Google Pixel 6 review: A new leaf

When the first Google Pixel phone was announced, I remember being excited at the prospect of using an Android iPhone — software and hardware developed under one roof, with an emphasis on UI smoothness, photo prowess, and mass market-friendly branding. (The Nexus line always felt a little too geeky to have a real shot at mainstream success.) But every generation has been a little off in some way: missing features, lackluster performance, or bizarrely high prices relative to the competition.

Not anymore. The Pixel 6 is an unequivocally great phone at a surprisingly fair price: $599. It almost feels a little uncanny, but man, I absolutely love this thing.

Design, hardware, what’s in the box

The Pixel 6 is Google’s biggest generational change in hardware design since the first Pixel, released in 2016. Its two-tone back glass and subdued colors are nods to its lineage, but that gonzo camera bar and oversized G logo just don’t look like anything Google’s built before.

The phone also represents another Pixel first: glossy, fingerprint-loving glass on every color. I’d been hoping “smartphones as reflective glass slabs” would be a 2010s design trend that would eventually give way to more widespread adoption of matte finishes (like the white or orange Pixel 4) — but Google apparently saw benefits in going glossy. I hate how easily this glass collects smudges, but as AP’s Max Weinbach points out, it kind of clings to the oils in your skin, which makes the phone easier to grip.

And aside from the Stormy Black colorway, the colors on offer here are light enough to hide fingerprints pretty well. The Sorta Seafoam model I’m using is even more subdued in most real-life lighting than it looks in Google’s press materials — less electric green and cyan than guacamole and cloud white. I know plenty of Pixel fans have been clamoring for bolder hues (pour one out for the Really Blue first-gen Pixel), but I think the muted tones on the Pixel 6 are just interesting enough. Plus, with the unique new design language, these phones don’t need much help standing out.

The side rails are matte aluminum (or “tactile alloy,” as Google euphemizes). The power and volume buttons, nestled in a little trench on the right edge, have nice travel and are sublimely clicky — although they do wiggle a bit, if that sort of thing bothers you. Google’s abandoned the colored accent power button this year, too, which is a shame — it was synonymous with the Pixel’s visual identity. I hope it returns next year.

On the bottom edge, you’ve got the microphone, USB-C port, and one of two stereo speakers. Those speakers are loud and full; they’re not going to replace a Bluetooth speaker, even in a small room, but they’re absolutely good enough for watching videos or playing games without headphones.The left edge houses the SIM card tray, and there’s another mic for noise canceling up top.

The front of the phone is dominated by a big, 6.4-inch display coated in Corning’s high-end Gorilla Glass Victus. It’s a 1080p, 90Hz OLED panel, and it looks really nice: it’s got those perfect OLED blacks, colors are vibrant, viewing angles are great, and it gets plenty bright enough to use outdoors. It supports HDR in compatible apps, too. It’s not the 120Hz 1440p corker Google stuck in the 6 Pro, but the jump from 60 to 90Hz is way more appreciable than the one from 90 to 120 anyway.

Bezels are a little chunky and uneven by 2021 standards — they’re actually thicker on every side than they were on the Pixel 5, and the top and bottom bezels are thicker than on the left and right. The selfie cam cutout is smaller, though, and, being centered at the top of the phone, should interfere with the status bar less than it would in the corner.

The top bezel houses a cutout that pulls double duty as both earpiece and the other half of the stereo speaker setup. Its grille is divvied up into 10 segments, and sound only comes out of the leftmost six — you can actually see that it’s filled in on the right side. It looks a little weird up close, but it doesn’t impact audio quality.

For the first time, Google’s gone with an optical under-display fingerprint sensor. I still miss the secure face unlock offered by the Pixel 4, but I do prefer front fingerprint sensors to rear-mounted ones — they’re easier to use when your phone is on a table, or a wireless charger, or in a car mount. It’s just a shame the one here is a little slow unless you get your finger placement just so: it takes a beat to unlock when you don’t have your digit quite centered. That could probably be mitigated by registering the same fingerprint multiple times, but that kind of hacky workaround shouldn’t be required — especially on a Pixel.

