Featured Products
If you buy something from a link, 6 Months Later may earn a commission. See our ethics policy.
by Josh Teder
It’s been 6 months since I bought a Pixel 9 Pro XL and after spending half a year using it alongside other flagship phones. While I don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect phone, I’ll take you through whether or not I think this is the closest Google has come to making one, plus if Gemini is actually useful, how good the new camera system is, and whether this is a phone I’d recommend.
Design and Build Quality
The first highlight of this phone is its physical form factor. It feels like an iPhone in certain respects with its rounded corners and side rails, but still maintains that distinct Pixel look with that gorgeous camera bar. I think this is by far the best looking Pixel the company has ever made, and the materials also feel in line with the price that Google is charging. It’s still lighter than other phones like my iPhone 16 Pro Max at 221 g, though a bit heavier than previous Pixels and is actually heavier than the brand new Galaxy S25 Ultra. I’m hoping Google keeps it at this weight or can shave off a few grs in the next iteration of this phone.
Something I immediately noticed with this Pixel is the new ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. This finally gets rid of that occasional lag and bright light shining at you in the middle of the night that older Pixels had.
Software and Performance
The software features on this phone are another major highlight, as with previous Pixels. The animations on this phone feel fast, and I haven’t had any performance issues with the Tensor G4 chip Google put in this phone. Another thing I’ve always loved about Pixel phones is the typing experience, and the Pixel 9 Pro XL doesn’t disappoint. I find I type on it the most accurately, and Google speech dictation, which uses on-device models, is pretty accurate in my experience and works well.
The phone also features adaptive sound and vibrations that adjust to your environment, making notifications more noticeable when you need them, and the updated Pixel weather app with its AI summary and new design has been great for those who spend a lot of time on phone calls. The call quality has been solid.
Call Quality and Features
All right, and these are what the mics sound like with a phone call on the Pixel 9 Pro XL. I’m just recording this call on my iPhone, not using any buds or anything. Let me know how you thought the audio was, and here’s an example of how the microphones on the phone itself sound just recording into the recorder app. Let me know what you think, and here’s how it sounds if I was actually just talking on the phone to someone. Let me know in the comments: does it sound pretty decent?
And of course, because it’s a Pixel, you get all the great call assist features like Direct My Call to help you visually see options in a call menu, Hold For Me for when you call customer service, Live Captions for phone calls which you can find in accessibility settings, a new scam detection feature, and then there’s my personal favorite—call screening. The Pixel will pick up the call for you, ask why somebody is calling, and if they respond, it’ll let the call ring through and actually show you in plain text what the person said to the assistant before you pick up the call.
Another feature I’ve really come to appreciate that’s new this year is Pixel Call Notes, which can record phone calls, automatically summarize your calls, and highlight what you need to know, as well as give you a full transcript of the call. Though this feature isn’t so much a differentiator for the Pixel as much as it’s a “I’m glad it’s here” type of a feature. Both the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the S25 Ultra have similar features.
Software Features and Small Touches
Some other software-related things I’ve enjoyed with this phone are all of the small touches you get like the Now Playing feature, a feature that identifies music playing in the background; Flip to Sh, where when you put your phone face down it automatically turns on Do Not Disturb. You also get the excellent grayscale color scheme at bedtime. You can turn on color scheming the icons, though frustratingly not all of them will work by default—looking at you, Snapchat. Oh, and yes, this phone still has a thermometer built into it. It’s still kind of an oddball thing to put in a phone, but that one time I needed it, I was glad I had it.
Battery Life
Next up: battery life. This has been a pleasant surprise with this phone for me. It has easily lasted all day on trips and has been generally comparable to my iPhone’s battery life, which is the most recent other phone I’ve been testing over the long term. Speaking of other phones, the 9 Pro XL’s battery is also noticeably better than my Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s, where the Pixel 9 Pro will be close to 50% battery left by the time I put it on the charger, the 9 Pro Fold will be closer to 20% with the same kind of use. My screen time per day is only about 1 or 2 hours on average, with maybe another 2 to 3 hours of background activity for music and podcasts.
