Google Pixel 9 Review: Lacks Pro Appeal

The Google Pixel 9 is a nice phone, but for buyers at this price range you’re going to get a lot more phone if you can bump your budget up to the price of the Pixel 9 Pro instead.

Pros	Cons
Same Tensor G4 found in the pricier Pro Pixels	AI features are hit and miss… and will cost you more
Compact size but still powerful	Lacks telephoto lens
7 Years of Android updates	Gemini Advanced AI costs you money from day one

Score: 3.5/5

 

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In this review

Specifications
Design
Camera
Performance
Battery
Conclusion

The Pixel 9 is another phone – like the recently reviewed Apple iPhone 16 that, owing to some health issues of mine (boring, won’t go into here) has taken a while to review.

That has given me some time to more fully evaluate what’s good about Google’s “entry level” Pixel 9 – or at least entry level until the Pixel 9a breaks cover – and where it might not suit you if you’re after one of Google’s own-brand phones.

The Pixel 9 has solid-but-not-spectacular processing power, and it’s admirable that it’s running the same core CPU as its pricier Pro counterparts, but like those Pro phones, its biggest appeal is going to be if you’re planning on going all-in on Google’s Gemini Advanced AI features.

However, as they’re pay-to-use from day one, it’s hard to see a scenario where the Pixel 9 Pro isn’t the better deal.

Design

The Pixel 9 is built around a 6.3 inch 1080x2424 pixel OLED 120Hz capable display, giving it much the same look – and the same exact size – as the Pixel 9 Pro. The difference here is in the screen refresh rate, because while the Pixel 9 Pro/Pro XL/Pro Fold phones have Google’s take on an LTPO screen (in Google-speak it’s a “Super Actua Display”), capable of 1-120Hz, here you get a rather more regular 60Hz/120Hz choice of refresh rates.

This works well enough, though Google only offers you the choice to activate that 120Hz mode (“Smooth display”) for selected content rather than giving the more granular choice of adaptive, 60Hz always or 120Hz always as some other phones do.

The Pixel 9 follows the very slight design change trend of its bigger siblings, changing out the rear camera bar for what is more of a camera “pill”. It should be noted that if you do drop a case on it, it takes on more of the older style bar look if that matters to you.

Adding googly eyes (totally optional, not included) makes it look oddly guilty...

In terms of colour choices, you get to pick between Obsidian‬, Porcelain, ‬Wintergreen or Peony. All of the Pixels have Obsidian (black, as tested) and Porcelain colours, while Peony is the Pixel 9’s slightly different pink hue to the Pixel 9 Pro/XL’s Rose Quartz. That leaves Wintergreen as your one unique Pixel 9 colour if you’re fussed by such matters. It’s a pleasant enough light metallic green hue.

I tested with the Obsidian colour, AKA "black", and while that's typically the safe choice for many phones, it does have the classic issues of attracting dust and fingerprints mere nano-seconds after you take it out of the box. I'm me, so of course it went into a case the moment I unpacked it.

Like its more expensive siblings, the Pixel 9 is IP68 rated for water resistance and wrapped in Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2. That should give it enough durability to survive most everyday bumps and thumps, though I’d still advocate for the use of a phone case to take those knocks instead.

As with so many other companies, while IP68 phones should survive immersion in water, Google’s warranty does not cover damage due to water ingress, so go easy on the Pixel 9 pool swims, OK?

Camera

The Pixel 9 shares a lot of its DNA with its Pro counterparts, but the single largest area where they differ is in camera options.

Here you’re looking at just a 50MP wide and 48MP ultrawide camera lens at the rear, while the front-facing camera has a 10.5MP resolution.

Regular daytime shots work well, but you'd expect that out of any phone you didn't get out of a cereal packet these days.

One nice feature that’s drifted down to the regular Pixel 9 line this year is a fully secure (or as fully secure as these things ever are) facial unlock feature, which means you can use the camera to authorise purchases as it’s accurate enough to properly detect you for that purpose. That’s a feature that was Pro-exclusive last year.

The Pixel 9 can biometrically tell that this is me. Can't do anything about my face being my face, mind.

Low light, like this shot of a Sydney train tunnel works pleasingly well in most circumstances.

Mid-level light -- it was darker in this room than it appears -- is also handled reasonably.

