Google is trying to get you off your phone. The Pixel 11 Pro is “A Phone Designed to Help You Use It Less,” the company promises. It can proactively help you book restaurant reservations, take the best frames from a video, and help you voice-text significantly faster. The pitch is that the new features bundled with the Pixel 11 series of phones can help fix your relationship with technology — one that Google knows has badly degraded in recent years.

But the hardware of the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL is very similar to last year’s models — and in at least one case, a downgrade — so those software features are pretty much the entire pitch. 

Over the last week testing the 11 Pro, I’ve been trying them all to see how much they can help me put my phone down. Like many experiences with Google software, when they work, they are genuinely helpful. But getting them to work often requires a very narrow set of circumstances that some Google engineer probably dreamed up in the “society if” utopia lab.

Google Pixel 11 Pro

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Incredible build quality Rambler is a game changer Camera Looks is a step in the right direction Magic Capture is a great feature	Less RAM for the base model than last year More expensive base model HiLight is a huge disappointment Proactive Assistance only works in very narrow circumstances

Where to Buy:

• $1099 at Amazon
• $1099 at Google
• $1099 at Best Buy

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Incredible build quality Rambler is a game changer Camera Looks is a step in the right direction Magic Capture is a great feature	Less RAM for the base model than last year More expensive base model HiLight is a huge disappointment Proactive Assistance only works in very narrow circumstances

Where to Buy:

• $1299 at Amazon
• $1299 at Google
• $1299 at Best Buy

The Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL are minor hardware updates compared to last year’s Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL. They both get brighter 3,600-nit screens. Their charging has been upgraded, with faster wired speeds and Qi2.2 for up to 25W when wireless. The 5x optical telephoto camera has a bigger sensor that Google says enables 30 percent more light intake. Storage now starts at 256GB, instead of 128GB. And there’s also a fancy new “notification light,” which I’ll get to in a bit. 

Unfortunately, these upgrades come with a downgrade too, for the base model at least. The 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL now start with less RAM: 12GB compared to the 16GB that came standard last year, the same amount as the regular Pixel 11. I’m testing the 16GB / 512GB model, so unfortunately I can’t tell you if the RAM decrease is noticeable. That base model is also $100 more expensive than last year, too, at $1,099.  

With such minor spec changes, Google has gone all in on software this year. And this time, that software’s primary purpose is to get you off your phone, or at least get tedious tasks done faster so you can get back to your life.

Perhaps the largest push in this direction is the Pixel 11’s new “Proactive Assistance” feature. This is a set of dynamic chips that appear when certain interactions happen on your phone, like a friend asking what your schedule looks like next week or if you booked that table at a restaurant yet.

For the most basic interactions, like checking availability or adding an event to my calendar, I found Proactive Assistance really helpful. I practically live inside my calendar, and text conversations about scheduling are common. When my friend Marc texted me asking when I was available next week, Gemini popped up and suggested checking my calendar for times. Outside of simple scenarios like that, though, Proactive Assistance gets less reliable. One of Google’s key examples is letting Gemini book a dinner reservation for you if you’re chatting about heading out to eat, but I had to receive a text with an extremely specific string of information to get it to work — and even then it only worked sometimes.

For example, receiving the text “Can you make a reservation at Frankie Spuntino next Saturday at 7pm?” surfaced a chip to agentically try to make the reservation. But if the message doesn’t include the date or time, it won’t invoke anything at all. Most of the time when the chip does show up, it disappears the moment I reply. Occasionally it will stick around if the AI thinks we’re still talking about the restaurant, but those instances were few and far between. I wish Google would keep the chip around for at least a few messages, or have it float around the messages in some way.

One promise of large language models is the ability to understand what you mean and remove the requirements for smart keywords, so it’s odd that explicit keywords are still necessary to get so much of Proactive Assistance to work. I can see what Google is trying to do with this and I can maybe see a future where it gets refined, but as it stands, it’s simply too inconsistent. Plus, I had to manually toggle on Proactive Assistance and add OpenTable to connected apps in settings, which I just don’t think most people will know to do. As my colleague Cameron Faulkner puts it, “You need to be proactive to get Proactive Assistance to work.”

Proactive Assistance is advertised as working with other scenarios too, like surfacing your flight information when someone asks what time your flight is or bringing up the right photo when someone asks for it. But both of these scenarios either failed or were inconsistent for me. Asking when my flight is supposed to land surfaced nothing even though I have flight information in my Gmail, and when my friend asked for a photo of me from 2024, it surfaced photos from 2024, but none of me. It’s disappointing that this feature only works in such narrow circumstances. I can see the vision, but the execution just isn’t there yet.

