Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro review: The best Google phones yet impress with AI-powered camera features

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The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro launched on 12 October and introduce a slate of significant improvements over last year’s devices, from the new flat-display design of the Pro model to some impressive AI-powered camera and editing features.

Google’s flagship Androids are also more expensive this year. At £999, the Pixel 8 Pro now goes toe-to-toe with the identically priced iPhone 15 Pro, while the smaller and cheaper Pixel 8 gets a £100 increase (to £699), compared with the Pixel 7’s launch price.

So, how does Google justify the new premium Pixel pricing? With big upgrades and even bigger promises of feature updates still to come. Both phones run on the new Tensor G3 chip, which Google says is built for “on-device machine learning” and has been designed in close collaboration with the tech giant’s London-based artificial intelligence research lab.

We’re also getting brighter screens, improved camera hardware and a whole new set of impressive photo-editing features powered by Google AI. Design-wise, the bigger Pixel 8 Pro ditches the curved display in favour of a flat screen, more similar to the iPhone, while the Pixel 8 shrinks slightly from 6.3in to 6.2in.

Both Pixel phones will also receive a whopping seven years of software and security updates, meaning your new phone could, in theory, be by your side until 2030.

We put the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones through their paces for weeks, paying close attention to software features, new AI-enabled tricks, build quality and camera capabilities in a range of lighting conditions. Here’s what we thought.

Arriving at a time when the “artificial intelligence” buzzphrase is plastered on everything from toasters to electric toothbrushes, the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro feel like a glimpse into the AI-assisted future we’ve been promised for years – a future in which the phone in your pocket is a truly reliable, useful and skilled assistant.

But that reality isn’t quite here yet. Both phones are set to receive an update merging Bard (Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot) with the Google Assistant, to create an exponentially more lifelike helper. In theory, this would allow your phone to better interpret your words and intentions, respond more naturally to questions, continue conversations, create lists, organise itineraries and draft travel plans, summarise your inbox and refer to content in your Google Drive.

The feature won’t remain exclusive to the new Pixel phones – Google plans to roll out Assistant with Bard to older Pixel phones, iOS and Samsung devices – but it’s not the only way this year’s Pixels have been given an AI-enabled upgrade.

Big promises of a simulated AI friend in your pocket aside, Google’s software cleverness already runs through every aspect of the new Pixel phones. Magic Editor is a new photo-editing tool that uses generative AI to make changes to your pictures, such as moving a subject three feet to the left, replacing a cloudy sky with a clear one or adjusting the lighting for a “golden hour” effect.

Unlike the Pixel 7’s existing Magic Eraser feature, which simply patches over deleted parts of the image by using similar nearby patterns, Magic Editor fills in gaps by using artificial intelligence to guess what might be there. We tested it on a complicated group shot with friends standing shoulder to shoulder, some with arms around one another, and deleting one unfortunate person by tapping on their unsuspecting face.

The results – you get a few to choose from – are wildly impressive. Magic Editor removed our photographed friend and filled in the resulting gap by making up the missing details. On the floor, in the space where the vanished person once stood, it added the end of a rug not visible in the original shot. It attempted to recreate the arm of the person next to them, albeit with a terrible sleeve tattoo for some reason.

The software is still in a testing phase – like most artificial intelligence, Magic Editor is prone to hallucinations and weird guesses – but with a clear enough original photo to work with, it produces unnervingly great results. Sure, you can get philosophical about the potential dangers of routinely manipulating our pictures, and whether we should be remixing our memories in favour of getting that perfect shot, but the software is undoubtedly impressive.

The Best Take feature raised more alarm bells when it was announced. With it, when you take a series of photos of a group of people, you can mix and match everyone’s individual faces, picking the best expression from each shot to create a new photo where everybody’s smiling and facing the camera without blinking. You can press on each person’s face and choose from a selection of alternative takes, or let Google try to figure it out.

Lingering ‘ick’ aside, Best Take turns out to be the most useful AI feature of the Pixel cameras. Anyone with more than one kid will appreciate how difficult it is to hold their attention long enough to get a good shot. Best Take solves that problem, although we’d argue that idly swapping your children’s faces around to create a photo of something that technically never happened is simply a new and more profound problem.

Still, it’s a really effective and practical feature, and one we’ve used a lot during testing. Best Take exists for the same reason we instinctively hammer the shutter button in group shots, hoping for that one photo where everyone’s looking in the right direction. Crucially, it doesn’t invent new expressions that were never made. If that rainy weekend in Bognor Regis really was that miserable, you can’t plaster fake grins over your family’s faces.

AI is deployed elsewhere in the camera. Much like how Magic Eraser deletes unwanted photobombers in pictures, you can now remove background noises and distracting sounds – think traffic, dogs barking, wind and music – in your videos.

This works surprisingly well, and is the kind of trick that even seasoned audio engineers would struggle to achieve with good results. That it can be done with a few taps on your phone, with a simple and intuitive interface that lets you dial up and down the volume of the distracting sound, feels almost like magic.

What else, besides all the artificial intelligence fun? Well, this year’s Pixel phones get an upgraded and more secure face unlock. Previously limited to just unlocking the device itself, you can now use your face to log in to banking apps, authorise payments and access your passwords. It’s a seemingly small change, but not having to repeatedly reach for the fingerprint scanner to prove your identity makes using the Pixel feel much smoother.

Google is also promising a full seven years of software and security updates, meaning you could still be using your Pixel 8 in the year 2030, whatever that looks like. This is, as far as we know, the longest promised support for any phone.

So, which Pixel phone is best for you? Both are evenly matched, running on the same speedy Tensor G3 processor and offering all of the AI features mentioned above, but they differ in size, price and cameras.

Google claims that, while both phones use cloud-based processing extensively, only the Pro is capable of running generative AI routines natively on the device. Some upcoming software features will be exclusively available on the more expensive phone, too.

Keep reading for more detail on what makes each phone unique.