Google Pixel 8 Pro Review // It Is NOT Perfect... But It Comes Close!
I received this in the mail not even an hour before my Uber arrived to get to the airport for a trip to Japan last month, so I set this thing up on the flight and used it the entire time I was overseas. This gives me an opportunity to share a really unique experience and review with you, since I was using features that made my trip less stressful and really fun!
Buy a Google Pixel 8 Pro here!
This video isn’t sponsored, but this phone was sent over via TeamPixel for review as a gift from google. Since I generally buy phones that are reviewed on this channel, subscribing is the best way to show your support and it’ll keep me in your youtube feed since youtube makes it seem like all our fav youtubers are doing disappearing acts here on this platform. Shoutout to Michael for being a Smore on my patreon page! Thank you for joining, let’s get into the review.
Colorways = Obsidian, Porcelain, and Bay - I love the Bay color, obsidian is my least favorite as it’s a lot harder to show y’all the details on camera since everything blends in together.
It starts at $999 unlocked for 128GB, with 256GB or 512GB options for $1059 or $1179 respectively. A 1TB model is available only for obsidian for $1399. All storage sizes include 12 GB RAM and a SIM slot (but support a Nano SIM plus an eSIM for dual SIM support).
By the way, if you’re interested in hearing my take on any of the 8 Pro cases or accessories, let me know in the comments and I’ll buy those and test ‘em for ya.
The dimensions of this phone are basically the same as the 7 Pro, down to the dimensions of the display. If you liked the size of the 7 Pro, you’ll like this one too. It’s also fairly lightweight at 7.5oz, and this matte corning gorilla glass victus 2 back is sooo nice to hold. It’s soft and not slippery, so even though I was caseless the entire time I was traveling, I didn’t worry too much about dropping the phone. It’s kinda soft and satiny smooth and it hides my fingerprints really well. The few times I did drop it, really the only place that got scratched up was around the lenses - with little micro scratches all around the lens casing. The aluminum frame is super shiny but I appreciate that the color accents the obsidian design.
This one large glass cover for all 3 lenses makes it a lot easier to clean but also to put a lens protector on since it’s just one large piece.
When it rained at a shrine in Hakone, I was able to use this phone with no issues as it’s IP68, and I ran around more than one dusty temple with zero problems if it fell in the dirt.
This display is what Google is calling their Super Actua display, and the biggest upgrade here is that it his 1600 nits brightness HDR and up to 2400 peak, which is crazy high but also appreciated since I was outdoors a ton while walking around places like Nara or Yokohama. It kept the display easy to read and see in bright sunlight, and the colors looked accurate. It does still hit 120Hz, and the 20:9 aspect ratio and it’s a flat display. To compare, the regular Pixel 8, which I don’t have in hand, has an Actua display, which doesn’t get as bright but is supposed to give you the same realistic HDR colors while in direct sunlight. This is a huge upgrade from the Pixel 7a which I found to be hard to see in bright daylight at 1000 nits.
Battery life was a big concern since the new 8 Pro carries a lot of computational upgrades like the new Tensor G3. In my use case - doing a lot of touristy things, using google translate constantly, cellular data, and vlogging - the battery lasted long enough to get me about 7 hours of on screen time - and in a battery drain test, I started at 100% at 10am, and got it down to 3% at precisely 7pm, with the phone radios on and at full brightness. It’s rated as a 5050 mAh typical size, and can do fast charging via a 30W USB C charger to get you 50% in 30 minutes, as well as fast wireless charging via Qi at 12W but you can get up to 21W with the 2nd gen Pixel Stand. Battery share is also included - a nice touch when I needed to top off my Pixel Buds Pro. It would be nice if they included a 30W charger in the box, but luckily I have one in my home studio and Nomad sent out these awesome travel-friendly chargers for me to test with the new Pixel while I was traveling. The battery life could be better - you’ll likely have to charge your phone overnight - but for normal usage, it should get you through the day.
With the 8 Pro supporting WiFi 7, I’m able to get great speeds from my home network, which is fiber with Wifi 6 APs. It does get better speeds than my S23 Ultra on my tests by a pretty significant margin.
Calls made via 5G sounded clear and connecting to my Pixel Buds Pro worked great for the long flights and while riding the bullet trains. The 8 Pro supports BT 5.3 with dual antennas along with Ultra Wide Band.
Fingerprint unlock is still optical, and about the same as the 7 Pro. It’s not as fast as an ultrasonic one, but it is pretty accurate. BUT we have an excellent face unlock that is fast and seems very efficient, though not entirely accurate in low light settings. This face unlock has Class 3 biometric security thanks to the new Tensor G3 which means it’s secure enough to use with banking apps or payments. In my experience it only really had trouble when I was in a dark environment, so I’d switch to the fingerprint sensor to unlock.
Audio through the stereo speakers is good enough for some regular entertainment or watching tiktoks but nothing that wows me. It does get quite loud and but bass still lacks.
CAMERAS
I spent a ton of time using the cameras on the 8 Pro. The primary sensor is 50MP still, but in auto it does 12MPs, so you can enable that 50MP optionally in pro mode, and here are the specs on screen. Using the main lens at full 50 MP will get you some finer detailed shots, but that also takes up more storage space. But at 12 MP, I looooved the clarity of my photos just straight out of the phone. They’re sharp and crispy, I don’t feel like I lost any detail in those pictures. There’s this gorgeous bokeh or aperture - depth of field - whenever you take pictures of close up subjects like you don’t even need to use portrait mode to capture a stunning photo, in fact, I prefer not to. The HDR quality looks great. I took so many photos outside during bright sunny days and it was really nice to be able to stand in the shade and still get a quality photo even with a bright background.
