The Google Pixel 10 has decent hardware, but unless you’re particularly heavily invested in Google’s vision of an AI future, it’s a hard phone to recommend.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Qi2 charging for easy magnetic attachment | Mediocre low light performance for a premium phone |
| AI features like Magic Cue show lots of promise… | … but these are promises that largely aren’t being lived up to (yet). |
| Nice range of colour choices | Pixel 10 Pro/XL are better, while Pixel 9a is a LOT cheaper |
Score: 3/5
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Buy The Pixel 10! | Buy On Amazon |
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In this review
Google Pixel 10 Specifications
Google Pixel 10 Design
Google Pixel 10 Camera
Google Pixel 10 Performance
Google Pixel 10 Battery
Google Pixel 10 Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Pixel 10 used in this review was sent my way by Google Australia, and they don’t typically ask for phones back.
This has no influence on the content of my review outside making it feasible in the first place.
I mean, I could put on a shadow puppet show of thoughts around what it might be like without the phone to test, but that wouldn’t be all that useful, even if it was quite a different approach to phone reviewing.
Google has no input into the editorial content in this review, and that’s how it should be, especially as so many more reviews and sites are using AI slop to pad out their content or compromising their ethics (if they had any in the first place) with shill reviews. I don’t do that. For more on ART’s ethics policy, see here.
Design
The Google Pixel 10 is, like the Pixel 10 Pro XL built in the current design style that Google favours, which means we’re talking mostly pastel-style tones built into phones with significant camera bars at the back; not much has changed here from prior Pixel generations to speak of.
The Pixel 10 is built around a 6.3 inch 60Hz-120Hz OLED display, not quite up there with the best LTPO panels you can get in a premium phone, but not entirely surprising given that this is Google’s lowest cost Pixel 10 device, at either $1349 (as tested) with 128GB of storage or $1499 with 256GB of storage. That’s not expandable, but on the Australian models, like the one I’ve tested, you do get a physical SIM card tray, accessed from the top of the phone.
Google takes the very traditional view of the split between its regular and Pro series phones when it comes to colour choices; I’ve already complained at them about how the Pixel 10 Pro colours are on the duller side, but this does mean that the Pixel 10 side of the fence does get to have a lot more fun with colours, with Obsidian, Frost, Indigo and Lemongrass finishes to choose from.
Are those slightly silly colour names? Of course they are, but I do rather like the deeper blue of Indigo, and the Lemongrass model that Google sent my way is certainly eye-catching if you like lime coloured phones.
The presence of the camera bar at the rear of the Pixel 10 does mean that it’ll never lie flat on a desk, but like its bigger sibling, because it’s horizontally placed near the top rear of the phone, it at least forms a mostly-stable ledge where other phones rock around more perilously.
Controls follow Google’s norm for volume and power on the right, though if you’re shifting from a Samsung phone you’ll find they’re reversed on Google’s own hardware with volume below the power/assistant button. There’s a USB-C port at the base for power and data transfer, but like just about every other premium phone, no 3.5mm headphone jack.
There’s definitely something to be said for smaller and more powerful phones, and at 152.8x72x8.6mm with a weight of 204g, it’s a pretty easy phone to hold in your hand for extended periods of time.
I will always advocate for cases as protective mechanisms, and with further disclosure in mind, Google sent me the colour matched Pixelsnap Lemongrass case to drop onto the Pixel 10. It’s quite a close colour match, though its matte finish does mean you lose the reflective shine of the glass back of the phone. On the upside there, not touching the glass back means you also don’t cover it with fingerprints.
In durability terms, the Pixel 10 is rated at IP68, which means inadvertent dunking should be survivable, but going crazy with ongoing surf adventures isn’t wise.
Camera
One of the bigger differences between previous Pixel phones and their pro counterparts was the lack of a telephoto lens on board the lower cost units. That was the case for last year’s Google Pixel 9 and it’s also the case for the lower cost Google Pixel 9a that came out earlier this year.
Google’s clearly had a change of heart in this respect, because alongside the Pixel 10’s 48MP wide and 13MP ultra wide sensors, you’ll also find a 10.8MP 5x telephoto sensor. At the front, it features a 10.5MP sensor for your selfie needs.
It’s great to see the telephoto present in the Pixel 10, but Google still isn’t giving away the entire Pro camera recipe here; it’s more simply giving you a few more tools on the non-Pro side.
At $1349, the Pixel 10 still comfortably sits in the price range that I define as premium, and premium phones do need to provide better than average performance in camera terms to justify those higher prices. You can buy just about any phone over about $250 and get passable daylight shots, so it’s in the tougher conditions that I look for how well a camera runs.
