Pixel 6 review: Google Hardware finally lives up to its potential

Google did it. The company finally made a phone that feels like a full-effort flagship device. It took six long, frustrating years, but with the Pixel 6 it finally feels as though Google isn't holding back out of concern for its Android licensees or some other commitment issue. The Pixel 6 has a custom Google SoC, tons of AI software features that really work, and a new and exciting version of Android. These combine into the best Android smartphone out there—the One True Flagship of the Android ecosystem. With a great price, the Pixel 6 is an easy "buy" recommendation.

That's if you can buy one. The one negative thing you can say about the Pixel 6 is that Google, while it has improved its phone-building skills, hasn't improved its phone-selling skills. The Pixel 6 is only sold in 12 countries instead of the 100+ that Apple and Samsung sell in, and Google is already experiencing stock issues. Despite Google's brand recognition and several mega billion-dollar businesses, Google Hardware remains a tiny side project. So buy a Pixel 6 if you can—just don't do it from an eBay scalper.

Low prices and big camera bars

The back of the Pixel 6 Pro, with that distinctive camera bar. Google says this is supposed to be a "two-tone" design, but it's hard to spot on my model.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

We expected the Pixel 6 to sell at comparable prices with other vendors, but the biggest win for the line is that Google has priced these phones aggressively. The Pixel 6 Pro is $900, and with a 120 Hz 1440p display, 12 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery, spec for spec it's relatively comparable with the Galaxy S21 Ultra. The S21 Ultra has an MSRP of $1200, though, so Google is coming in $300 cheaper.

For $600, the Pixel 6 has a 90 Hz, 6.4-inch display with 8 GB of RAM and a 4600 mAh battery. It doesn't have a perfect Samsung comparison, but I'd say it falls somewhere between the S21 and S21+, which means that it's also about $300 cheaper. Google has even undercut OnePlus, and both Pixel 6 models have a bigger battery than the $970 OnePlus 9 Pro.

The Pixel 6 design is definitely something. We've seen camera bumps get bigger and bigger over the years, but the Pixel 6 introduces the camera bar, a big, black stripe of a camera bump that stretches across the back of the phone. It really stands out, and the Pixel 6 instantly became one of the most recognizable Android phones the second the design leaked five months ago.

I am actually a fan of the camera bar. Between the bottom edge of the phone and the edge of the camera bar, the phone has two full edges of contact with whatever surface it rests on, so it's rock solid if you're poking at a Pixel 6 on a table.

When holding the Pixel 6, it's nice to push your finger against the camera bar for an extra point of contact.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

The bar is quite tall for a camera bump. I measured it at 2.5 mm tall on the Pixel 6 Pro and 3 mm tall on the smaller Pixel 6. I don't really have a problem with this, either. Thicker phones can be good; they usually lead to longer battery life. Both new phones are about 12 mm thick if you include the camera bump, and this has always been a fine, pocketable size.

Having the camera bar stretch across the back of the phone makes it easy for your finger to reach while holding the phone normally. Sometimes I end up adopting a grip where my index finger pushes against the bottom edge of the camera bar. This extra point of contact supports the phone vertically, giving me one more contact point in the war against gravity. Having the rear contact points of the phone be something other than a slick pane of glass is, in my opinion, good. You can see the accessory market try to do something similar with all sorts of stick-on phone grips that add geometry to the back of the phone, but on the Pixel 6, that's kind of built-in. I feel like I'm less likely to drop a Pixel 6 thanks to the camera bar.

I spent most of my time with the white Pixel 6 Pro that I was sent, and it looks great. I can't really say my phone's color scheme looks accurate to Google renders, though, which show a two-tone design with a gray back panel above the camera bar and a white back panel below it. If you take a photo editor's eyedropper tool to one of these images, you might measure a slight difference, but it's so subtle I doubt it's something you'd notice in real life. It's hard to imagine that a color variation this minor was planned by a designer; it feels more like a quirk of manufacturing (color matching is very hard) that Google decided to run with.

Here you can clearly make out the camera lens seam on the right side of the black camera bar. This also shows off the ugly mmWave window on the top edge of the phone, which doesn't match the back color.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

Google's cost cutting isn't completely invisible, however. Both Pixel 6 screens seem fine for the price, but they aren't the most incredible displays out there. Neither phone gets as bright as an S21 display, and the base model's 90 Hz could stand to be upgraded to 120 Hz.

