The Killer Review
Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy star in action remake that looks bad and feels worse.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-killer-review-john-woo-peacock-nathalie-emmanuel-omar-sy
Save up to 50% Off Electric Standing Desks During the Flexispot Anniversary Sale
The best value electric standing desks on the market
Save $400 Off the Premium HP OMEN Transcend 14" Laptop with OLED Display at Best Buy
Equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU and RTX 4070 GPU
Barnes & Noble Is Having a Massive Labor Day Sale on Books and LEGO Sets
The biggest book sale of the year.
https://www.ign.com/articles/barnes-noble-is-having-a-massive-labor-day-sale-on-books-and-lego-sets
Get Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for 40% Off, Stock Up Now and Avoid the Price Hike (Extended)
Stack up to 36 months of Game Pass Ultimate
https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-game-pass-ultimate-is-40-off-stock-up-now-and-avoid-the-price-hike
Amazon Games Boss Says Label Will Put Games on Nintendo Switch 2, Praises Switch as a 'Great Device'
Amazon Games boss Christoph Hartmann says the label will "obviously" support the Nintendo Switch 2, praising the Switch as a "great device" and saying he can't wait for the next console.
Crimson Desert is like God of War and Dragon's Dogma Had a Baby | gamescom 2024
Mixing ideas from some of the best action games ever, Crimson Desert's boss battles could rival the epic clashes of Dragon's Dogma, God of War, and Black Myth: Wukong.
Power Rangers Prime Is a New Beginning For the Franchise
IGN spoke with the creative team behind Power Rangers Prime, a new series that completely reinvents the franchise in the style of Marvel's Ultimate Universe. Find out what to expect from this ambitious story.
https://www.ign.com/articles/power-rangers-prime-reboot-boom-studios-preview
Amazon Gaming Week Sale is Now Live, Here's All The Best Deals in the UK
Amazon has kicked off its 2024 Gaming Week sale, offering a fantastic range of deals you won’t want to miss. Running from August 22 to 28, this event is packed with opportunities to score big savings on games, accessories, and more. We’ll be highlighting our top picks throughout the sale, but be sure to also visit the Amazon hub page for the full list of offers available.
Amazon Gaming Week: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Collector's Edition for Just £150
Scalpers can get in the bin, as Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree Collector's Edition is back in stock and on sale right now at Amazon. It's down £149.99 for PS5 and Xbox at Amazon, £70 off the list price, and £100 off compared to retailers like GAME listed it for.
It includes Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree (base game not included), a Figurine of Mesmer the Impaler (46cm), an exclusive hardcover artbook (English), and a Digital Soundtrack. This sounds perfect for any big fans or collectors out there, so there's no like the present to get your order in.
Amazon Gaming Week: WD_BLACK C50 1TB Game Drive for Xbox for £122.99
Amazon has dropped the price on the officially licensed WD Black C50 1TB Expansion Card for Xbox Series consoles. Right now it's only £122.99, a 18% off price drop from its original £150 RRP. The C50 is one of the best SSDs for the Xbox, which isn't surprising since your options are pretty limited.
Amazon Gaming Week: Best PS5 Game Deals
Looking for a new game to play? There's a whole bunch of brillaint PS5 games on sale during Amazon's Gaming Week sale, including Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part 1, and more. Check out the best deals just here.
Amazon Gaming Week: Logitech G502 LIGHTSPEED Wireless Gaming Mouse for £68.99
One of the best gaming mice available is on sale for Amazon Gaming Week. Down to £68.99 from £139.99, this is one of the best prices we've ever seen on the Logitech G502 Lightspeed Mouse. Otheriwse, the Logitech G502 wired mouse is down to £24.48 if you're after an even more affordable option. While you're at it, consider picking up the Logitech G PRO X Wireless Lightspeed Gaming Headset to go alongside for £109.99 (down from £219.99).
Amazon Gaming Week: Best PS5 SSD Deals
If you've got a PS5, you'll absolutely want to upgrade the memory capabilities, and this couldn't be better time to invest in more storage. One of IGN's favourite PS5 SSD, the fanxiang M.2 SSD 1TB, is currently down to just £59.42 (including heatsink). Or, you can pick up the addlink A95 2TB M.2 SSD for just £125.49 instead, and you've got double the storage for a great price as well.