On the whole, the new look doesn’t feel very Google as we’ve come to understand it. There’s far less of the playfulness I usually appreciate in Google hardware; the phone’s backside is still charmingly offbeat, but with the centered selfie cam and tighter corner radius, its face looks more like a mid-range Samsung phone than anything I would’ve expected out of Google (though considering mid-range Galaxies sell in the millions, that might not be entirely by accident).

It’s a really well-built phone, though. The glass and metal construction feels premium in a way not a whole lot of devices in this segment do, and the haptics — a mushy sore spot on the Pixel 5 — are much improved, though I don’t think quite as nice as they were on the Pixel 4, and definitely not on par with the best stuff from Samsung, Apple, or OnePlus.

And I do have some petty gripes. The camera bar’s glass isn’t an uninterrupted piece all the way across; there are seams where the flat middle portion meets the rounded corners. That’s likely the right call, actually — the corners of the bar are more exposed than the face, and if it were all one piece, a nasty drop on one of those corners could easily crack the entire array. But if a discrete corner piece gets damaged, it’s probably not a big deal. Still, it looks strange.

The seams where the back glass meets the aluminum side rails are pretty pronounced, too. That probably doesn’t matter in any practical way, but it just feels a little off to me. There’s also a sharp corner above and below the camera bar that collects and holds onto lint like it was designed for that purpose. But the very fact that I’m grading this $599 phone’s build quality on the same curve I would one that costs nearly twice as much demonstrates just what Google has pulled off here.

Inside the surprisingly slim box, there’s the phone, a USB-C cable and USB-A-to-C adapter, and a tiny quick start guide. Like Apple and Samsung before it, Google is forgoing the power brick this generation.

In spite of how keenly aware I am that the eco-friendly packaging, with its recycled paper and minimal plastic, is performative greenwashing, I’m not bothered by the absence of a wall wart. It’ll be a minor hassle for the uninitiated, but USB-C bricks are cheap — even Google’s upcoming 30-watt PPS adapter is just $25.

What does bother me is that it isn’t abundantly clear that a required accessory isn’t included in the box: that fact is footnote number 13 on the Pixel 6’s Google Store page and is only referenced obliquely on the phone’s packaging. That’s not a good look for Google, but it’s also not a knock against the device itself.

Software, performance, and battery life

I think we’re pretty well past the point of saying Google’s phones run “stock Android” — the Pixel experience on Android 12 has nearly as many deviations from AOSP as Samsung’s One UI does. But it’s my favorite take on Android by a country mile, and it’s only improved on the Pixel 6.

Material You is the most obvious visual update. Essentially, it themes your entire phone based on your wallpaper. That might sound inane: Oh, great, my blue wallpaper will make every Google app blue. And I think that’s a reasonable take; it does seem like a lot of fuss over a change that, by design, fades into the background.

But it’s not just apps. The entire system theme reflects your wallpaper, from widgets to the lock screen to the notification shade. I’m yet to encounter an auto-generated Material You theme that looks bad, and despite what Google’s shown off, wallpapers with bold colors can generate similarly bold Material You themes — although negative space will always be a muted color for legibility’s sake. There’s even a setting that changes the color of your home screen app icons to match — though it’s in beta and currently only supports Google’s own apps. That Android can construct a seemingly unlimited number of cohesive themes is, frankly, amazing, and I love that Google is putting such care into a feature that only design geeks are likely to appreciate.

I do wish there was better manual theme control, though. You’ll get a selection of a handful of custom Material You themes for any wallpaper you pick — how different those themes are will vary depending on how many colors there are in the wallpaper. If you don’t like any of those options, you can also pick from four stock themes that are rendered in shades of blue, green, purple, or brown. It’s better than nothing, but I wonder why those four colors are the only choices. If you want your whole phone to be red or yellow or hot pink, you’re out of luck unless you’ve got a wallpaper MY pulls those colors out of.