If I'm going to nit-pick, I have some issues with fit and finish, too, like the camera bump glass cover that isn't continuous. The flat piece of glass that covers the sensors is separate from the curves that end each side of the camera bar, so there's a visible, tactile seam on the left and right sides of the camera bump. Breaking the glass into sections makes the curved pieces easier to manufacture, but it's definitely one of those small details that a company like Apple would have avoided.

The band around the sides of the phone is metal, like normal, but if you have a mmWave model, the metal band will stop at the top of the phone and be replaced by a huge plastic window. The plastic window looks really cheap and ugly. On my white model, this white plastic doesn't match the color on the back of the phone, so it gives off a "defective" or "damaged" vibe. The white panel is also visible from the front, which is distracting when combined with the black display surround and shiny metal ring. When Samsung needed to build a mmWave phone, it just made the metal ring around the phone a bit thinner, which looks considerably more elegant than Google's hack job.

Here you can see what the top of the screen looks like, along with the weird white cap on the top edge of the phone.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

We're three years into the carriers' mmWave experiment, and all signs point to it being a failed technology along the same lines as WiMax; it seems most useful as a way to justify marketing claims for "5G." According to an OpenSignal survey, mmWave access in the US stands at 0.8 percent availability on even the best carriers. With the feature being so useless, no one should sacrifice anything to get mmWave on a phone. If you can get a Pixel 6 without mmWave, you'll have a normal, complete metal ring around the phone, and we absolutely recommend that you do that.

Of course, we also have to beat up Google for shipping a curved display on the Pixel 6 Pro. Every Android OEM does this, and it's always a bad idea. Each long edge of the display curves into the side of the phone, which distorts any content that comes in contact with the edges, especially video. Curved glass does all sorts of bad things with light, creating shadows or glare streaks depending on the conditions. It also makes it easier to accidentally touch the sides of the phone. There is no reason at all to do this, but manufacturers keep doing it, presumably because they think it looks cool. You know what I think looks cool? An undistorted display. The baseline Pixel 6 has a flat display and looks great.

This is Google's first smartphone with an in-screen fingerprint reader, which has been on other flagships for a few years now. In-screen optical fingerprint readers are definitely a tick slower than rear, capacitive fingerprint readers, which also have the benefit of a tactile indent so you know where to put your finger. Front fingerprint readers are in a more convenient location, though—the screen you were already planning to touch. I've seen a few specific complaints about the speed of the Pixel 6 fingerprint reader specifically, but I found it identical to other in-screen fingerprint readers. I put out a side-by-side test with a OnePlus 9 Pro here, and the Pixel 6 is just as fast. Everyone should be using similar hardware from Goodix anyway, so it makes sense that the performance would be similar. The Pixel 6 fingerprint reader seems fine.

Most of these are normal Android problems and not deal breakers, especially considering the price. Overall, the hardware is excellent, and there's really very little to complain about. The one feature I miss, which is found on phones like the OnePlus 9 Pro, is a blazing fast quick-charge option. Google offers 21 W charging using a (not included in the box) USB-PD charger, but this pales in comparison to OnePlus' 65 W charging.

Google Tensor—A fine first try at an SoC

Note that there's no modem block here—that's on a separate chip.

Credit: Google

The headline feature of the Pixel 6 is easily the "Google Tensor," Google's first main SoC in a smartphone. If you're looking for a benchmark champion, you won't find it here. But it doesn't feel like Google messed up anything major in its first shot at an SoC, while also delivering a few (but not many) unique features. Google did a good job setting expectations for the SoC by saying bench "peak CPU and GPU speeds look great in benchmarks but don't always reflect real-world user experience." That's a fair statement to make, and Tensor is certainly a flagship-class chip. What really matters is that the Pixel 6 performance is excellent.