Amazon Gaming Week: Best Micro SD Card Deals
These are reliable choices for your Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch as well. SanDisk SD cards, in particular, have made both lists of the best SD cards for Nintendo Switch and the best SD cards for Steam Deck, so you can feel comfortable knowing you're investing in something worthwhile. Plus, with the Nintendo Switch 2 on the horizon, you'll want to find an SD card that'll last you into the future, so there's no better time than now to pick one up.
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
https://www.ign.com/articles/amazon-gaming-week-best-deals-uk-2024
Joker Director Todd Phillips Says Hulk Hogan Biopic With Chris Hemsworth No Longer Happening
Joker director Todd Phillips has confirmed that the long-awaited Hulk Hogan biopic with Chris Hemsworth is no longer happening.
Black State: Inception-Inspired Bullet-Time Action
We've played Black State, a stunning-looking new sci-fi story-driven shooter.
https://www.ign.com/articles/black-state-inception-inspired-bullet-time-action
Nintendo Is Shutting Down Its Animal Crossing Mobile Game — but It’s Working on a Paid Offline Version to Replace It
Nintendo has announced plans to shut down Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, seven years after the mobile game launched. But it's working to replace it with a paid offline version.
The Best FPS Gaming Monitor Is on Sale: Save 30% Off This Alienware 27" 360Hz OLED Display
The Alienware AW2725QF 27" QD OLED gaming monitor normally retails for $899.99, but right now you can get it for only $620.99 after a $210 off instant discount and 10% off coupon code "SAVE10". The AW2725QF is Dell's first (and only) monitor with both an OLED panel and blazing fast 360Hz refresh rate; it was announced earlier this year at CES 2024 and has garnered plenty of accolades since its release. This is easily one of the best 27" QHD gaming monitors you can get right now, especially if you're aiming for the highest frame rates possible in your FPS games.
27" Alienware AW2725QF 360Hz QD OLED Monitor for $621
The Alienware AW2725QF is a 27" monitor with a 2560x1440 resolution, 360Hz refresh rate, and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro certification. This monitor uses a Samsung quantum dot OLED panel, which is brighter than traditional OLED panels while maintaining the same incredible black levels, color range, and 0.03ms response times that OLEDs are known for. The AW2725QF boasts a 99.3% DCI-P3 color range and is factory calibrated with a Delta E less than 2. It is HDR True Black 400 certified with up to 1,000nits of peak brightness. Connectivity wise, the AW2725QF has one HDMI 2.1 port that supports up to 4K@144Hz and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports that support the full 4K@360Hz. There are also a couple of USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports for attaching peripherals and a single USB Type-C port for charging.
If you're looking for a 27" 1440p gaming monitor, there's nothing better at the moment. Because the AW2725QF combines an OLED panel with a super high refresh rate, it excels at both fast-moving games and 4K HDR movies. For gaming at 360Hz, you'll need to make sure your PC is equipped with the appropriate video card. At a minimum, you'll probably want something like a GeForce RTX 4070.
Looking for more gaming PCs? Check out the best Alienware deals on gaming PCs, laptops, and monitors.
Megalopolis Trailer Pulled Offline After Quotes Criticizing Francis Ford Coppola Are Discovered to Be Fake
After it was discovered that a new trailer Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis completely fabricated quotes from famous movie critics, Lionsgate has pulled it from the internet and apologized.
