Google Pixel 8 Pro review: Pure Android bliss

Contrary to popular belief, there’s more to Android than Samsung phones. Google is at pains to show this with its excellent Pixel smartphones, particularly as it is the company that actually owns and builds the Android operating system that is the only alternative to the iOS on iPhone.

The Pixel 8 Pro is the biggest and best Google Pixel phone to date, but also the most expensive ever at £999. If you dig the bold design and don’t mind a large phone, the screen, performance, and cameras are good enough to recommend it alongside the latest iPhone 15 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.

• Very big
• Matt glass stops fingerprints
• Three colour options

The Pixel 8 Pro has a distinctive metal ‘camera bar’ that houses the triple lenses alongside a flash and newly-added temperature sensor. On our black review phone it looks quite slick, and all fingerprints are hidden thanks to a silky matt finish of the rear glass.

We’re fond of the design – it’s unique and distinctive although we do find the phone difficult to use with one hand given it’s so enormous, but the same applies to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Plus, or any other big-screen device. You can also get the phone in a beige ‘porcelain’ colour or a sky blue called ‘bay’ that is surprisingly bright – we’d check it out in the flesh before going for blue as it’s not everyone.

We like that Google doesn’t muck about with superfluous buttons – there’s just the volume controls and a power button on the right edge, with a USB-C port on the bottom, though for charging there’s only a cable in the box and not a charging brick. You’ll have to buy one separately.

• 6.7-inch OLED
• 120Hz refresh rate
• Flat and bright

Unlike the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 6 Pro, the Pixel 8 Pro has a flat screen rather than being curved at the left and right edge. It makes for fewer reflections but we feel the curve added a bit of design flair while making the older phones feel slimmer and look more attractive. Thankfully the flat display on the 8 Pro is very good indeed, and the brightest we’ve ever used on a smartphone.

It can automatically scale up to its brightest setting when in direct sunlight, making everything on the screen perfectly legible. Everything looks great too thanks to vibrant colours and a 120Hz refresh rate keeping apps and text scrolling smoothly. The tech can get the rate right down to 1Hz when you’re not using it too, such as when the phone is locked but you’re using the useful always-on display to show key information like time, weather, and notifications. This also helps extend battery life.

• Incredible main 50Mp camera
• 5x telephoto lens is versatile
• Tons of photo software to play with

The Pixel phones are known for their excellent cameras, and the Pixel 8 Pro is no different. The main 50Mp camera sensor easily goes toe to toe with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s a matter of taste but we prefer Google’s photo processing compared to Apple, with the Pixel opting for a more contrasty look.

Compared to our recent use of several phones including the iPhone, Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra, and the OnePlus 11, the Pixel 8 Pro beats them all for sharpness of image, and having the least blur when shooting moving subjects (though the new iPhones have caught up considerably). If you have restless kids or pets that you like to photograph, going Pixel this year will guarantee you get shots you’ll keep forever.

Here are some shots from the Pixel 8 Pro’s main camera, including a portrait shot and impressive night time performance:

The Pro also has a 48Mp ultra-wide camera, an upgrade on the regular Pixel 8’s 12Mp version. It does a good job of minimising distortion at the edge of the frame and we found ourselves using it more often than we do on other phones:

Going Pro with the Pixel gets you a dedicated 48Mp 5x telephoto lens which is more fun and useful to shoot with than any ultra-wide. Being able to zoom in and – importantly! – still have an excellently detailed and sharp image at 5x is a game changer for phone photographers. You can punch in at a gig and still be able to post it to Instagram, but it also changes how you can frame photos and helped me get a bit arty and experimental.

Thanks to Google’s clever Super Res Zoom, you can also zoom to 30x digitally, though results are less impressive. The highest compliment we can pay the Pixel 8 Pro is that it made us want to go out and take more photos, and we really haven’t had that to the same extent with any other recent phone.