I brought the 8 Pro with me to this local Halloween pumpkin event and yes there is snow on the ground, welcome to my state. But Night sight did an excellent job of capturing photos at night. The lights didn’t blow out the whole image and everything in darker areas still had detail without looking grainy.
The Ultrawide lens does such a great job capturing clear photos with a wider field of view, I do think it helps to have this new 48MP Quad lens with autofocus. Also, I was very impressed by the telephoto capabilities. My zoomed in photos were better on this Pixel than previous models. My pictures are sharper, more detailed, even with far away subjects. My photos of this life size Gundam stand out since even the zoom pictures did it justice and captured little details.
I feel like I should do a whole separate video just about new features and how to use them because OH MY GAWD there are so many cool new things you can do.
There’s best take - which my sister would probably love with her 3 kids. It looks at similar photos you’ve taken like when you take multiple selfies with your friends and one of ‘em doesn’t smile in the best picture, you can use Best Take to grab their face from one of the other shots and layer it on top of the best group shot so everyone is smiling. I’ve seen some people saying “but it’s fake!” but like professional photographers have been using software for ages to fix group photos in very much the same way and it’s not a fake smile - you actually smiled in one of those photos. Google isn’t creating a fake face - your Pixel is just looking through those pictures to find one where you’re smiling. And it can do this with any pictures in your library.
Magic Editor is so cool. You can use it to erase subjects, sure, but you can also select a thing and move it, make it bigger, generative fill etc. So i tested it on this picture of my friends and some deer at Nara, and just erased some folks in the background then moved the deer and MY DUDES, it worked and I giggled like a child. I’m gonna toy around with this to make all my instagram photos look super fancy. Of course, again, it’s not perfect, so getting the excellent shot before you hit the shutter is always gonna be the best option.
Having pro controls - for example, so you can control the shutter speed, ISO, focus peaking, even which lens you’re using to take a photograph, is really cool but I didn’t find myself using it very often. The focus peaking is so cool because you can really control what part of your image is in focus. I found myself using the ISO and shutter speed settings the most mainly because sometimes, especially when overseas, lights will look like they are pulsing or flashing on camera and it’s because our cameras might be set at a different shutter speed and because of how electricity currents feed into lights - it’s this whole thing that I don’t wanna delve deep into here - but messing with those settings does fix the issue usually.
I used the 8 Pro to vlog. Being able to record my content at 4k 30p with 10 bit HDR was very, very fun. In some cases, I could tell it was trying really hard to stabilize my videos and not all of my content came out looking as good as it would on my traditional Sony camera. That was more-so the case in darker situations than in daylight. The internal mic is fine but there are instances where it doesn’t pick up my voice as clearly as I would hope, so if I was to use this for professional work, I’d definitely use an external mic.
Overall, a few video hiccups but it can definitely manage in most situations. One of my favorite features of video recording is it’s ability to get in focus shots while zoomed. This is better if you can get a stabilized shot but it still captures those details so well.
Again, we get epic new software features. One of my favs is Audio Eraser. This identifies all sorts of sounds in your video. I tested this while walking over to the Gundam Factory, and it was windy. You can use Audio Eraser to remove some of the noisy sounds from the video’s environment. It’s not perfect - for example, it makes my voice sound a bit hollow, but for a quick fix, it get’s the job done and will save me a ton of time in post production on vlogs. Say there’s licensed music in the background while you’re walking, you could erase that with Audio Eraser and not get hit with a copyright demonetization on a youtube video.
The selfie camera was so great for group photos. I really appreciate an wide field of view on a front facing lens for my group photos. And shooting video vlogs was really nice given the autofocus does a great job of keeping me in focus, especially when I switch from having another subject in frame to myself.
Here’s some examples, but for an entire travel vlog shot on the Pixel 8 Pro, subscribe to my travel channel, called Shannon Travels The World!
UPGRADES TO ANDROID
This phone ships with Android 14, which brings some more options to the lock screen, new wallpapers, and you get support for things like lossless audio via USB C and 10bit HDR.
I tested the new temperature sensor and I don’t have another tool to tell if the output is accurate, but I tested this on my coffee, which was room temp, my space heater, then the window while it was snowing outside. It certainly did show me varying degrees based on the object I was pointing it at so it does work - I just don’t know how accurately.
This is the first Pixel to come with 7 years of security and OS updates, and that’s a big deal because you could reasonable keep this phone for much longer and not run a greater risk of vulnerabilities. I also found interpreter mode to be incredibly useful when talking to folks in Japan and I do think it provided fast and pretty accurate translations for basic sentence structures.
In terms of stress testing the phone… I did do some gaming, video editing, and 3d mark test scores on here. The test scores were fair, but unsurprising.
Video edits were smooth as well as gaming, thought to be fair, my choice in mobile games is pretty chill.
The Pixel 8 Pro has been such a fun phone to use, so much so that I keep wanting to use it - and that’s because of Google’s attention to software and making it such a fun experience. I love all the little features they’ve added to make usability so important - things that I never asked for, but now if I switch away from Pixel, I miss a lot. Like Night Sight, and Hold For Me, the new pro controls for photography, and how flawless translations made my travels. Being able to select text from the background apps window and customize your lock screen with cute lil bubbly text without the need to download a third party loader.
Just maybe make the battery life a lil better and charging speeds on par with what our friends see internationally?