The New and Improved Alienware m16 RTX 4070 Gaming Laptop Drops to $1350 with Coupon
Slimmer and lighter, but just as powerful as its predecessor
https://www.ign.com/articles/2nd-gen-alienware-m16-rtx-4070-gaming-laptop-drops-to-1350-with-coupon
Google Pixel 9 Pro Review
Google’s new phones are here, and the Pixel 9 Pro is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch. It shifts the formula, offering the Pro camera setup and hardware enhancements but keeping them in the more small-hand-friendly form factor of the base Pixel 9. At $999, the Pixel 9 Pro is still a pricier option, but it comes with a number of meaningful upgrades over the base Pixel 9 that will be well worth it for photo fiends. And for anyone interested in the latest AI capabilities, the Pixel 9 will be an obvious choice, as its $200 uptick in price over the Pixel 9 comes with one year of Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage with Google One AI Premium, which alone is a $240 value. Anyone not sold on the AI will still get a great phone, though.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Design and Features
The Pixel 9 Pro shakes up the formula Google has been rolling with the last few years. Instead of being a larger model than the base Pixel 9, it’s exactly the same size but features all the key “Pro” upgrades. This sees the Pixel 9 Pro sit at a comfortable size with a 6.3-inch display and reasonably light weight, making it comfortable in the hand and easier to navigate with one hand than prior Pro models. (Meanwhile, if you prefer a larger phone, the 9 Pro is available in an XL variant that offers a larger 6.8-inch display for a $100 premium. Beyond the display and size increase, the 9 Pro XL just increases resolution and battery size but leaves the rest largely unchanged.) Flatter corners avoid creating sharp pressure points in my palm, which is a welcome change from the thinner edges of earlier Pixels.
The big outward difference between the Pixel 9 Pro and its non-Pro sibling is the style – it features a matte back glass and polished metal frame in contrast to the glossy glass and matte metal of the Pixel 9. Though the camera bump on the two phones is the same size, the Pixel 9 Pro fits in a third camera and a temperature sensor.
The Pixel 9 Pro bears some serious resemblance to recent iPhones with its flat metal frame, large-radius corner curves, and flat glass front and back. The camera bar on the rear is its big, stylish differentiator, which has shifted away from earlier designs that saw the camera bar slope down into the phone’s frame. Here, the bar juts up like a mesa rising from the back of the phone. It’s an engaging look, but can snag even more easily on pockets and still can gather dust.
Hiding underneath the display, Google includes an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which the company suggests is 50% faster than prior models, though I found it performed exactly as fast as the scanner in the Pixel 8 in side-by-side testing.
The screen on the Pixel 9 Pro is a great one. Its LTPO OLED offers a handful of upgrades over the OLED display in the base Pixel 9, which was already a looker. It boasts an extra-sharp 1280 x 2856 resolution that looks perfectly crisp. It’s also boasting a 3000-nit peak brightness and remains easy to see in most conditions. It also benefits from a wider refresh rate range, 1-120Hz, offering potential battery saving when displaying more static content. Where the whole display of the Pixel 9 can get a blue sheen when strong light is hitting it, the Pixel 9 Pro’s display remains a deeper black. It’s truly an excellent display, and the Gorilla Glass Victus 2 covering should help keep it intact if it’s dropped. It’s not immune to light scratching though, with some blemishes already showing on my test unit.
In addition to the full covering of Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front and back, Google has given the phone IP68-grade protection against dust and water ingress, so it should be safe around water, as long as you don’t let it sink into the deep end or spend too long underwater. Google claims to have made the phone two times more durable than last year’s model, but it’s unclear what that translates to in terms of drop resistance.
For audio, the Pixel 9 Pro features a set of speakers with one on the bottom and another stealthed away inside the earpiece. They provide bright and loud audio that’s easily loud enough to be heard while taking a shower and more than enough for casual listening with the phone at arm’s length in a quiet room.
In addition to its 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connections, the Pixel 9 Pro gets satellite communication. This will be activated when no other signals are available and a user dials 9-1-1. The service was unavailable for testing at the time of writing, but will be available free to users for 2 years after purchase.
The USB-C port on the bottom of the phone supports fast charging and data transfer, and this year it also comes with support for video output.
Purchasing Guide
The Google Pixel 9 Pro is available for pre-order from Google, Best Buy, and carriers starting at $999 for 128GB of storage or $1099 for 256GB. It comes in Obsidian, Porcelain, Hazel, and Rose Quartz.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Software
Google has launched the Pixel 9 Pro a bit earlier in the year than usual, and as a result, it comes with the same Android 14 operating system as the Pixel 8 before it. That’s not bad news, but it means there’s a little less to get excited about. Since Google is promising 7 years of OS and security updates, it will get Android 15 in due time, and theoretically will see a future Android 21 (though perhaps not Android 22). The software is smooth and effective on the Pixel 9 Pro, offering a stylish and polished interface. I still wish Google was more utilitarian with screen space, as it prioritizes looks over information density, but I can’t knock the Pixel 9 Pro’s swagger with rounded Android styling that blends great with the curves of the phone and screen itself.