Camera System
Now let’s talk about the standout feature with this phone: the camera system. Overall, it’s the smartphone camera system I generally have the least frustrations with. It’s my favorite one to use because of its default color choices. It just doesn’t blow all the highlights to hell like my iPhone, and it doesn’t oversaturate or over-sharpen photos like Samsung’s phones have tended to do in the past for me. And while Google has no similar feature to Apple’s updated Photographic Styles, which lets you adjust how overprocessed your photos look after the fact, Google doesn’t really need to have that feature because they just look right from the get-go. My Pixel 9 Pro XL’s camera system is much more in line with producing photos how my actual dedicated cameras take them.
Now, part of this is because for the Pixel 9 Pro XL and the other 9 Pro phones, Google actually rebuilt the entire HDR pipeline from the ground up. You can definitely tell there’s still photos from a smartphone camera, though sometimes they’ll even surprise me, like this waterfall photo from my Iceland trip. That’s one I still can’t believe a phone took. The coloring and overall look here just is pretty stunning, actually. If I was going on a trip like I did and I didn’t have a fancy camera like the Fujifilm X100 6, which I’ve reviewed, or my Sony A7 Mark III, this would be the phone camera I would want to use.
Video Quality
But what about video quality? That, in my experience, has always been the Achilles heel of Pixel camera systems. Well, not anymore. The video quality is quite good, especially if you use Video Boost, which now renders two times faster and can upscale 4K to 8K (which I don’t frankly need), but even more important is that you can now use Video Boost with any lens you want, and yes, you can use it to shoot 4K 60. I find it makes sometimes subtle but often noticeable upgrades in video footage quality, though you do still have to wait a bit for Google servers to process the footage.
And for comparison, here’s how they look compared to the iPhone, which is often considered the gold standard in smartphone videography. Here’s that waterfall again. I think both look pretty good here, though the coloring on the Pixel might even look slightly better. I think Google just really nailed the coloring noise and have netted better performance in low light thanks to their new dual exposure technology when shooting video, which will combine exposures for the best footage quality.
The only issue I’ve run into with video on the Pixel is the autofocus on the 5x camera. For my phone at least, it just struggles at maintaining focus on a moving object, whether there’s falling snow in the background or a clear blue sky—it doesn’t really seem to matter. Overall though, this is a phone camera system I would, and have been, very happy with using over the long term.
Gemini
Next, let’s talk about Gemini, Google’s AI assistant that comes built into the Pixel 9 Pro XL. Overall—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—Gemini is actually useful. Not only can it help you accomplish things on your phone like opening up apps, adding things to your grocery lists (your standard Google Assistant fare), but in 6 months, I think Google has closed the gap compared to the Google Assistant quite a bit. And just before filming this video, they just announced that they’re actually going to phase out the Google Assistant for Gemini, and I can see why, because over the past six months there have been many situations where I’ll ask the assistant on Nest Hubs, for example, for some piece of information it failed; I’ll go over, pick up my Pixel, ask the same question to Gemini, and get the often correct answer.
What have I used it for? General search queries for how to use devices, like how to turn off the tap to cast feature on Pixel phones, which allows you to bring your phone to a Pixel Tablet to move media from your phone to it (which works well—I just kept accidentally triggering it way too much with where I often place my phone and wanted to turn it off). I’ve asked Gemini cooking suggestions and sometimes just general questions like “Is SNL new this weekend?” It’s actually better than the Google Assistant at responding to a query like that, but for answers I need to be 100% accurate. But often I find it would have been faster to get the information directly from the source versus using Gemini to give me an answer but then having me go check to make sure that answer is correct.
Gemini does still have limitations, like being able to play from Apple Music, but it now can at least play from Spotify as well as do other things like control parts of the Pixel related to Gemini. While I don’t think it itself is just AI hype—like it actually does have some utility and expanded capabilities from the Google Assistant—but what about all of the other AI features that you’ll find on this phone?
AI Features
Some are genuinely useful, like quick edits with Magic Eraser and Magic Editor or the new Zoom Enhance, which gives digitally cropped-in photos more detail, though in some instances it just kind of ends up oversharpening the photos. Other features, like the new Pixel Studio image generator, I haven’t utilized as much and do feel closer to that AI hype bubble, but at the same time can still be fun.