Another feature that got a lot of marketing hype but flatlined on its delivery is HiLight. You may have noticed the temperature sensor is missing on the Pixel 11 Pro. Instead, Google has replaced it with a multicolored LED ring hidden inside the flash that can glow when different things are happening on your phone. Again, in concept, I love this idea. Google wants you to be living your life, with your phone placed face down on the table so it can’t distract you unless HiLight notifies you of something you need to pay attention to. In practice, HiLight is so badly executed that it’s frankly embarrassing.

Right now, HiLight can glow for exactly two things. First, it will glow and animate when you’re speaking with Gemini, but only while your phone is face down on the table. These are two things I do not do very often. When I use Gemini, I’m generally typing to it, and when I do use Gemini voice mode, my phone is in my hand or sitting screen up. If this was just one of the many things HiLight could light up for, I wouldn’t find it so offensive. But at the moment, the only other thing HiLight will glow for is for calls from your favorite contacts. I wish I was kidding.

If I’m getting a call from a favorite contact, I just want my phone to ring. Again, if it was just an additional feature, then sure, I guess. I don’t mind having an additional indicator that a favorite is calling me while my phone is face down. But if the call is coming through anyway, it’s really not that much effort to turn the phone over and see who it is. To make it worse, you can only choose from five colors, and one of them is white!

Customizable RGB LEDs were a feature we lost long ago, but when we did have it, it was almost always possible to map to just about any notification you wanted: red for a new email, green for a WhatsApp message. Google has confirmed that it’s looking to add text notifications from favorite contacts to HiLight, but why not just make it customizable to any app? This feels like such a missed opportunity, and it’s wild to me that it wasn’t better thought out before launch. Right now, it’s just acting like my flash, like it’s always been.

There are some new features that I’m finding genuinely useful that do help me stay in the moment, though. I was most pleasantly surprised by Rambler, a souped-up voice-to-text tool powered by Gemini. Rambler removes the filler words that voice-to-text would normally pick up, does proper grammar and punctuation without explicitly asking for it, and will even rewrite misspeaks mid-recording. The speed of the Pixel’s voice-to-text has been one of its strong suits ever since Google started using its own Tensor chips on the Pixel 6, but Rambler makes this even better, to the point where I’m dictating the text on my phone whenever I have the opportunity. It is a genuinely great feature, saves me time, and almost makes it feel like I’m having a conversation in real time while texting.

As is tradition, Google also introduced a bunch of new camera features this year, and perhaps the most prominent is Magic Capture. The feature is front and center in the camera app right next to the photo and video modes, which tells you something about how confident Google is in it. Start a Magic Capture, point it at what’s happening, and when you’re done recording, Gemini will do some processing and pull out what it considers the best photos and video clips from the session.

During the Made by Google keynote last week, Google demoed the feature by recording some people shooting hoops on a basketball court. In the demonstration, Google said you could simply hold your phone and let it record while you take in the moment with your eyes. I have tried this exact scenario quite a few times, and let me tell you, it is extremely difficult to keep your subject in frame if you’re not staring at your screen. Magic Capture did a great job of pulling relevant images and clips from my recordings when I was making sure to keep my subject in frame by, you know, staring at my screen, but unless you have your phone mounted on a tripod or something, it’s naive to think you can ignore your phone completely.

That caveat aside, I really like this feature. I take a lot of videos on my phone, but I’m much more likely to revisit pictures. With Magic Capture, I can have both. The main caveat seems to be that stabilization isn’t as good on the clips it cuts compared to clips you’d take in video mode. Even so, I think Magic Capture will be useful for parents trying to capture moments of their kids, without needing to work so hard to get the perfect smile for a photo. Instead of marketing this feature as something that lets you be in the moment by not looking at your phone at all, it would probably be better to pitch it as something that will automatically grab great photos and short video clips for you, and all you need to do is point your phone and hit record.

While Magic Capture took most of the spotlight in Google’s keynote, maybe the most discussed photo upgrade this year is Camera Looks. I did a whole interview with Google’s camera chief about this feature going deep into how the new system was made, and there’s a lot of potential in the execution. Camera Looks is a new photography feature you can think of similar to Fujifilm’s film simulations, which let its cameras emulate different film styles on the JPGs they put out. On the Pixel 11 series, there are four modifications of the standard camera, with Original, Natural, Shadows, and Vanilla giving subtle tweaks to your image. But if you want to get more out there, there are six additional creative looks, called Editorial, Velvet, Classic, Digi, Black Tie, and Minimal.

Each of the looks can be modified to your liking, with adjustable settings like contrast, highlights, shadows, vibrance, tint, warmth, sharpness, and grain. What makes this a really interesting feature to me is that Google is adjusting the amount of computational processing it’s doing at capture, based on the settings you choose; it’s not just applying filters later. For example, the Digi mode will do less frame stacking and the Minimal mode will apply less sharpness and contrast.

