The Pixel 11 Pro XL is a tad better than the Pixel 10 Pro XL as you might expect. The challenge is that…well, that’s about it, really.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Plenty of onboard AI smarts (if you like that kind of thing) | Tensor G6 still doesn’t stack up well against competition |
| IP68 water resistance | Less RAM than last year’s model is… a choice. Not a good choice, to be clear. |
| Qi2 charging works really well | HiLight notification is… a gimmick |
Score: 3/5
In this review
Google Pixel 11 Pro Specifications
Google Pixel 11 Pro Design
Google Pixel 11 Pro Camera
Google Pixel 11 Pro Performance
Google Pixel 11 Pro Battery
Google Pixel 11 Pro Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The Google Pixel 11 Pro used in this review was loaned to me by Google for the purposes of review.
I favour being upfront about whether a product is a loaner or if it’s going back, not that this makes any difference to the reviews that I create. Lots of sites don’t, and I personally don’t feel like you should trust them if they don’t trust you with that kind of information.
In a world rife with AI-led slop and “reviewers” with sloppy ethics, I think being clear with an audience should be a positive point of differentiation.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Pixel 11 Pro XL: Design
For the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL, Google’s design ethos has been to play it safe… maybe too safe.
Whether that’s true or not for you will, I think, come down to whether or not you feel that Google’s existing Pixel design style needed much in the way of tweaking, because what tweaks are present in the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL are very minor indeed.
We’re still talking a 6.8 inch OLED display with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for protection, though peak brightness has been pumped up just a little to 3600 nits compared to 3300 for last year’s iteration. It’s marginally smaller and lighter while retaining the same screen size, but at a level where you’d genuinely have to put both phones side by side to pick that particular change.
At 162.7×76.5×8.5mm it’s still a sizeable slab of a phone to carry around or stuff into a pants pocket, but you’d totally expect that for a phone that calls itself the “Pro XL”, wouldn’t you? For those who like a smaller phone experience, you could always opt for the regular Google Pixel 11 Pro and its 6.3 inch display instead.
Flip the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL over and you’ll see a slighty redesigned camera bar, though again I reckon you’d need a prior model to hand to particularly spot the differences in design.
One less subtle element of the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL’s camera bar design is the HiLight notification LED. It’s designed to let you know when you’re using Gemini hands-free if the phone’s flipped over, or if you want to set a specific HiLight colour for your contacts.
Mind you, you’d want to have a pretty small contacts list, because while the RGB LED light is theoretically capable of thousands if not millions of colour variations, as most are, Google in its infinite AI-led wisdom has decided that you can have exactly five colours to choose from.
As someone who frequently works from home, I’m maybe not the most social of butterflies if you know what I mean, but even I have more than five contacts, Google!
HiLight is a gimmick, and it amuses me that it’s been placed somewhere where Google’s had to cut a previous gimmick.
Google had placed a thermometer in the camera array of prior Pixel phones because… well, really, nobody ever really came up with a good reason why it was there.
It was just there… and now it’s not, but you do get HighLight, which feels similarly gimmicky and useless, at least until Google expands out the apps that can use it and the colours that are available.
In terms of colour choices, the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL does that thing that so many “Pro” phones do, where they think that everyone only wants serious “business” colour options.
Yes, OK, they’re called Canyon, Olive, Fog or Obsidian, but in the real world they’re Orange, Green, Blue/Grey or Black.
They are at least reasonably durable, with an IP68 rating that should see them survive a few bumps and knocks and maybe even some immersion events. Just don’t push it – and if you’re not au fait with how water/dust resistance works, I’ve got a full guide for you right here .
Or you can watch the video below:
Pixel 11 Pro XL: Camera
The Google Pixel 11 Pro XL packs in a primary 50MP wide f/1.7 sensor, 48MP 123˚ f/1.7 ultra-wide and 48MP f/2.8 5x telephoto sensor in its rear camera bar, as well as a 42MP f/2.2 selfie camera at the front… all of which feels rather familiar, somehow.
That’s because just from those stats, there’s no difference between the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL and last year’s Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, though if you dig a little deeper Google has made some under-the-hood hardware changes, with slightly larger actual sensors for telephoto and ultra-wide photography, which does give the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL a little more oomph when it comes to matters like low light photography.
Still, Google’s putting ever more faith in its computational photography rather than in improving the underlying hardware, with mixed results, because you are often relying on Google’s AI to finish off photos nicely for you. I’m not 100% sure that the “Pro” camera space wants that, but I’m willing to be proved wrong.
One area for example where Google’s AI almost certainly steps in to finish details is when you’re using the extremes of its zoom capability. The Google Pixel 11 Pro XL has the best telephoto of any of this year’s crop of Pixels, at up to 120x, though only 5x of that is actual optical telephoto. The rest is a mix of sensor compression, software and likely AI interpolation.
Let’s put that to the test with the same essential shot I used to test out the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold, of the clock tower at Sydney’s Central station.
Here’s the wide shot, all fine but of course the clock is a decent distance away.
I can push it straight to 30x zoom, the limit of the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and the results are decent, certainly better than the Fold manages.
At 120x, it’s definitely doing some AI-led smoothing.
Not terrible results if that’s what you want, but rather predictably if you push it more on surfaces that aren’t flat and predictable, ultra-long zoom shots like this can degrade pretty quickly.
If you’re a Pixel fan and you’re after the best Google does right now, the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL is rather clearly the way to go, though I do feel like Google should look to upping the hardware allocation on its Pixels for next year’s crop.
Pixel 11 Pro XL Sample Photos
Pixel 11 Pro XL: Performance
Like the comparable Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold, under the display of the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL you’ll find Google’s newest Tensor processor, specifically the Tensor G6.