There’s also Google’s suite of outstanding phone call features. Call Screen isn’t new, but as a refresher: the phone can answer calls to ask the caller what they need, transcribing their response for you to read and providing a number of replies you can choose between by touch. There are settings to automatically filter calls from known spammers and potentially spoofed numbers, plus unknown numbers and first-time callers. It’s probably the single software feature I miss most when I’m not using a Google-branded phone.

Hold For Me, another existing feature, lets you “hang up” during holds while the phone sits in the queue for you. When a real person gets on the line, your phone notifies you, and you can pick up and start talking right away. There’s always a chance the person on the other end of either of these types of exchange will get confused or flustered and give up, but that’s unusual in my experience, and these two features work shockingly well.

New to the Pixel 6 is Wait Times, which, as the name implies, shows how long a wait you should be in for at any given time calling a toll-free business number — kind of like Google Maps’ popular times chart, but for phone calls.

When you do call one of those toll-free numbers, another new Pixel-exclusive feature pops up. Direct My Call uses the same Duplex infrastructure as Call Screen to transcribe automated help line speech in real time. The speech appears in a text conversation-style layout, and questions that require answers are highlighted in a couple of different ways depending on whether you have to reply out loud or select a menu option. For the latter, you can choose your reply by touch — which, as Google says, should eliminate the need for requesting to hear your options again.

Direct My Call is still in beta, and it doesn’t work flawlessly — it mishears speech pretty often. But given that it highlights strings of text that may not be transcribed correctly, and that you can still listen to the call as you use the feature, you probably won’t miss much information, and I still think it’s endlessly preferable to navigating automated call menus the “traditional” way.

I didn’t expect to be excited about it, but Gboard gets vastly improved voice typing thanks to Google’s new Tensor chip. I’m always reluctant to dictate my texts — I’m a stickler for punctuation, even in my personal life (because I’m weird), and “hi comma how are you question mark” just doesn’t feel right to say out loud. But thanks to speech processing efficiency gains compared to the Qualcomm-powered Pixels of yesteryear, dictation is smoother and smarter than ever.

You can actually speak naturally to it, and it’ll insert the proper punctuation — including commas between clauses and question marks at the ends of questions. Google says it learns how to spell names you say over time, too, though I haven’t used it long enough to know how true that is.

You can also pick emoji by voice: “L-O-L emoji” turns into 😂 automatically, for example. You can even give commands like “send” or “clear.” In my experience so far, it usually knows from context whether you want to insert the word or perform the command, but a few times, I’ve had it start a new sentence with the word “send” instead of sending my message.

This all happens on the phone itself; it’s not sending your dictation to a server. It’s pretty wild stuff, and as smartphones as a product category continue to mature, this sort of edgewise, incremental software improvement is going to be the path forward.

Speaking of that Tensor chip: it’s good! Google’s using custom, house-branded silicon in its phones for the first time this year, and I’m happy to say that that doesn’t seem to have been a bad call. It’s supposed to be competitive with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 you’ll find in basically every 2021 Android flagship, and it doesn’t feel too far off.

For those of you who care about benchmark scores, in Geekbench, the Pixel 6 beats the Snapdragon 888-equipped Galaxy S21 on single-core performance: 1027 versus 899. It doesn’t score quite as well on multi-core, though: the Pixel 6 clocks in at 2760, while the S21 manages 2961.

But in real-world use? I can tell you this thing is quick. It’s got eight gigs of RAM backing that fancy new chipset, and I’m yet to perceive any delay or sluggishness. I’m a little salty the Pro model gets 12 gigs of RAM, but at this price point — $599 — even six gigs wouldn’t have been surprising. As is, applications rarely get booted from memory earlier than I’d expect, and even once they have, they start up again in a hurry.