Technically, the Tensor is interesting though. Google took a very opinionated approach to the CPU design. Of course, it's an ARM chip that uses off-the-shelf ARM cores, but Google isn't using the normal layout most other SoC vendors are going with. The cookie-cutter choice for a phone like this would be the Snapdragon 888, which has one "big" ARM X1 core for peak single-threaded performance, three A78 cores for "medium" workload stuff in the foreground, and four "little" A55 cores for low-power background work. Google has a totally different design for Tensor, with two big X1 cores, two A76 cores—these are the "big" cores from 2020 phones—and then the usual A55s. Google says its unique chip arrangement lets its have sustained performance for the kinds of full-chip "heterogeneous" computing its AI features need.

Google's Pixel 6 presentation was remarkable for how much shade it threw at Qualcomm, which Google has previously used to power every other Pixel phone. "This is an area where we've been held back for years," Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh told the livestream crowd when he introduced Google Tensor. "Mobile chips simply haven't been able to keep up with Google Research," added Google Silicon Director Monika Gupta, "And rather than wait for them to catch up, we decided to make one ourselves." Does somebody want to go check on Qualcomm?

The final verdict on CPU scores? I'd say the phone has competitive single-thread performance, while in multicore scores it's something like a 2020 flagship. It's fine.

While Google did something special for the CPU design and focused on AI, the GPU and modem seem to be afterthoughts. The Tensor GPU is just an off-the-shelf ARM Mail MP20, which performs comparably to Qualcomm's latest on the Galaxy S21. The modem is a separate chip, which is not an ideal design. The consolidation of chips into a single SoC is pretty much the defining characteristic of smartphone design, since it saves space, uses less power, and allows more room for a bigger battery. There are typically only two reasons to have a separate modem. One: you're introducing a new, immature modem technology—like when Qualcomm introduced 4G in devices (the HTC thunderbolt) or 5G in 2019 with the Snapdragon 855—and this is a one-generation blip. The other reason is an IP issue, like Apple not being allowed to integrate Qualcomm modems in its iPhone SoCs. (Apple is hard at work fixing this with in-house modems.)

This is a Google-designed chip being made with the help of Samsung’s Exynos division, and Google is shipping an Exynos modem. Google actually might be facing both modem integration issues. It's not clear if Google would even be allowed to integrate Samsung IP on its "Google" branded chip. There's also a good chance the Samsung/Google chip is a generation or two behind Qualcomm with regards to the technical work of modem integration.

For an SoC focused on AI, Google really won't talk about the AI performance of its chip at all. Instead, the company is choosing instead to let software capabilities do the talking. Google says there aren't any good benchmarks for AI, so it doesn't have any numbers to throw out.

If there's anything bad to say about Google's first-ever SoC, it's that the sales pitch for the SoC is surprisingly modest. Focusing on something like incredible CPU or GPU performance would benefit all apps automatically, but Google's focus on AI means Tensor's capabilities are only working for the handful of features Google has personally developed. There aren't many compelling third-party uses of AI, and there's no public third-party API yet for Tensor's heterogeneous AI compute features.

What Google built with Tensor is a bunch of AI features for the camera, voice input, and translation. If one of those features hits your personal usage sweet spot, good for you. But none of the features has universal, killer-app appeal. Google says the Tensor will be a foundation for future innovation, so hopefully, Tensor will turn into something compelling in the future. For now, it's not a huge selling point—but it's not a liability either.

The one thing Google could have done to benefit everyone is extend Pixel support so that the devices don't become obsolete so quickly, but the company decided to not do that. Google is now free of Qualcomm and fully controls how long it can update the PixeL. But the company only gave customers a pittance: one more year of security updates. Google did all this vertical integration, and the Pixel 6 is still only getting three major OS updates. Apple offers six. Officially, it's three years of major OS updates and an extra two years of security updates, which is an odd balance. Google can and should do better. We're only asking for the company to be competitive here. I don't understand why we even need to have this conversation. Apple offers better support on a $400 phone than Google does on a $900 phone. Fix it.

Software and all that AI stuff

We'll have a huge deep dive into Android 12 coming out later, but naturally, the Pixel line is shipping the best Android software package in the industry. Android 12's new color-changing "Material You" design is in full effect on the Pixel 6, and since Google actually is doing a great job rolling out matching designs to most of the Google apps, Android 12 on the Pixel offers you a very cohesive interface out of the box. It makes Android skins even less appealing than they normally are, since right now everything matches.