The same thing applies to the Reimagine feature, which lets you add in objects to your photos that weren’t there. It’s a feature I rarely use and only really as a party trick. I also didn’t end up using the Add Me feature much. We tried this out a lot on our trip to Iceland and Ireland with mixed success. Maybe one photo would be one I’d actually put in a frame, but I’d still know that it was kind of a fake. There’s just something about looking at a photo and being like, “Yep, that was what was there when I took it,” and for me at least, I definitely do not get that same feeling when I look at these photos.
Another feature that I thankfully haven’t had to use is the Emergency SOS via satellite feature, but it’s definitely a feature I’m glad is there. I didn’t use the Pixel Screenshots app as much as I thought I would, but that’s probably more from me bouncing between like four or five different phones in the course of 6 months. But the thing I do think this gets right is a dedicated place for all screenshots, a way to back them up to the cloud if you want, and adding some on-device AI smarts to them as well to make information more searchable.
Downsides
Now let’s talk about some of the downsides I’ve encountered with the Pixel 9 Pro XL. The biggest downside for me is the pulsewidth modulation and overall display quality. The Pixel’s is around 240 Hz, which is one of the lowest refresh rates compared to peers like Apple and Samsung, and other phone manufacturers are even well above that, like my Nothing Phone 2, which is well above 1,000 Hz. PWM stands for pulsewidth modulation, and it’s how a lot of OLED screens control brightness by basically rapidly turning on and off the display to make it appear dimmer or brighter. I can’t tell if it’s the lower PWM number, but the Pixel’s display is my least favorite display to look at out of the flagship phones I switch between.
Part of this is also due to the lack of white balance adjustment with the Pixel 9 Pro XL. You can’t even manually adjust it like you can in Nothing OS or Samsung’s One UI, and the S25 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro Max both have settings where it will just adjust the white balance automatically.
The last downside I’ve had when using this phone is when you’re using Gemini and you have the Pixelbuds Pro 2 in your ears, and I want to use the wake word to get the Gemini assistant to do something like play some music. I’ve noticed that my Google Assistant devices, like my Nest Tubs in my home, they don’t seem to realize that I have my buds in and I want to just talk to the assistant on the phone, and they also answer and start playing music, which has been very annoying.
Conclusion
So do I ultimately recommend the Pixel 9 Pro XL? Yes, absolutely. I’d recommend this to anyone who wants an Android phone or phone in general with an excellent camera system, snappy software, someone who likes the Pixel design language, and especially if you want to spend a little less than the other flagships.
Google also has a pretty strong lineup of accessories now for their phones, like with the Pixel Watch 3, which has a really nice and bright display plus a great aesthetic overall where you can’t quite tell where the display ends, and it now comes in a larger size. The Pixelbuds Pro 2 are a solid set of earbuds that go along with this phone, and I’ll have reviews coming out soon on both of those Google products, so if you want to see them, make sure you’re subscribed to the channel.
Pixel 9 vs 9 Pro vs Pro XL
What about the Pixel 9 versus 9 Pro versus Pro XL—do you really need to go Pro? In general, the reason why I almost always buy the pro versions of these phones is the telephoto camera. The other differences between the Pro and regular are the larger display on the Pro XL, 8K video recording with Video Boost, a 42 mapel selfie camera. The selfie camera is noticeably better on the new Pros. The Pro also gets you Pro Photo controls, Video Boost, Night Sight video, access to high-res photos, and Gemini Advanced.
The high-res mode was actually something I used a lot. It’s perfect for when you want high-quality photos but also the ability to crop in on an image without losing a significant amount of detail. Pro Photo controls are something I use less often but something I still want to have for the occasion I can’t get something in focus, which yes, actually happens more than you would expect with this camera system, and Video Boost for me at least is an absolute must-have for getting the best quality videos.
It’s not every year where you can easily justify the $200 price difference between the Pro and non-Pro Pixels, but this year I think it is easier to recommend the Pro, especially if you want the better camera features.
Final Thoughts
The Google Pixel has come a long way from its humble beginnings where many questioned whether Google would even commit long enough for it to gain any traction before killing it, but the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a damn good phone. It’s not a perfect phone, but it’s the closest Google has ever come to making one and is easy to recommend.