I really dig the looks, even right out of the box. They span from basic edits to quite inspired, and if you’re looking for something that gives you the “film simulation look” straight out of camera, these definitely deliver. It was high time Google added some more creative looks to the Pixel, especially considering it doesn’t have nearly as robust a third-party camera ecosystem as the iPhone. I’ve personally made the Minimal mode permanent on my phone for its unsharpened, minimally contrasty look, occasionally switching to Classic, but after testing them all, I think Velvet and Editorial will get a lot of use, since they have the most “film aesthetic” of the bunch. With less processed photos, you can actually see texture in photos, which is normally washed away by noise reduction algorithms.

Overall camera quality on the Pixel 11 Pro series is great this year, and practically the only reason to pick up a Pro Pixel over the standard 11, aside from wanting a larger phone, in the case of the XL. The primary sensor is technically new, but Google tells me it’s the same size as last year and was swapped in because it uses slightly less power. The biggest camera hardware change is the new larger telephoto sensor, which Google says captures more light, and I can tell. Telephoto cameras are usually the weakest link in a smartphone’s camera arsenal, but even at 10x zoom, which is a 2x crop of the telephoto sensor, it was hard to notice any significant quality degradation. Plus, the transition between sensors is much smoother now, with only a very slight jump when switching between lenses.

The Pixel 11 Pro also includes a 120x Pro Zoom mode, enabled by the new image signal processor in Tensor G6. Like the 100x Pro Zoom on the Pixel 10 Pro, Google is using generative AI to upscale your highly zoomed-in images to make them look more realistic. On objects without a lot of sharp edges this actually does a pretty good job, and Google will give you both the non-AI-enhanced and enhanced versions so you can see the difference.

I was in Spain during last week’s solar eclipse, and the Pixel 11 Pro did a good job of turning a zoomed-in photo of the moon from a blurry mess into something that looked good enough to elicit responses of awe when I posted it in Slack. But that was a relatively simple image, and shots with a lot more detail often look like an early AI-generated image, with skewed angles and edges, garbled text, and muddy tones. I’d only really use this if you needed to see information you can’t see with your normal eyes, not for artistic purposes.

The Pixel 11 Pro also gets a new, faster Night Sight, which Google says is about three times faster on average than the Pixel 10 Pro. In testing, most Night Sight images I took only needed to be held for one second, and I got all the same benefits you got from holding the phone for three or more seconds previously. This is the kind of quality-of-life update I love to see, and I’m glad Google is continuing to improve here.

I love Rambler, Magic Capture, and Camera Looks. If you’re looking to upgrade your phone this year, they’re legitimately great features. But after a week of use, it’s clear to me that the Pixel 11 Pro is not yet smart enough to help me use my phone less, despite what Google claims. Proactive Assistance is only bound to save you a few seconds and a few taps compared to just opening the apps and doing the steps yourself.

If you were hoping for the Pixel 11 Pro would help address your phone addiction, that’s probably not going to happen. But if you’re looking for a phone with the best voice-to-text on the market, great cameras with good built-in style, and solid hardware, the Pixel 11 Pro delivers. 

Photography by David Imel / The Verge

If you look at a photo taken by a smartphone today, it’s hard to find much that’s technically wrong. Faces are bright and visible. The skies are pristine and blue. Even at night, scenes are well lit and noise-free. If the physical limitations of a tiny camera are what you’re trying to solve for, you could probably label smartphone photography a mostly solved problem.

But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says Isaac Reynolds, who leads the Pixel camera team at Google. Some people want a perfectly optimized photo, Reynolds says. “But there’s a growing number of people who want something that they feel is more authentic or traditional, by their definition.”

That’s what Reynolds and the Pixel team are setting out to solve with Camera Looks, a total rethink of how the camera captures and styles an image on the Pixel 11 series. The phones include a new suite of processing tools aimed at giving people much more control over the camera’s output. At first glance, they look a lot like filters, with names like Black Tie, Classic, and most strikingly, Digi, in reference to the growing trend of buying cheap digital cameras from the early aughts. But unlike a filter, which generally applies editing tweaks after the processing happens, Camera Looks is changing how image data is processed at the sensor level.

“The pipeline spans the entire system,” Reynolds says. “It’s inside HDR Plus. It’s inside the processing engine.  It’s inside the camera app as well in how we make certain decisions about auto exposure and integration time and number of frames packaged and captured.”