Gaming performance has been solid, too. Google says it worked to ensure compatibility with the most popular games on Android, and that seems like it holds water: I tried Call of Duty Mobile, Asphalt 9, Pokémon Go, Downwell, Dead Cells, and Fortnite, and they all ran nicely — although Fortnite is a little odd.

The Pixel 6 handles maxing out Fortnite’s graphical settings just fine, maintaining a relatively stable 30 frames per second that only dips when large sections of the map are on screen (like when you’re dropping in at the beginning of a match). But even after lowering the fidelity, there’s no option to play at 60 frames per second — just 20 or 30. I imagine that’s more a scarcity of optimization than horsepower, and it’s entirely possible it’ll get patched. But as it stands, be aware that some games might not perform quite as well as it seems like they should on this hardware.

Android 12’s new Game Dashboard is here, too. It adds a customizable floating shortcut to a bunch of features you might want in-game, like screen recording and a system-level frame rate counter. I’m not exactly a hardcore mobile gamer, so the dashboard doesn’t really speak to me — but it’s optional, and I’m sure people who game mainly on their phones will appreciate it.

Crediting its fancy new chip, Google’s committing to not only its usual three years of OS updates, but at least five years of security patches for the Pixel 6. Samsung offered longer Android software support than Google itself for a minute, which wasn’t a great look for Pixels — but Google has snatched back the update crown. If this is the next volley in an ongoing software support war, I’m all for it.

Unfortunately, after just a week with this phone, I can’t comment on how the battery performs in normal use. But my early impressions are promising.

On my heaviest day of testing — we’re talking 40 minutes of Google Maps navigation, some gaming, some YouTube, taking a half-hour Google Meet video conference call, and shooting nearly a hundred photos — I was able to wring six hours and nine minutes of screen on-time out of the Pixel 6’s 4,614-milliamp hour cell. With lighter use, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it hit seven or more. That would hardly be groundbreaking, but it’s firmly “good” in my book.

My outlook on charging is a little less rosy. The Pixel 6 supports charging speeds up to 30 watts with a compatible PPS charger (like the one Google itself will soon be selling), which Google says will fill the battery halfway in about a half hour. But most chargers won’t hit that speed. With a regular ol’ non-PPS 60-watt charger, I measured speeds around 18 watts when the battery was low. As it approached the halfway point, that number dropped to 15. Honestly, I think those numbers are acceptable, but don’t expect to get crazy-fast speeds without buying a new power brick.

The Pixel 6 also supports wireless charging up to 21 watts, but only on Google’s own second-generation Pixel Stand, which also isn’t yet available for purchase. It can pull up to 12 watts from other Qi-certified charging pads. Like the Pixel 5, it supports reverse wireless charging, too — I guess for whenever Google releases the next Pixel Buds (the A-Series don’t support wireless charging).

Cameras

In the Pixel 6, we finally have a Pixel phone with a big camera sensor, and boy oh boy, pictures from this thing are really good. Let’s skip right to the samples:

The primary camera is a 50-megapixel shooter with a luxurious 1/1.31” sensor. For a phone, that’s huge — way bigger than the 1/2.55” main sensor Google stuck in the Pixel 3, 4, and 5 (yes, it was the same exact sensor in all three — Sony’s IMX363). Size matters for camera sensors because the bigger a sensor is, the more light it can collect at once. A bigger sensor means not only better low-light performance, but also quicker photos across all lighting conditions.

That 50-megapixel figure doesn’t mean you’ll get photos you could blow up to the size of a billboard, though. Google’s photo software uses a technique called pixel binning to effectively combine sets of four adjacent pixels into ones four times the size — a common practice among high-megapixel smartphone cameras. Here, though, there’s no option to switch to full-res, so every photo you take is going to output at 12.5 megapixels. Larger pixels mean better low-light performance, so it makes sense as a default setting — but to straight-up disallow shooting higher-megapixel photos is a bizarre choice that I hope Google will eventually walk back through updates.

