portrait selfies too. The rear cameras can record 4K videos at 24, 30 and 60 fps and slow-mo 1080p videos up to 240 fps. OIS and gyro-EIS lend stability to the captured footage. A 10-bit HDR option is also available. The recorded videos from the rear cameras are sharp and stabilised and pretty good for this segment. The front camera can also record 4K videos at 30 and 60 fps.

Here are some sample photos from the Google Pixel 9:

Google Pixel 9 OS and user interface: As good as its gets on Android, now with more AI tricks

For the bulk of this review, barring the final week or so, this phone ran Android 14. Like all Pixel phones, you get the cleanest and the best Android experience at the moment. You get a pure Android experience without any bloatware and with the Material You design language. The user interface is fluid, totally lag-free and void of any major bugs; Android 14 had ample time to settle down after all. Just a week ago (at the time of writing), the phone received an Android 15 update.

That’s just the first of the 7 major software updates Google has promised for the Pixel 9 series. They started these extra long-term software commitments with the Pixel 8 series and it’s good to see them continue the tradition here. Post the Android 15 update, there hasn’t been any major change in UI, nor have we come across any bugs worth reporting so far. But there’s a lot more left to explore.

The buzzword for the Pixel 9 series is AI, or should I say Gemini? You do get a handful of tools on this phone to play around with, along with the popular Google apps that are seamlessly integrated. But more importantly, you get a super-charged virtual assistant that is capable of doing a lot more than the usual Google assistant found in other phones.

Features like object recognition using Google Lens or speech recognition or translation were already available. Now you have things like ‘circle to search’ wherein you circle an object on the screen and Google gives you more information about it. In addition to the Magic Eraser and Camouflage options, you also get the Magic Editor to enhance your images in different ways. Oh and Google also packs the Pixel Studio to make use of generative AI and let your creativity run wild and create images ranging from normal to abstract.

There are a lot more things to explore and that would be a separate article in itself. Check Pixel Tips on the phone from time to time to explore the new or enhanced features made available. Also note that AI, though fun to use, is still in its infancy and will only get better with time. So keep your expectations in check till then.

Google Pixel 9: Price, alternatives and verdict

The Google Pixel 9 is priced at Rs 79,999 for the 256GB internal storage variant with a one-year warranty. The pricing, though not tempting, is better than that of the Pixel 8 at launch. It is a good all-round phone but I would wait a bit longer for its price to drop before swiping my card. That’s always the case with all Apple and Google phones at launch; they offer much better value in the following year.

As for alternatives, there are a handful of them for you to consider, including some from Google. At the time of writing, Google’s previous flagship, the Pixel 8 Pro with 256GB storage was listed for a similar price as the Pixel 9. In addition to a larger, higher-res display, you also get an excellent 48MP telephoto camera that offers 5X optical zoom. You will miss out on a slightly more powerful SoC and some AI features probably, but it’s a very solid alternative.

If you are looking for something as compact or smaller, there are two options – 256GB variants of the Google Pixel 8 and the Samsung Galaxy S24. The price of the former fluctuates more than the stock market but is often spotted under 50K on Flipkart even outside of mega sales, where it sells even cheaper. Anything under Rs 50,000 is a great price for the Pixel 8. The Samsung Galaxy S24 can easily be scored under 60K currently and offers great performance, excellent cameras and has some AI chops too. Take your pick.