Around the front is a 10.5Mp selfie camera with autofocus – shots look good, and you can shoot at a wider angle or zoom in, too.

Despite all this photography prowess, Google is pushing its artificial intelligence (AI) photo editing features hard with the Pixel 8 Pro. Using the Google Photos app, you can edit photos in ways that left us impressed with the technology but worried about the precedent for phone photography.

You can erase people and objects from the background of photos or move them around in the frame, change the colour of the sky and image to look like a different time of day, or take the faces of people from several shots in a row and mix and match their faces to create the ‘perfect’ shot – so you can snap a few takes and make sure afterwards that no one is blinking or pulling a face.

This sounds cool but in practice we found it at best unnecessary and at worst very creepy. It seems like a gimmick you could ignore, but Google bases a lot of its Pixel marketing around such features for the Pixel 8 Pro. But given some of these features are already available to any phone in the Google Photos app, Pixel buyers might just be guinea pigs for software perks Google wants to push to everyone eventually.

• Call quality is excellent
• Apps all run smoothly
• Useful AI functions offline

Google uses its own Tensor G3 chipset in the Pixel 8 Pro, which it says is tweaked to give you the best AI power possible. We were a little sceptical about that, given many other phones can run Google AI features just fine in Google apps, but the Pixel 8 Pro is a quick, snappy phone in daily use.

There’s no problem flicking between favourite apps, taking calls, listening to music, typing up notes, and navigating around London – the phone didn’t miss a beat. Being able to verify payments and log into apps using the Pixel’s Face Unlock is seamless too, and an upgrade over older models.

Toggle on Google’s Pixel-only clear calling, and you’ll also benefit from the phone cleverly reducing background noise so the person on the other end of the line can hear you better. That’s right – you can still use your phone as an actual phone!

• Android 14
• Clever additions other phones lack
• Seven years of updates promised

The phone runs Android 14, a very nice looking and polished version of Google’s mobile software. Pixel phones have a playful look and feel to the software these days and we prefer it over Samsung and OnePlus. You can set system wide colour themes, dig into settings to tweak privacy and notifications so your phone is set up just perfectly for you, or create a whole work profile to keep your job’s apps separate from your personal ones.

You also have clever things like Call Screen, where the Pixel can answer potential spam calls on your behalf and transcribe what’s being said onto the screen to see if you want to pick up or not. Annoyingly, many other smart software features are for US customers only, such as Summarize, which can sum up all the information on an open web page in neat bullet points using AI.

From an accessibility standpoint, the Pixel has very good voice transcription that types out what you’re saying with incredible speed and accuracy. The system-wide TalkBack mode is also very good for those with impaired vision as it speaks out loud to tell you where to tap and what’s on the screen, with new Guided Frame mode helping you take photos of people and make sure subjects are in frame.

Android remains more flexible and customisable compared to the iPhone’s iOS, and Google has Apple beaten on its software support promise, saying the Pixel 8 Pro will get seven years of Android updates and security updates – taking this phone to 2030. If Google makes good on its promise, that’s industry-best. It remains to be seen if this hardware will last that long, though.

The Google Pixel 8 Pro costs £999 for the model with 128GB storage. In the UK you can also spend £1,059 to double storage to 256GB, which we highly recommend if you want to keep this phone for some years to come.

There’s also a 512GB model for £1,179, but it only comes in black.

The Google Pixel 8 Pro is one of the best phones you can buy, with a bold design, amazingly good screen, and one of the highest quality camera systems on any smartphone. You’ll love the photos you take on this thing, and it’s the main reason to consider it above rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 15 Pro Max – and despite a price rise from Google, the Pixel is still cheaper than those two devices.

The AI camera features feel a little creepy but you can completely ignore them, and though battery life isn’t industry-leading this phone will still get you through a full day, every day – and if Google comes through on its software promise, the Pixel 8 Pro is supported until 2030. You might have to replace the battery before then, but that sets a new standard for smartphone longevity.