Still, Google’s AI photo magic applied to images from that jumbo camera sensor with artificially large pixels does make for excellent photos across just about every lighting condition. Excessively noisy low-light photos from the primary camera are a rarity, and in good light, a deft photographer could easily get frame-worthy photos out of this thing.

The accompanying ultrawide shooter is less impressive. It’s got a 12-megapixel sensor with a 114-degree field of view — which means it’s lower-resolution than the Pixel 5’s 16-megapixel ultrawide, but also seven degrees wider, so you can pack a bit more into the frame. Google hasn’t disclosed the sensor size for the ultrawide, so I’m assuming it’s not very large — a theory that’s supported by the fact that photos from the ultrawide are notably darker and noisier than the main camera. Check out these two sets of regular vs. ultrawide shots, each taken from the same spot just a couple seconds apart:

In the outdoor set, you can see straight away that the wide shot has darker shadows than the one from the main camera. Things are even hairier in the indoor set: that wide shot has the most noise of any photo I took during my testing, and the subject’s hand is blurrier than I would’ve expected.

Still, at this price and with a main camera this good, I can’t be too dejected about ultrawide performance; that that camera is here at all feels like icing on the cake. What I am dejected about is the absence of a telephoto shooter.

The Pixel 6 Pro has a 4x telephoto lens crammed into its camera bar. On the Pixel 6, no such luck. You can magnify up to 7x in the camera software (a feature Google charitably calls Super Res Zoom) and still get 12.5-megapixel images, but the results are… pretty bad. Check it out:

While the Super Res Zoom photo is technically a higher resolution than a post-shot crop would get you, it doesn’t contain much additional information. Text on the card here is about as legible zoomed in on the 1x shot as it is at the camera app’s 7x software zoom.

Personally, I would’ve preferred even a 2x telephoto camera over an ultrawide here — I find myself wanting to zoom in to take a photo an order of magnitude more often than I want to zoom out.

But I seem to be in the minority there, and some of Google’s software camera features that use the regular and ultrawide cameras simultaneously might not work as well with a different setup. I’m sure Google doesn’t want to deal with the headache that developing for two even more disparate camera arrays would cause, either.

Speaking of the Pixel 6’s software camera features: they’re really dang cool. Long Exposure mimics the look of, well, a long exposure: still elements in the frame remain clear, while moving objects are blurred. Think those artsy waterfall photos you see on Instagram.

It worked relatively well on the shot of the river above — the moving water has indeed been blurred. The leaves that overlap the water from the camera’s perspective were even preserved pretty well. But the second photo had people walking through the frame, and it sort of made them look like ghosts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; real long exposures would behave the same way. But it’s something to look out for.

Action Pan lets you ape the look of a longer exposure that tracks a moving subject — a notoriously tricky technique to pull off.

Google’s software uses the motion of the object you’re taking a photo of to calculate the angle of the blur, and it works surprisingly well on subjects like cars. As you can see from the photo of dogs running, though, it’s not too hard to confuse Action Pan’s algorithm — it has the same trouble with accurate cutouts of organic shapes as portrait mode tends to.

Speaking of portrait mode: it’s still portrait mode.

The quality of the photos themselves here is impressive, but the software still frequently has a hard time finding edges. Check out my forehead in the example where I’m facing left below. What the hell happened there?

Night Sight is still around, too, and it’s better than ever; those portrait mode photos of me above were also shot with Night Sight on. It can and does still look artificial sometimes — note the almost-night vision quality to the one of the arch below — but if the camera is struggling in low light, Night Sight will almost always net you a more editable photo than you’d otherwise end up with.

It’s particularly impressive in moonlight. Check out what it was able to do with this shot:

I wouldn’t want to post the Night Sight result above to social media or anything, but those two shots were just seconds apart, and it was dark. I still just about can’t believe it, and I’m the one who shot it. The new sensor really is a revelation.

