The Pixel 9 is the kind of device you get after a few generations of incremental progress.
One minor update after another doesn’t seem like a big deal compared to last year. A faster fingerprint sensor? Uniform bezels? It’s not something that makes headlines. But over time, the little things add up to something meaningful. That’s the feeling I get when I hold the Pixel 9, and I like it a lot.
The Pixel 9 is the only non-Pro phone in the 9 series right now, which as far as I can tell means it has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB and no telephoto lens. It’s smaller than the aptly named Pixel 9 Pro XL, is the same size and shape as the regular Pixel 9 Pro, and doesn’t fold in half like the Pixel 9 Pro XL. other 9 Pro does it.
But mostly, the Pixel 9 just works. The screen is bright and the battery lasts all day. The fingerprint sensor is fast and accurate. finally. While it's more expensive than last year's model ($799 vs. $699), that's basically the going rate for a non-Pro flagship phone. And for the first time, the Pixel line seems to have earned a place alongside Samsung and Apple. It only took Google a few years to get here.
Let’s be clear: From the front, the Pixel 9 looks like an iPhone. The rounded corners of the display, the flat sides — it’s all iPhone, and that’s fine. Compared to recent Pixel generations, I feel like it’s 80 percent less likely to slip out of my hand when I pick it up off a table, which I appreciate a lot more than the distinctive look the curved edges give it. The 6.3-inch display is slightly larger than the Pixel 8’s. Its 1080p display is low-resolution, but it looks sharp enough that it never bothered me.
The Pixel 9 comes with the same main and ultra-wide cameras as the Pro phones, but it doesn’t have a telephoto lens. Not every flagship phone comes with a telephoto lens, and the Pixel 9’s lossless 2x crop zoom is fine. But you don’t get the more dramatic reach of the 9 Pro’s 5x zoom or the nice portrait framing of a 3x lens like the one on the Samsung Galaxy S24. It’s what I missed most when I switched from using the Pixel 9 Pro to the Pixel 9 — much more than just a few extra pixels on the display or a handful of ai-enhanced photo or video features.
Other than that, you're not missing much. The screen is not affected. quite Just as bright as the Pros, but good enough to use in direct sunlight. Battery performance is on par with the rest of the Pixel 9 series. At the end of the day, it still had plenty of juice left and I never felt like I needed to recharge it at the end of the day, even with heavy usage.
Tensor G4, Google's new chipset, is present in all four Pixel 9 models. It's a solid performer for everyday tasks and doesn't seem to heat up as drastically as the previous generation, though if you spend 20 minutes running a media-heavy web page, willpower It also doubles as a hand warmer, but it doesn't look like it's going to burst into flames, you know?
All of this adds up to an experience that feels polished in ways that previous Pixels didn’t quite manage. The chips ran hot, the shapes felt uneven, and the displays just weren’t all that nice. The non-Pro Pixel, in particular, has been on a journey from upper-midrange to true flagship, mostly by improving the display refresh rate and adding minor camera features along the way. Both models also got some quality of life improvements over time, including the ability to use face unlock for payments and, new for the 9 series, a much-improved fingerprint scanner. The sort of things that make me feel a lot more comfortable recommending it to my parents or my hairdresser.
Google has fixed the hardware issue, and the software is as clean as ever. But this is a phone launching in 2024, so we need to talk about ai. There are a few features reserved for the Pro line, like Video Boost, which uses cloud-based ai to boost brightness in low-light videos. It’s not a huge loss, and the Pixel 9 has plenty of other ai features, like Reimagine, Screenshots, and Pixel Studio, which you can read about in my Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL reviews. Some of them are so good they’re problematic! But in short, it feels like it’s all a bit of a mixed bag right now, and the ai features are starting to pile up in a way that’s driving me crazy.
What do I do with a JPEG of a kid's birthday party invitation? Add it to screenshots? Ask Gemini to put it in my calendar? Or just find it in my messages every time I need to look up the party time or address? ai is supposed to save us from the latter scenario, and Google's various ai tools a bit Sometimes it works like this. So far, it has not been proven that this is the next platform change.
The Pixel 9 also comes with something more important, but much less flashy: seven years of OS updates. Sure, it comes with Android 14, which is odd since Pixels typically ship with the most recent OS version of the year. But the Pixel 9 will be the first to get Android 15 when it arrives this fall, so it doesn’t feel like much more than an interesting footnote. You’ll outgrow the Pixel 9 before it stops getting software updates, which is how things should be.
And that’s all the Pixel 9 has to offer: it’s a phone that the Android ecosystem has long needed. It’s simple, well-made, and designed to keep up with the times for years to come. It doesn’t have all the fancy features or the best camera hardware, but it has enough to make it a worthy alternative to the base model of Samsung’s S series, which is more or less the default Android phone.
There's a reason so many people choose a Samsung phone: they're really good, but they also come with a ton of features. stuff that most people don’t need, that border on bloat. They’re powerful tools if you know how to tweak them to your liking, but I suspect a lot of people buy them for the good hardware and just settle for the software quirks. Overall, I’ve preferred the simpler experience of using a Pixel phone, but the hardware never really felt on par with Samsung’s.
It's a phone that the Android ecosystem has been needing for a long time.
That changes with the Pixel 9. It's finally a phone for someone who just wants a really good device. phone. For someone who doesn't care about the difference between optical and digital zoom, who doesn't want to fiddle with a lot of customization options, and who wants to avoid thinking about buying a new phone for as long as possible, the Android ecosystem now has that option, and it's a very good one.
Photograph by Allison Johnson/The Verge