Tip: Always photograph your valuables for insurance purposes. Hey, it's valuable to me...

The ultrawide lens also does decent work as a macro style lens as needed.

The cameras on the Pixel 9 land with me in much the same way as the somewhat similar array on the Apple iPhone 16 do.

They’re quite good cameras that can deliver decent results in most situations, but at the same time, these are phones with price points starting at $1,349, which is a lot of money to pay for a phone that doesn’t have a true telephoto lens.

You do get a default 2x mode in the Google Camera app, and that is of course just a crop from the standard lens, and you can push that further out with a hybrid digital zoom, but only to 8x.

Capping at 8x does limit quite how choppy the digital zoom looks, but it also means it’s a more limited phone than competing devices; by way of comparison Samsung’s Galaxy S24 FE does include a 3x telephoto lens… and that’s on a phone that’s cheaper than the Pixel 9 is!

Also read:
Samsung Galaxy S24 FE Review

You do also get access to Google’s range of AI-led features for adding yourself into photos, enhacing zoom quality with sharpening, magically erasing items from photos and even reimagining photos by adding elements to them.

These flowers are fake, but this is not an AI-adjusted shot in any way... yet.

I’ve gone into more detail around how well these features work (and where they don’t) in my Pixel 9 Pro XL review, and I don’t want to just retread all the same water, though I will note that adding a few months hasn’t made reimagine any less weird in terms of some of the results its spits out. To give Google credit, you are warned upfront that results may be less than perfect.

That’s totally true. Experimentally, I grabbed this photo of Nyssa, one of my cats.

She’s cute. What if I tell remagine to remagine her with a red hat on, though?

That's not my cat. Also, it looks like it's been drugged. Also also... it's not actually wearing the hat!

OK, it reimagined the entire cat there, and I guess I can’t entirely blame that.

What about if I ask it to put a red hat on the cat in the photo.

That will work, right?

WHAT EVEN IS THIS? WHO WANTS THIS?

Performance

One of the nicer aspects of the way that Google has designed and pitched its regular and Pro line Pixels over the last few years has been the fact that it doesn’t discriminate in terms of processors across either line. Buy a Pixel 9 series phone, whether it’s the Pixel 9 Pro Fold or the Pixel 9, and you’re getting a Tensor G4 processor either way.

The one sop to the price/performance ratio here is that the Pixel 9 gets just 12GB of RAM compared to the 16GB that you’ll find on all the Pro phones. That’s matched up with either 128GB or 256GB of onboard RAM. As has always been the way with Pixel phones, that’s non-expandable, unless you fancy having a USB flash drive or SSD hanging out the bottom of your Pixel 9.

Not keen? I don’t blame you.

The inclusion of the Tensor G4 is both good and bad, because while it allows for top-end Pixel performance on the lower cost model… the reality of Tensor G4 performance simply isn’t that hot for most mainline performance tasks.

The Pixel 9 benchmarks at a near similar level to other Tensor G4 phones, but that’s typically below what you can expect from other flagships – and even some phones that are priced a little lower. Here’s how it compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

It’s not surprising that the similarly priced iPhone 16 beats out the Pixel 9, because Apple’s silicon has the best performance of anything in a smartphone right now.

However, being beaten by both the cheaper Galaxy S24 FE and Poco F6 Pro isn’t exactly a stellar endorsement.

Also, yes, the Pixel 8 did do a little better in this benchmark back when I tested it; I stand by my averaged results and that’s what it is.

The Tensor G4 does provide a GPU performance upgrade over the Pixel 8, however.

Here’s how the same crop of phones compares using 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test:

While the argument can be made that most users don’t really push smartphones all that hard and the Pixel 9 has more than enough for everyday tasks – and that’s true enough – it’s equally hard to say that you should buy one on performance terms alone when you can pretty easily do better, at least for everyday tasks.

Like its siblings, this is a phone designed to last the distance at least in relation to software updates, with the promise of 7 years of OS upgrades, security patches and Pixel feature drops. That does start with Android 14, though Android 15 became available during the span of my testing time, so it's still a slightly open question as to what the "final" version of Android that this phone will get. That feels like a problem for future users at the very end of its likely lifespan, however.