First stop there for the Pixel 10 was low light performance, where I included it in my head-to-head shootout against its bigger sibling and other competing premium phones:
I’m not surprised that the Pixel 10 gets outshot by phones that do cost more than it does, but the bigger problem here is that Google’s general AI-led approach to low light shooting is still very much present here. It lags behind the best that Apple and Samsung bring to the party, whether you’re talking low-light selfies or more general shots.
The presence of telephoto is quite welcome – it’s honestly nice to have smaller and more easily held phones when shooting long distances – but the 10.5MP telephoto sensor only natively goes out to 5x zoom, up to a maximum zoom of 20x via digital cropping with a healthy dose of Google’s AI thrown into the mix.
Most long digital crops are poor, and keeping it to just 20x does limit the damage that can be done here. As with the Pixel 10 Pro XL, you do also get a post-processing option for enhancing your zoom shots, though this is just the older “Super Res Zoom” found on last year’s Pixel Pro phones, not the Pro Res Zoom sharpening feature found on the Pixel 10 Pro/XL devices.
Super Res Zoom can enhance some shots, but the results can also often look quite artificial, not surprising when you consider you’re using AI to try to discern some kind of “best” result.
Take for example this King Parrot:
Australian native birds. Excellent critters, but this one’s a bit far away. Let’s zoom in.
Zooming in gives us a larger King Parrot, but you really can tell it’s a digital zoom.
Can Super Res Zoom save the day?
No. It can make its underside wing feathers glow an unnatural neon hue, however.
The other big AI feature in the Pixel 10 is Camera Coach, Google’s AI-led method for teaching you how to better utilise the camera features you have by suggesting different framings, angles or ways to make your pictures truly pop.
Conceptually, I love Camera Coach, because I do like the idea of letting people naturally discover new techniques and go beyond a spray and pray approach to taking photos. The issues with Camera Coach are identical here to the Pixel 10 Pro XL, in that while the idea is sound, the implementation is glacially slow.
In order to work, Camera Coach has to assess the scene it’s looking at, run it through its AI filter and then start guiding you through ways to take your shots. Many of its suggestions are fine, but its guidance isn’t enforced, so you can click past a step without it realising you’re doing so, or miss what it’s trying to teach you. Because it’s quite slow, it’s totally useless on any moving object, and even subjects that agree to be photographed may well lose patience with you waiting for Camera Coach to do its thing.
Google Pixel 10 Sample Photos
I am honestly trying to cut back on the number of cat photos I take while testing phones. Somehow, they keep on happening anyway.
Kuromi is technically a rabbit, not a cat, so I’m safe here.
In regular light, the Pixel 10 puts its best foot forward. I do not regret this pun for even a second.
Those more car-savvy might know what this car is. I just know it’s a car.
The Halal snack pack. A fine advert for Australian multiculturalism, though not exactly a healthy lunch.
The Pixel 10 does a fair job of snapping selfies, though it can’t make me pretty. Nothing can.
Low light from the rear cameras is OK, but you can do better.
Low light selfies are not good. Maybe this is how to make a better looking selfie of me, though. Hmm.
Performance
The Google Pixel 10 is built on Google’s new Tensor G5 processor, backed up with 12GB of RAM and either 128GB or 256GB of storage.
Typically what I find with those phones is that I can’t benchmark them prior to launch because Google rather nastily blocks their usage specifically on Pixel phones. That was exactly the experience I had testing out the Pixel 10 Pro XL prior to launch.
I did have the Pixel 10 in the same timeframe (and had the same issues) but enough time has passed that Google’s lifted its arbitrary block, so I could run my usual benchmarks directly from the Google Play store without needing side loading.
So how does the Pixel 10 compare?
Here I’ve pitched it against phones selling at the time of writing this review that were available at similar price points. Some of these phones have dropped in price recently, but if you’re spending this level of money, it makes sense to get the best you can get, which is why I’ve included them, alongside some of the Pixel 10’s predecessors.
Here’s how the Pixel 10 compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
While it does beat out the Pixel 9, as you should expect, it’s seriously lagging behind its competition, including two phones that came out last year and one that’s recently seen some serious price cuts to put it into this discussion – though quite how long Galaxy S25 Edge price cuts will last remains a rather open question.
The Pixel 10 does fare a little better on the GPU front, by way of 3DMark Wild Life Extreme:
Benchmarks are not the final word on performance, and the reality of Tensor G5 is that it’s certainly up to the task of running most intensive Android apps. As with everything Pixel, you’re also looking at 7 years of OS upgrades and security updates, plus “Pixel Drops” of new features, though the most exciting ones there tend to be within that first year of a phone’s release date.