Bigger than the OS itself is the suite of AI tools Google is pushing as a key feature for the Pixel 9 Pro. It has introduced Screenshots, a tool for analyzing screenshots stored on the device and providing insights into them when queried by users. Gemini fills in for Google Assistant, taking over many of its capabilities and adding AI generated responses to some queries. The conversational Gemini Live is perhaps the bigger get, as it’s specific to the Pro models this year and included as part of Gemini Advanced – a subscription which you get a year of with the Pixel 9 Pro. (If this sounds a little overly complex, that’s because it is.) Gemini Live lets you have spoken conversations with Google’s AI.
I found it an interesting tool to talk to as a substitute for Google search. It would dig up details for me about products and sometimes provide useful extra data. Alas, I found it could also provide wrong answers, as it tried to tell me the Pixel 9 Pro had a 12MP telephoto camera. When I corrected it, it apologized for the mistake and corrected itself. When I asked it why it had told me 12MP at first, it then asked me where I’d heard that the Pixel 9 Pro had a 12MP camera. This line of questioning got me nowhere. In many cases, Gemini Live would begin talking and then abruptly stop. I thought perhaps some ambient noise was interrupting it, but whenever I attempted to interrupt it myself, it never cut off quite as quickly. With little visual information in the applications, it’s impossible to tell what’s going wrong. It’s also unclear where the bounds of on-device processing and web requests is. I asked the AI if it worked offline, and it said it could to some degree, but it wouldn’t open if the Pixel 9 Pro was in Airplane mode.
Gemini Live is supposed to only be in English right now, but it actually spontaneously began speaking to me in Japanese (which is one of the languages I have set for my Google account). Questions posed to it in either English or Japanese were still registered, but it continued to respond in Japanese until I asked it to switch back. It was able to switch back and forth with prompts in either language as well. While talking with it, for some reason, it decided that it was a 3rd-year high school student, but when asked its age, it admitted that it doesn’t have an age because it is an AI.
The Screenshots tool is meant to be a repository of data that Google’s AI can sift through and source for answers. Sometimes, it does the job, albeit with mixed results. For instance, using a screenshot of my calendar as a reference, it told me how many work shifts my girlfriend had for September when asked, but it read the calendar wrong and overcounted (adding dates from October as well, presumably because they were visible in the screenshot). Meanwhile, asking it the same question multiple times can cause its cracks to show. In a couple cases, it mistook other events for work shifts and completely ignored the labeled shifts. Asking when a funeral was scheduled in my calendar – which there is only one of – the AI pulled up the screen shot of my calendar but presented me with the wrong answer, suggesting it was today.
I tried almost the same thing Google tried in its Pixel 9 launch demo of Gemini, taking a picture of some event details and asking Gemini to check my calendar and see if I would be available. In one case, it simply reported that I would be free, assumed I was attending all three events in my photo, and then said I looked pretty busy that day – swing and a miss. In a second case, I asked it more clearly to check my calendar specifically for availability (needing to find the right wording to ask a question defeats the value of this kind of service), and it simply said that it couldn't help me and that I should check my calendar app – strike two. Or perhaps that’s strike three, because even Google couldn’t get this one to work in its demo. Curiously, Google’s demo used a Samsung device, so it seems that the feature’s inability to work is device agnostic.
Pixel Studio is Google’s image generation tool. It often misses the mark on generated images, takes a bit of time to process, and it also doesn’t work when the phone is offline. At this point, it’s becoming unclear what role the phone’s own AI processing capabilities are for if so many features require an internet connection and seem to be offloading to the cloud.
These new AI features are interesting, but I don’t find them a compelling part of the Pixel 9 Pro. They certainly don’t stand out as the reason to choose the Pixel 9 Pro over other phones – thankfully, it has more going on than just these features.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Gaming and Performance
The Pixel 9 Pro runs on the Tensor G4 chip, which is a minor upgrade over the Tensor G3. It’s not offering leaps and bounds of extra performance, but it’s no slouch when it comes to day-to-day use and even some heavier gaming. Given the Tensor G3 was already well behind its Snapdragon rivals, I’m not expecting the Tensor G4 to do much to narrow the gap, but we’ll have to wait until benchmarking software is available for the Pixel 9 Pro to see just what difference the new chip makes (at the time of writing, popular benchmarks like Geekbench 6 and 3DMark were not available for the pre-launch device).
