The new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones have price jumps and a slew of new features, and Google’s latest smartwatch and earbuds got upgrades.Google Pixel 8 smartphones in various colors on a table
GOOGLE’S OCTOBER HARDWARE event took place this morning in New York City. During its presentation, the company showed off three new pieces of hardware: the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones, and the Pixel Watch 2. The new phones are flush with new features, from secure face authentication and seven years of software support to a built-in thermometer, while the second-generation Pixel Watch has more modest improvements over its predecessor. There are also some software upgrades coming to the Pixel Buds Pro, Google’s wireless earbuds.
Today’s event wasn’t just about hardware. Google also unveiled its plans to inject Google Assistant with its Bard large language model, imbuing the voice chatbot with artificial-intelligence-fueled conversational powers. You can read more about that in a separate story. Below is everything you need to know about the Pixel 8 series phones and Pixel Watch 2.
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Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 ProGoogle Pixel 8 Pro smartphone
It’s year eight for Google’s Pixel smartphones, which means the handset line has officially survived longer than Google Reader. (I’m not salty.)
The Pixel 8 is a bit smaller than last year’s Pixel 7, with a 6.2-inch screen; the Pixel 8 Pro retains the 6.7-inch screen size of its predecessor. Both phones have more-rounded edges than before—they mold to my hands quite nicely!—and the Pixel 8has a matte camera bar with a glossy glass back, whereas the Pro model has a soft-touch matte back glass with a glossy camera bar. Both of the new models have frames crafted out of 100 percent recycled aluminum.
Google’s going the Apple route of giving its OLED displays a proprietary name—the Pixel 8 has an “Actua display” and the Pixel 8 Pro has a “Super Actua display.” Like Apple’s Liquid Retina Display, the cute name doesn’t really mean anything special. What’s new, however, is that the Pixel 8 can hit a peak brightness of 2,000 nits in outdoor conditions, 42 percent brighter than last year’s Pixel 7. The Pixel 8 Pro pushes this to 2,400 nits. Both phones support a screen refresh rate up to 120-Hz, making the animations on the display look smoother than ever, but only the Pro model has a low-temperature polycrystalline oxide screen, meaning it can dial back the number of frames per second displayed—anywhere from 120 to 1, based on what’s happening on the screen—to conserve battery life.
One of the more surprising additions to the Pixel 8 series is support for secure face authentication. If you’ve been following Pixel hardware over the years, you’ll remember that the Pixel 4 was the only one to ever support facial recognition as a secure biometric authentication method, utilizing Google’s radar technology. The Pixel 8 series doesn’t have the Soli chip that powered that function in the older handset, but these new phones have the same capabilities. This means you can use your face to securely access banking and payment apps, or anything that usually requires a PIN or fingerprint authentication. If you don’t like face recognition, both phones still have fingerprint sensors.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find this next new feature on another smartphone: a temperature sensor. This is exclusive to the Pixel 8 Pro. Google says you’re able to measure the temperature of almost anything by pointing the sensor on the back of the Pixel to an object. I measured cups of hot and iced water, and it delivered results quite quickly, though you have to get very close to the thing you want to measure, and you’ll get more accurate results if you choose one of the preset options on the material you’re trying to read, like glass or ceramic. (Google says these presets help calibrate the sensor.) Theoretically, you can even measure someone’s body temperature. Google has submitted the app to the FDA for this purpose, but it hasn’t been cleared for such use.
These new phones are powered by Tensor G3, Google’s third generation of its custom silicon processor, and the company says “every subsystem has been upgraded,” including the image signal processor to improve the Pixel’s picture-taking capabilities. Speaking of, the Pixel 8 has an upgraded 50-megapixel primary camera with what Google claims is a 20 percent improvement in light sensitivity. (More light sensitivity means brighter and sharper photos, especially in low light.) It’s joined by a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera that supports macro mode from the Pixel 7 Pro, so you can capture close-ups.
The Pixel 8 Pro has upgraded light-gathering capabilities in all three of its cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera, a 48-megapixel ultrawide, and a 48-megapixel telephoto camera with 5X optical zoom. Its macro mode can now get even closer to a subject, and the Pro’s autofocus system is now “multi-zone,” allowing for a wider cone of focus in photos. This Pixel also gets an exclusive Pro camera mode that allows shutterbugs to tweak things like ISO and shutter speed while still taking advantage of the Pixel’s computational photography.
Both phones have a 10.5-megapixel selfie camera, but I have good news and bad news. There’s finally autofocus on the front-facing camera, allowing you to see all your pores in sharp detail. Unfortunately, this is available only on the Pixel 8 Pro. The Pixel 8’s front camera has a fixed focus.
There are some new camera software tricks this year. The coolest is Video Boost mode, yet another exclusive for the Pixel 8 Pro. Here, when you take a video in low-light conditions (up to 4K, 30 frames per second), the clip is sent to Google’s cloud servers for processing and is then sent back to you—depending on the length of the video, it can take several hours. However, the improvements are startling. Google showed me clips using this mode versus those from the iPhone 14 Pro, and the Pixel’s video was much brighter and sharper, with better stabilization.