One of the most refreshing things about using a Pixel 6 after a OnePlus or Samsung phone is that your notifications will actually work. Android OEMs have gotten more and more aggressive with battery optimizations over the years, to the point that a lot of notifications stop working altogether or become unreliable depending on when the app was last opened. There are some checkboxes that supposedly control these changes, but they never actually restore what Android notifications are supposed to be like.

The people at dontkillmyapp.com do a great job of tracking how much OEMs are limiting background processing via a crowd-sourced app and a benchmark. The front page has a public naming-and-shaming system, with Samsung and OnePlus as the #1 and #2 biggest offenders of breaking background apps. Google is, naturally, on the bottom of the list, and the tagline of the Play Store app is actually "make apps finally work properly even if you do not own a Pixel." The app usually can't fix much because of how aggressive OnePlus and Samsung are, but you can see how Google is the gold standard.

You really don't need the benchmark though. This is a massive difference between notifications on a Pixel and notifications on these more limited phones. Gmail and other app notifications show up instantly, and it makes a big difference in how reliable and helpful the phone feels. Some Android OEMs compulsively have to change everything about Android, and it's rarely justified, and that seems to be the case here, too. There is no reason to shut down these apps. The Pixel 6 battery life is excellent, and it easily lasts all day.

The new Pixel features—supposedly enabled by the Google Tensor SoC—are a collection of really specific features you may or may not use. First up: voice recognition. The Pixel 6 has a new voice-recognition system, which Google says is "the most advanced speech recognition model ever released by Google." Google's speech-recognition model applies basically everywhere on the OS that you have a microphone input. This means the Google Assistant, the Gboard microphone, Google translate, and probably some other places I'm forgetting.

Here's an example:

The new input system is noticeably better but still not perfect. It's more reliable for basic word recognition, and it makes fewer mistakes. Here you can see the old model had some major transcription flubs, turning "brain-dead" into "branded" and dropping a few words on the fourth line. (I really have no idea what it was thinking.) The new model got all the basic words right.

The old model could occasionally drop the last few words of my final sentence as my voice naturally trailed off, but the new model always finished my sentences. The automatic commas and other punctuation are a great start (to be clear, you can dictate punctuation, but I didn't do that in the above example), But the new Pixel has trouble nailing every sentence or comma-separated lists. It also has trouble with hyphenating compound adjectives—but then so do I.

All of this happens offline, by the way. The Pixel 6 was also slightly faster than the Pixel 4 for transcription. (The Pixel 4 is faster than the mid-range Pixel 5, but also it's what I have on hand.) For long transcription tasks, Pixel 4 would sometimes fall behind by three or four words and would never catch up. The Pixel 6, meanwhile, was always on the latest word. Having the Pixel 6 always display the latest word is nicer for the user experience—the device lets you immediately know that it heard you, and it helps with your train of thought.

The "OK Google" hotword seems better, too. Google says it should work better in noisy environments, and it does seem more reliable. I love voice command systems, but the problem I have with Google's hotword on a phone lately is that so much functionality now requires authentication that voice command just isn't useful anymore. The hotword seems specifically useful for when the phone isn't immediately in your hand, but when you give a completely harmless command like "turn off the light" and the Google Assistant responds with "OK, but you'll need to unlock your phone first," I don't really see the point. I have a few Google Home speakers, and these have no problem running the commands I want without the security theater. At this point, I just disable the phone hotword since it doesn't work very well and no longer seems to coordinate with the speakers.

Google's phone features. The left is menu transcription, which even transcribes the Spanish part of the menu. On the right is crowd-sourced phone call busy times. It's supposed to be a bar graph, but in this prerelease form, there's no data yet.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

There are some great new phone call features in the Pixel 6 phone app. I couldn't get this with actual data on my prerelease testing, but the phone app can now show busy call times using crowdsourced data, just like how Google Maps shows the busy times for business locations. There's also a phone call menu transcription service, which will live transcribe the annoying and lengthy menus customer service lines always throw at you, and sometimes will allow you to navigate the menus via the touchscreen.

Despite being a heavily promoted feature, none of this was on by default for me, which was confusing. Google has been quietly waging a war on phone calls over the last few years, and there are like a hundred checkboxes you want to turn on in the phone app settings for various Google Assistant features, like "Hold For Me."