Google’s contention is that the Tensor G4 is more finely tuned for AI tasks, because it’s so very strongly tying in its smartphone fortunes into selling around Gemini Advanced and the on-device AI work that it can do. The Tensor G4 is in the Pixel 9, as per Google, because it just wouldn’t be possible to run the Gemini Advanced features on-device without it.

Measuring AI performance on smartphones is tricky, but I’m struck by the same observation I
had back when I was testing out the Pixel 9 Pro XL. For consumers, the advantages of AI just don’t seem that great or that much of an astonishing leap forward to make it a must-have feature.

For example, Gemini Advanced is meant to offer you a more conversational and situationally aware way to converse with an AI using natural language, but it doesn’t take too much querying to hit limits it can’t deal with, or to end up with answers that don’t seem to make much sense.

Of course AI is evolving and theoretically improving all the time, and maybe that will “flip” to a position where it really is working that way – but we’re certainly not quite there yet.

The other catch here for anyone keen on Gemini Advanced is that while the Pixel 9 Pro phones come with a year’s worth of Gemini Advanced access (along with 2TB of Google Drive storage), the Pixel 9 does not.

You can get a one month free trial, but my understanding is that you can get that without buying the Pixel 9 anyway -- so it's not that much of a freebie.

If you do want to push the Tensor G4 that bit harder with some heavy AI work, you’re going to have to pay $32.99 per month for the privilege. More on that later...

On the network side, the Google Pixel 9 is a 5G phone, but only on sub-6Ghz frequencies. While I’m annoyed that Google dropped mmWave for all but the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, I can’t be quite as surprised for the Pixel 9, because mmWave has only been a feature of the Pro lines in years past, not the regular ones.

Battery

The smaller size of the Pixel 9 does mean that it packs in less battery power than the larger Pixel 9 Pro XL, though it shares the same 4,700mAh capacity as the pricier Pixel 9 Pro. That’s not a surprise, because they’re so very clearly built on the exact same chassis.

While many Android phones in 2024 feature 5,000mAh batteries, battery capacity numbers are not a direct way to measure actual battery life; while more is better in terms of having a bigger power tank to draw from, it’s really about how you use that power.

All smartphone usage is relative, because somebody playing an intensive game will burn through power at a much greater rate than somebody who purely uses the Pixel 9 to receive occasional phone calls.

My standard for this is a YouTube battery rundown test, and the Pixel 9 shows rather nicely just how well it manages its power, even if it’s not running from the biggest battery pack:

It neatly jumps well over the 90% barrier where I’d usually say that a phone might have trouble lasting through a full day, and then some. You’d have to really hammer the Pixel 9 to get it to run flat, and while that’s possible, any kind of moderate use should easily see you through a day.

That’s shown rather nicely through my extended YouTube battery test, where I run the same test over three hours, noting down battery usage rundown. Here the Pixel 9 truly excelled:

The Pixel 9 supports USB-C charging – though there’s no charger in the box – at up to 45W as well as Qi wireless charging. I had rather been hoping that Google might be the company to kickstart Qi2 on Android, but it wasn’t to be, with that plaudit instead falling to HMD with the HMD Skyline.

Google Pixel 9: Alex’s Verdict

Is the Pixel 9 a good smartphone? Yes, mostly, and there are some bright points to help it stand out. While the Tensor G4 isn't the fastest processor on the block, it's enough power for most users, and its particular tilt towards AI functions will have its fans, even if I'm not personally 100% sold on this approach. The more compact size does make it easier to carry around, and the battery life is absolutely superb for a flagship phone right now.

However... much the same is true of the Pixel 9 Pro (review coming soon), and that's a phone that's only $350 more. Now, you could reasonably say that $350 isn't nothing, and you would be right, but if you are keen on a Pixel 9 series phone, you're probably keen on AI and what it can do for you.

The Pixel 9 Pro comes with a year's worth of Gemini Advanced, 11 months more than you'd get with the Pixel 9. That's a difference of $362.89, or more than the price difference between the two for a phone that also packs in a nicer screen, more RAM and more capable cameras.

In that scenario, the Pixel 9 does start to feel like less of a compelling deal.

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Google Pixel 9: Pricing and availability

The Google Pixel 9 retails in Australia for $1349 with 128GB of storage, or $1499 with 256GB of storage.

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