The other selling point for the Pixel 10 is meant to be AI, but here there’s some significant roadblocks in the way. Buy a Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL or Pixel 10 Pro Fold and you get a year’s worth of Google AI Pro thrown in for free, a “saving” of $395.88 presuming you were already going to subscribe to that tier. The Pixel 10 does not get that offer, with only a month trial of Google AI Pro, a more paltry $32.99 discount… but then this is a trial you can take up without buying a Pixel 10 at all, so it’s not really a saving at all.
The bigger AI issue I’ve hit with the Pixel 10’s AI is that most of the features don’t really feel fully implemented as yet. As with the Pixel 10 Pro XL, Magic Cue is meant to drag out my information in contextual ways that help, as long as I agree to that. Honestly, normally I’d say no (and you can, it’s not mandatory), but even with it enabled, I never really saw it fire up.
Maybe it’s the way that I’m holding it… no, wait, that was iPhones back in the day, but perhaps I could wave this off as just being my own usage patterns were it not for that being the experience that many of my Australian IT journalist peers have had with it too.
I do get that this is the nature of an evolving AI market, and maybe at some point Magic Cue will become as indispensable on smartphones as apps are right now.
We’re not there yet, however, and you’ve got to be pretty committed to Google’s particular AI vision for these features to be particularly appealing. My general advice is always to buy for what a product can do right now, not what’s promised in the future.
Battery
Google slightly primed the battery pump for the Pixel 10, bringing it up from the Pixel 9’s 4700mAh battery to a healthier 4,970mAh. A nice sounding figure, though I can’t help but realise that it’s still 30mAh below the typical 5,000mAh you find in most Android phones, including plenty that are considerably cheaper than the Pixel 10.
Still, battery life is not just a game of battery capacity numbers, and Google’s made some bold claims around the Pixel 10 being capable of more than 30 hours of battery endurance.
As always, battery endurance is a question of the apps you use, and everyone’s usage is going to differ at some level. To give this some context, I ran it past my standard battery test suite – you can read more about how I test batteries here https://alexreviewstech.com/mobile-phone-battery-tests/ — to see how it compares:
On the plus side, the Pixel 10 easily gets past the one hour 90% barrier, and that’s typically where I find phones that won’t last a day might fail. Every percentage point above 90% can equal extra hours of endurance, lending some credibility to the idea that you could get 30+ hours out of the Pixel 10’s battery.
On the minus side, note the phones above the Pixel 10 in that exact test. They’re the older Pixel 9 and the cheaper Pixel 9a, both of which manage just that little bit better than the Pixel 10 does.
The Pixel 10 does have a not-so-secret weapon in its arsenal, however, and that’s around how you recharge it. It’s a premium phone, so no charger is included in the box, but it does support up to 30W wired charging or Qi2 charging at up to 15W.
That is slower than the Qi 2.2 25W charging supported by the Pixel 9 Pro XL I’ve already tested, but you do at least get the advantages of inbuilt magnetic alignment making wireless charging that touch more efficient and a whole lot easier to manage.
Google isn’t the first Android maker to offer Qi2 – HMD gets that plaudit by way of the HMD Skyline – but its implementation is better, with a solid magnetic attachment that was noticeably missing on the Skyline.
Slipping the Pixel 10 onto the Belkin UltraCharge Pro 3-in-1 Magnetic Charging Dock has worked wonderfully every time I’ve tested it, even if it’s not quite taking full advantage of the power of that particular charging station.
Google Pixel 10: Alex’s Verdict
The big problem that Google has with the Pixel 10 specifically is that it really does sit in an awkward space.
Google’s AI ambitions are clear, but just as they are with the Pixel 10 Pro XL, there’s not quite enough in fully realised and compelling AI yet, so you’re betting on features that you can’t properly use just yet while not getting the best hardware performance possible at this price point, especially compared to Android competitors.
Even if you’re an Android die-hard, while there’s not too much to be upset about with the Pixel 10’s hardware setup, the Pixel 9a is right there, and at the time of writing it can be had for around half the asking price of the Pixel 10.
It’s not quite as fast and of course the cameras aren’t quite as shiny – but it’s considerably better than simply being half as good, making it the better buy if you’re after a Pixel upgrade.
If you must have this year’s Pixel, the price gulf between the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro phones isn’t that huge. I’m yet to test the Pixel 10 Pro — I will if Google’s willing to send one my way — but based on my experiences with the Pixel 10 Pro XL, that would seem to be the smarter buy as well.
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Google Pixel 10: Pricing and availability
The Google Pixel 10 retails in Australia with pricing starting at $1349.
|
Buy The Pixel 10! | Buy On Amazon |
The Pixel 9a is also a solid option if you’re particularly keen on a Pixel specifically:
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Buy The Google Pixel 9a! | Buy On Amazon |
If you use the above link, ART may earn a small commission. I’d prefer direct reader support to be honest, but it does help keep the server purring along.
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