The transcription in the phone app is shoddy compared to the new model used for voice recognition. It's pretty clearly using an old system that doesn't do punctuation, and it's not very accurate either. This seem particularly bad given the way phone menus are recorded. It's always a very robotic, well enunciated, slowly speaking voice, which you would think voice recognition would be great at. This was actually something that popped into my mind when Google said Tensor enabled its best voice recognition ever on the Pixel 6. Google's voice recognition is a whole ecosystem of products, so how can this better recognition work on smart speakers, watches, Chromebooks, and in the general Google apps for other Android phones, when those don't have Tensor chips? Right now the gap is very noticeable.

Photos—Adequate, but not revolutionary

A lot of hype surrounded the Google Pixel 6 camera. While everyone else in the industry continually upgrades their camera hardware with bigger and better sensors, Google shipped the same camera sensor on the Pixel 2, 3, 4, and 5. Despite being at a multiyear hardware disadvantage, Google still managed to remain competitive through its industry-leading software camera processing. Google would call this the "software-defined camera," but you could also call it "being cheap." Old hardware is less expensive.

On the Pixel 6, Google is finally getting new hardware to play with for the main camera: a 50MP Samsung sensor called the GN1. With a sensor size of 1/1.31", it's a massive upgrade over the 1/2.55" sensor on the Pixel 2/3/4/5, it's bigger than the iPhone 13 sensor (1/1.65"), and it's on par with what Samsung ships in the S21 (1/1.33"). It's not the biggest phone sensor on the market, though—that would be the 1-inch Sony IMX800 in devices like the Sharp Aquos R6.

The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro have identical main and wide-angle cameras, with a 4X telephoto as the additional camera for the 6 Pro. The thing is, the 4X telephoto camera on the Pixel 6 Pro doesn't work. There's a "4X" button in the camera app, but it does not reliably trigger the telephoto camera. Often, the Pixel 6 Pro chooses to use digital zoom instead. There is just no reliable way to switch cameras.

The hardware is just part of the story though, and Google has really done wonders with its image-processing algorithm, called "HDR+." Smartphone sensors and lens are tiny and don't pick up a ton of light compared to a real camera, so Google popularized the idea of image stacking—taking multiple images at once, aligning them, and merging them in software to produce a single photo. Every single photo from the Pixel line is the result of image stacking. The Pixel camera is constantly saving pictures anytime the viewfinder is open and storing them in a temporary buffer. When you press the shutter button, the current moment and the last few images in the buffer get saved and merged together, usually resulting in 10 frames of sensor data being combined into one final photo. The result of this is more detail, better light pickup, and a better photo, and it's worked wonders on the Pixel line for years.

Google is trying to bring some of the look of HDR+ to video with "HDRnet." This is a neural network that Google trained to replicate the look of HDR+, but it's not actually going through all that image stacking work. This was originally developed for the Pixel 4's viewfinder, but Google says that Tensor enables it to run this on every video mode now, including the highest-bandwidth 4K, 60 FPS video mode.The Pixel 6's videos should look more like the photos now, though they don't have the same dynamic range.

What really matters is what the pictures look like, and in this area the Pixel 6 is fine. It's at least as good as the Pixel 4, but it isn't a significant leap over the old phone.

Google puts in a full effort and is already seeing success

In the run-up to the Pixel 6 launch, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told The Verge's Dieter Bohn, "Part of the reason that I think the team has been more modest in their approach with Pixel over the past 18 months or so is because they've been waiting for Tensor." It's a pretty shocking for the CEO of a company to admit they haven't been putting in a full effort on previous products, but Google's Pixel hardware has felt like that for a long time. The Pixel has always felt like the side hobby of an ad company while all of its competitors are real hardware companies, for whom the design of a flagship smartphone is an existentially important task.

So much has gone wrong. The Pixel 5 was a mid-range device that cost $100 more than today's flagship-class Pixel 6. The Pixel 4 was a crazy laboratory of unproven ideas that didn't work out—like Project Soli and Google's face unlock system—and was bad enough to cause internal strife at Google. The Pixel 3 had a hideous notch, poor specs, and was sabotaged with Android 9's half-baked navigation system. The Pixel 2, in 2017, was really the last time Google turned in a great flagship smartphone. But even the Pixel 2 was a "just getting started" product after the rush job of the Pixel 1. None of this has felt like progress, like growth, or like Google has any kind of roadmap. It's just been a crapshoot year after year.

