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Beyond these features, quieter examples of AI continue to make the Pixel an excellent smartphone overall, from improving call quality to answering suspicious incoming calls for you, to the ability to pull up web results on anything you see if you select it.
A foldable version of the Pixel 9 Pro is also set to launch soon.credit: Bloomberg
Taking pictures
Pixel phones have long had impressive cameras that regularly outperform other premium smartphones, and that continues here. On the Pro model, the new 42MP front camera delivers great selfies in almost any lighting condition, and can zoom back for group shots. On the back, a wide, ultrawide, and telephoto camera array delivers sharp results from as close as 2cm away from your subject (provided there’s enough light and a steady hand) and up to 10x zoom.
Under similar conditions, Google produces photos that are closer to life than current Apple and Samsung phones, in my opinion. Colors aren’t overly saturated or warm, and artificial lighting tends to be just right. Sure, the portrait mode and panorama aren’t flawless, but they look great overall.
However, Google’s clear focus in building its future-proof photography system is on AI tools, which are more numerous than ever on the Pixel 9 Pro. While they all work, the results always have an AI feel to them, and applying AI editing to portrait photos is still a bit less convenient than the usual cropping and filtering.
Even at over 10x zoom, the Pixel 9 Pro takes some very nice photos.credit: Tim Biggs
A new feature called Zoom Enhance is a bit of a magic trick that TV investigators use on still CCTV images, except in this case it uses generative AI to guess what something looks like in greater detail than what the camera actually captured. If you zoom in more than 15x, this feature will be applied automatically when you take the photo, but you can also edit any photo you’ve taken with the phone, zoom in and activate Zoom Enhance to clean it up. It works better than the blurry or distorted results you’d expect on most phones, but the photos definitely end up with obvious AI artifacts like weird skin textures, wrong colors, or heavy ink lines.
Add Me, another new feature, is designed to address that common problem where you don’t get in a group photo because you took the photo. You can activate the mode, take the photo, then hand the phone to a friend and walk over to where the group just was. Your friend will see you superimposed on the photo they took, and when they press the shutter the system will stitch everything together. It has its problems if it needs to put you on a plush couch or in complicated shadows, but it’s about as efficient as a really good Photoshop.
and more artificial intelligence
The AI-powered Magic Editor, which you can use to retouch even the oldest photos taken on other phones, has some new features too. Auto Frame will analyze the image and give you a few framing options to choose from based on different shooting techniques. It might straighten the image, crop it, zoom in, or even move away from the subject. Obviously, many of these options require the AI to invent an entirely new frame, so results will vary.
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In one example, I reframed a photo of my son that I had taken from behind, while he was riding a motorbike. The system flipped the photo from portrait to landscape, and moved the subject from the middle of the photo to the bottom third, which makes the photo look much better at first glance. But it also means that about half of the photo is completely fake, and if you look closely you can see what looks like melted car bodies, power lines that aren’t connected to anything, and what appears to be a pile of cement blocks with chunks of highly visible material stuck to them.
The Reimagine option in the Magic Editor is more direct, where you can select any element in the image (as if you were going to remove it with the Magic Eraser) and type in a text prompt to transform it. This could mean ordering fireworks in the sky behind you, or turning an unwanted “No Smoking” sign into a band poster. As is always the case with these things, some of the results are almost indistinguishable from reality, and some are downright miserable.
For video, most of the AI features arrive when you turn on something called Video Boost, which sends the backup video clips to a Google server for processing. The video you capture is available instantly, but the boosted version generally takes a few hours to arrive. Boost smooths out noise and adds detail to videos zoomed in more than 5x, fixes color, makes low-light shots sharper, and optionally increases the resolution to 8K so you can capture decent stills from the video. In my limited testing, it did an excellent job of improving night-time video, just as Night Sight does for stills. I’m eager to try it out at a concert and see how the AI handles capturing performer details from a distance and with a lot of movement.
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