Speaking of moonlight: up against a deadline and generally uncooperative weather, I wasn’t able to test the Pixel 6’s astrophotography chops. I also haven’t yet been able to dig into video performance. We’ll be updating this review with longer-term impressions in the coming weeks, though, so stay tuned.

At the Pixel 6 launch last week, Google talked up a feature called Face Unblur that’s supposed to identify moving faces in less than ideal lighting and, using data from both rear cameras at once, make them clearer. It’s not a separate mode or anything, it’s supposed to just happen when you need it to. In my experience, it doesn’t: I couldn’t get it to trigger under any circumstances. That’s a disappointment.

The selfie shooter, an eight-megapixel fixed-focus camera, is okay. It can do portrait mode and Night Sight just like the rear cameras, but the results aren’t nearly as impressive.

Curiously, the Pixel 6 Pro has an 11.1-megapixel front camera with a wider field of view. That strikes me as a weird feature to reserve for Pro customers, but the selfie cam in the non-Pro Pixel 6 is still fine.

Oh, and Google’s added a white balance slider to the camera app in addition to the existing exposure controls. I’m personally very excited about that, because Google’s photo processing tends to skew a bit cooler than I generally prefer. I only wish there were a way to make your preferred tweaks persistent: as is, you have to make the same adjustments every time you relaunch the camera app. Something like the iPhone 13’s Photographic Styles would be a very welcome addition.

While it’s not exactly a camera feature, Magic Eraser is an exciting new addition to the Google Photos editor. On Pixel 6, the app will suggest you “Remove people in the background” if it spots folks it thinks you’d prefer not be in the shot. You can trigger it manually under Tools otherwise.

It feels more or less like the healing tools we’re familiar with from photo editing software like Lightroom and Snapseed, but with a machine learning boost that makes suggestions on what you ought to remove. Sometimes, it works pretty well:

Others, not so much:

You can see some weirdness around where the subject was removed here — and the shadow is an obvious giveaway there used to be a person in the photo. But even this “bad” example is pretty impressive from a technical perspective, and I have no doubt Magic Eraser will salvage plenty of photobombed shots over the next few years.

As I see it, the camera has just one notable problem: lens flare.

In an inexplicable design oversight, the glass on the Pixel 6’s cameras causes some pretty bad glare under certain circumstances. Here’s what it looks like in action:

It’s only in specific situations, and the severity can range from “who cares” to actively ruining photos. It didn’t bother me too often, but depending on what you normally take pictures of with your phone, it could be a big issue for you.

The first-generation Pixel, which also had a wide expanse of glass covering its rear camera, had a similar issue that Google eventually addressed with a software update. I’d be surprised if this didn’t get patched out, too, but for the time being, it’s definitely A Problem.

Should you buy it? Abso-damn-lutely. The Pixel 6 represents the best value Google has ever offered in a hardware product, full stop. It punches above its weight in nearly every way: performance is great, build quality is very good, update support is class-leading, and the cameras positively rip.

More than once while testing this phone, I had to remind myself that it’s not a flagship. If I didn’t already know and you’d asked me to guess how much the Pixel 6 cost after my time with it, I would’ve pegged it at $800. But at $599, this thing is extremely aggressively positioned; it’s so good for the money, it makes the $899 Pixel 6 Pro, a phone with more cameras, more RAM, and better and larger display, feel overpriced.

Google’s somehow managed to bring some of the incredible value offered by its A-series phones upstream to more premium offerings, and I’m so excited to see it. I’m still miffed the Pro model has so many advantages over the smaller version, but stripping out some of the more premium features to keep the base model’s price low was definitely the right call.

I do wish there was a smaller version available — this is a big phone, which is a bit of a shock after the compact Pixel 4 and Pixel 5. But it’s a very good big phone at a very good price. It makes the competition in its segment look plain bad.

There’s no looming “if” here: Do you want a new smartphone? Can you afford to spend $600 on it, but don’t want to spend much more? Buy the Pixel 6.

Buy on the Google Store:

Pixel 6 – $599

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