Google Hardware should be so much better than this. With its end-to-end control of the OS, Google is the only Android OEM that isn't trying to pile additional junk on top of Android. It's not trying to twist Android into any additional purposes the OS wasn't designed for or rebrand it because of some misguided "not invented here" mentality. Google is really the only Android company putting out a cohesive, quickly updatable, vertically integrated product, which is the kind of polish the iPhone enjoys year after year. Google should be making hardware that can be seen as the flagship of the entire Android ecosystem, but its lackluster hardware efforts have really hampered that.

The Pixel 6 is finally just a normal, good flagship smartphone. Google tried a few interesting things like the Tensor chip, but mainly the Pixel 6 is good because Google hit all of the basic areas it needed to and didn't screw anything up. The Pixel 6 has flagship-class specs, a good price, decent design, and upgraded aging areas like the camera hardware, and it didn't include any weird, half-broken experiments with the phone. Google has such an advantage in software, AI, and camera technology that all it has to do is put out competitive hardware and it will probably end up with the best Android phone. For the Pixel 6, everything ranges from "fine" to "great," and in the often-compromised world of Android, that's good enough to make the 6 the best device on the market.

I don't think the first-generation Google Tensor SoC is a revolution. Google says the chip is focused on AI but none of the AI features here are necessarily killer apps, since they all seem to be niche use cases. If Google hit one of your personal niches, like the translation features or with live transcription for the hard of hearing, you're probably thrilled, but mostly I don't think the phone would be wildly different with a Snapdragon 888. That statement cuts both ways, though—the Tensor is not dramatically different from Qualcomm's best SoC in day-to-day usage, which is a great compliment. It's fine. Google didn't screw it up.

Google would have had a dramatically better argument for the Tensor if it extended the Pixel's major OS update policy. While Google did extend the minor security patch timeline to five years, Pixels still only get major OS updates for three years, making them obsolete. Apple is a much more serious hardware company than Google, and one sign of that is its software support, which lasts for six years for iPhones. Providing security updates for five years means you can't argue people don't use their phones for that long, so the lack of major updates just seems to be penny-pinching from a nearly $2 trillion company.

The Pixel's camera history is a great microcosm of the Pixel line over the years: subpar hardware propped up by great software and AI processing. It's great that Google finally upgraded the camera hardware, and even if photo quality isn't as big of a leap as I was expecting, the 6 can at least turn in competitive video now. There's also at least a possibility now of meaningful software upgrades in the future.

Putting forth a solid effort seems to already be working out for Google. The result when the Pixel 6 went up for preorder was complete pandemonium. Immediately after the announcement, the Google Store went down under the load of people trying to buy a Pixel 6. Models went out of stock almost immediately, and the next day the best you could do was join a waitlist to buy a Pixel 6 at some uncertain date. This is after a report from Nikkei Asia saying Google put in orders to double the supply of the Pixel 6.

While the Pixel 6 looks like it is already a huge success for Google, the keywords there are "for Google." Google is still a microscopic organization when it comes to phone sales and distribution; Nikkei reports that doubling the Pixel 6 supply leads to a humbling total of 7 million units. Apple ships around 200 million iPhones a year, and Samsung ships anywhere from 260-300 million phones. Even though the Pixel 6 is a great phone, it can never gain meaningful market share because Google still doesn't sell the Pixel phone worldwide. Taking Google Hardware seriously will always be a challenge when it can't even begin the global smartphone sales race—it has never once expanded the areas it sells in.

Thanks to Google Hardware's lack of killer instinct over all these years, even though this is the sixth-generation Pixel phone, in many ways it feels like a first-generation device. It's the first Google Tensor chip, and there's already evidence a second-generation Tensor chip is in the works. We're curious if Google took a modest approach with its first SoC and if it has bigger plans for the second version. This is the first time Google has really upgraded the camera hardware, and you have to wonder if camera upgrades will be a yearly thing going forward. It's the first time Google has had a fully integrated AI hardware and software stack—will more functionality be coming down the pipeline via Google's quarterly feature drops?