In the last decade or so, smartphone cameras have been engineered to do battle with the limitations of physics using what’s known as “computational photography.” Too dark? Night mode uses multi-frame image stacking to brighten the photo without adding too much noise. Need to zoom in but don’t have a telephoto lens? An on-device model can artificially create data it expects to be in your photo. Too small of a sensor for natural blur? Phones can use subject segmentation to recognize objects, cut out the subject, and emulate depth of field. 

The result has been crisp, clear photos — and also a lot of (mostly younger) consumers carrying around old iPhones and cheap point-and-shoots from the early aughts to get a simpler, less processed, and (to their eye) better look.

The Pixel 11’s new Camera Looks feature is Google’s response to this growing trend. And to solve it, the Pixel team is allowing users to dial back how much processing happens when they snap a shot. Some of the Pixel’s Camera Looks will merge fewer frames together, leaving the highlights a bit blown out instead of compressing them to a midtone. Some of them won’t apply as much sharpening and will instead leave the image softer on the edges. You could argue that these new photos are technically “worse” — with reduced detail and dynamic range — but the result should be a photo closer to what any given user actually wants. This is a completely different way of thinking about computational photography, using tools to optimize for style instead of for technical perfection. 

Until now, the Pixel camera pipeline has done the same type of processing for every user, and any edits to match their preferred style had to be made after the fact. But when an image is already fully processed, you’re stuck with the data and artifacts caused by that processing. “Once you’ve processed it that way, you can’t do less. If there was a merge artifact, that is baked in. It’s irreversible,” Reynolds says. With the Pixel 11, “we bring it a lot earlier, and that way if you are looking for a minimal look, which is minimally processed, we simply don’t do the processing at all.”

This, I think, is the most Google way to handle this change in camera mindset I could have imagined. In order to keep people from being too confused about technical jargon like tone compression or frame merging, Google is intelligently making processing decisions for you based on style selections most users can understand — and more importantly, can see. Reynolds tells me that there were long debates inside the camera team for just how many sliders users should have access to, and they landed on more than you’d probably expect.

“ There are so many in there that I actually had to have an escalation meeting with my PM and my UX team about how many controls we were allowed to put in there,” Reynolds says. “There’s a lot of controls that photographers say are critical to have. We had a lot of trouble cutting it down.” For every Camera Look, you’ll get a set of six or more different levers, like contrast, warmth, tint, and saturation. And some Looks, like the black-and-white look Black Tie, will give you extra options, like red, green, and blue filters, which darken certain frequencies of light on black-and-white film.

This is notably different from the way Apple is currently thinking about cameras on the iPhone. Since the iPhone 13, Apple has included “Photographic Styles” in its camera — a series of presets that users can dial in through only two settings, tone and color (brightness/contrast and saturation). Google gives you access to these settings, too, but you’re also getting access to computational settings like sharpness and grain, which can more dramatically tune the look of your image before you shoot.

Giving users this much control over their images is a major step change for Google. The last time I had an in-depth conversation with Reynolds was in 2019 for the launch of the Pixel 4. At the time, Google’s priority was not to make a camera at all, but rather a magic box, where the user would simply point, shoot, and get what it considered the “perfect” image.

Simplification is not the priority this year. Now, it’s about choice. But Reynolds is still convinced that Google’s default settings are correct for most people, so the first option in the list of Looks is called “Original” — the experience Google has delivered for years. “ We do user studies with large N counts that are global, where we very, very carefully control the demographics, and we’re very confident that the original Pixel look is the right look,” he says. “We have no debate about that.”

There are simpler looks that only make subtle changes from Original, like Natural, Shadows and Vanilla, but there are also much more stylized Looks, like Editorial, Classic, and Velvet. If I were a betting man, I would say Google styled these directly after Fujifilm’s popular film simulations, but Reynolds won’t quite go that far. “These are film-inspired,” he tells me. “I would not say that these are film copies. I wouldn’t want to tell you that this is supposed to be Kodachrome or something.”

I expect that the most popular Camera Look will probably be Digi, though in my brief time with the phone I was partial to Minimal. The Digi Look is inspired by digicams, digital cameras from the early aughts that have low dynamic range and high contrast. In just the last five years, search volume for “digicam” is up 500 percent, according to Google Trends, and cameras that used to sell for $5 at thrift stores now go for hundreds of dollars on the secondhand market. Some companies like Canon have even caught wind and are rereleasing old digicam models just to cash in on the trend. It makes sense for Google to want to adopt the look, too.

I’m extremely happy to see Google changing things up in the camera department. At least for me, Google’s Pixel camera processing has gotten far too clinical, and lost the realism that once made it so revered. Now, it’s adapting to what a growing audience says they want from a camera — something real, stylized, and unique to the way they want to see the world.

Photography by David Imel / The Verge