However, unlike the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, you might not find 16GB of RAM to go with it. You can get a Google Pixel 11 Pro XL with 16GB of RAM, but only officially in Australia if you opt for the model with 512GB of storage, which will cost you $2299.
If you opt for the lower priced 256GB storage model at $2099, you get just 12GB of onboard RAM.
Which is problematic, and the fault lies 100% with Google here.
It’s not an unknown matter that RAM prices are through the roof right now, thanks largely to the needs of AI datacentres like those run by Google. There are, it seems, two ways around this problem.
Either you hike up the prices of your premium phones – and maybe even your mid-range or budget models down the track – or you cut the quantity of RAM that they’re packing.
For the 256GB model – and to be fair and clear, Google loaned me a 512GB model for review – Google has double dipped, because this is a phone that’s $100 more than last year’s entry level Pro XL model, but it’s got less RAM as well. I can’t say that I love that.
The issue that Google has had with the Tensor series ever since it started is that they’ve been underperformers relative to the best that you’d see from the likes of Qualcomm or Apple at the same time, and I already pretty much knew that this was going to be the case for the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL, because it’s got the same underlying architecture as the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold.
Yes, that does also mean that I had to sideload benchmarks, because Google really doesn’t like having that kind of comparison out in the open, it seems. My comparisons here are with the older Geekbench 6 because that’s what I have older figures for; I’m well aware that Geekbench 7 exists now too.
Here’s how the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL compares against similar premium phones and prior models in the “Pro” Pixel space:
It is a plus that Google’s in-house processors continue to get better year-on-year… but there’s no avoiding the fact that it’s trailling even behind last year’s flagship Android processors, let alone those from this year, and not by a small sum.
It’s an even worse picture when we consider GPU performance.
Here’s how its GPU compared using 3Dmark Wild Life Extreme:
Google’s argument here is that the AI refinements built into Tensor make issues like CPU and GPU speed far less of an issue, if they’re an issue at all.
While I am a noted AI skeptic – I very much prefer to write my own words, and while I’m a lousy artist, I’d rather employ actual human artists for art in any case – there’s maybe some merit in that for some users, though I would qualify that both by noting that on-device applications can still benefit from straight line CPU and GPU performance, especially if they’re not AI-tuned, but also that a lot of Google’s AI implementations rely at one level or another on calling back to an online Google server anyway.
Don’t believe me? Chuck the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL into airplane mode and see just how many AI features still function…
I often didn’t have to do that particular step sans a SIM in the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL anyway, because like the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold, I did have some Wi-Fi connectivity issues during my review period, with more dropouts than I’d really like even when other devices that were equally Wi-Fi 7 compliant were happily purring along on the exact same network.
Is that a chipset issue? Did I just get unlucky twice with these review models? Either way, sometimes even when I wanted to use AI features, I couldn’t.
Keeping with AI, one of the bigger benefits of getting a Pixel “Pro” phone in recent years is that Google has kicked in a nice little bonus year’s worth of its AI Pro platform, valued at $32.99/month. Good for AI users, or anyone who might want 5TB of onboard storage for their Google Drive wants too.
Google does still give you a taster of AI Pro, but it’s being much less generous this year, with the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL only getting a six month freebie, rather than the full year’s worth.
So it’s got less RAM in the smaller storage version, costs more and comes with less time to use Google AI until you have to pay for it… that’s a rather hard sell right there, Google!
Pixel 11 Pro XL: Battery
The Google Pixel 11 Pro XL packs in a 5115 mAh (typical) battery behind its frame, which certainly isn’t a bad number to have for your battery in a modern premium smartphone, though I can’t help but remember what last year’s model had there as well. The Google Pixel 10 Pro XL packed in a 5,200mAh battery, after all.
Battery endurance is still more than just a game of raw battery numbers, however, and that 85mAh difference may not mean much if the Tensor G6 can manage battery life even more aggressively than its predecessors.
Battery testing is a complicated and not always precise for everyone’s use cases. You can read about my own battery testing methodology here.
Here’s how the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL compared using my standard YouTube battery test:
Here the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL acquits itself quite well, though this is a somewhat softer test than some battery benchmarks might present. There’s easy scope here for all-day battery life for all but the most demanding users.
When it does come time to recharge the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL, you’re not provided with a charger, because that’s 100% the style of the time when it comes to even pricey smartphones these days, but you do have the choice of wired charging at up to 30W from your own charger, or Qi2 charging up to 25W if wireless is more your style.
That’s full and proper Qi2 with magnetic attachment, too, something that still seems to elude Samsung in its premium phone lines.
Google Pixel 11 Pro XL: Alex’s Verdict
Google’s best benefit for years now has been that it’s the provider of Android software, and as such, buying a Pixel meant that you were first in line for new Android features, all while typically paying less than the competition for the privilege.
While the first part there is still true, and the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL will see future Android updates and features first and for the next seven years, the second part… isn’t.
That’s a consequence of the RAM and storage price hikes that are absolutely ravaging all parts of the IT space right now, thanks to the demand placed on both by AI data centres and the way that capitalism works.
Google isn’t alone in this; I’d be at least a little bit surprised if this year’s crop of iPhones doesn’t also see price hikes, and we can look forward to a few years of rising premium phone prices if most analyst predictions are to be believed.
That’s pondering for the financial and IT market parts of a news site, however, and what you want to do is work out whether or not the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL is the right phone for you in the here and now.
It’s certainly a good flagship, and if you’re all in on Google’s AI vision and want that “clean” Android experience and can bear the rising costs of ownership, it will largely serve you well.
However, I can’t get past the fact that the changes on the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL are fairly marginal compared to the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, all with a higher price point and with less free access to Google’s best AI models.
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