Turning the Pixel 9 Pro to the heavy task of running Zenless Zone Zero at high settings and 60fps, it happily plugged along. It ran the game with relative ease, though it suffered some tanked frame rates during one early sequence, likely as a result of trying to load in large files while playing an animated sequence, and the issue never repeated. Over prolonged gameplay, the phone heats up, but doesn’t get painfully hot.
Overall, the Pixel 9 Pro’s performance is satisfying, and with 16GB of memory, it should also be able to hold up well for some time. But it remains to be seen whether the hardware will continue to keep up as processing demands grow over the years the phone receives software support, or if the gap between Google’s Tensor chips and other flagships’ Snapdragon chips will only grow more apparent as performance demands increase.
Battery performance is as expected, with the large 5060mAh battery happily chugging along all day with modest use, including gaming, some video playback, browsing, and some conversations with AI.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Cameras
The Pixel 9 Pro may be the same size as the Pixel 9, but it fits in an even better stack of cameras. While it shares the wide and ultra-wide sensors with its cheaper sibling – sensors which are, in turn, little different from those found in last year’s Pixels – it gets a bumped up selfie camera and a 48MP telephoto sensor with 5x optical zoom. This array allows for some properly diverse shooting capabilities that all benefit from that knack Google has for smart photography.
Here are the cameras the Google Pixel 9 Pro packs:
50MP (binned to 12.5MP) Wide, 1/1.31" sensor, f/1.68, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
48MP ultrawide (binned to 12.5MP), 1/2.55" sensor, f/1.7, 123-degree FOV
48MP telephoto (binned to 12.5MP), 1/2.55" sensor, f/2.9, 5x optical, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
42MP Selfie, f/2.2, 103-degree FOV
The Google Pixel 9 Pro offers up a superb camera system. The main sensor captures wide scenes with loads of light, excellent color, and plenty of sharpness. Scenes look natural, with vibrance where it’s called for and tamer color in all the right places. Zooming beyond 2x on the sensor isn’t a compelling option, with noise readily showing up, and some will even turn up at 2x if you look in the right areas (usually untextured surfaces).
The ultra-wide sensor is a great complement to the main sensor, giving you even more range to work with. It pushes the center of the scene back quite a ways, but lets you capture a ton in one shot. The colors and lighting line up nicely with the main sensor as well, so it feels like zooming out more than it feels like switching to some wider but inferior camera – a common experience on many phones.
Now, since the Pixel 9 Pro relies on the same main and ultra-wide cameras as the Pixel 9, it’s really offering no upgrades from that main sensor and shots on each phone look all but identical. But the Pixel 9 Pro gains a 5x telephoto sensor that really steps up its photographic potential. Where the Pixel 9 struggles to push past 2x, the Pixel 9 Pro can snag great shots of more distant subjects. Signs and buildings that were hard to make out in shots on the main sensor can come right into sharp focus with the telephoto camera.
With a tighter aperture, much less light is reaching the telephoto sensor though, and Google appears to overcompensate a bit, resulting in shots that brighten subjects a bit more than those taken with the main or ultrawide sensor snapping the same subject. It’s not egregious, but the noise in the images becomes easier to spot when zooming in on the photos. It can also lead to slightly washed out visuals for especially zoomed-in shots. Comparing back to even old shots I took on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, I still see the benefit of its 10x sensor over the Pixel 9 Pro zooming into 10x on the same subjects. Google now offers a Zoom Enhance photo editing tool meant to upgrade even these zoomed photos (though it works on other shots as well), and while I found it does sharpen the images and up the contrast, it’s nowhere close to making the photos appear as though they were shot with optical zoom.
The selfie camera on the Pixel 9 Pro provides a straightforward upgrade over the Pixel 9, going sharper and wider without any notable sacrifices. It gets a broad 103-degree FOV ready to capture you and your surroundings or a couple friends. While the color is nearly identical to the Pixel 9 – which is to say quite good – the extra sharpness is evident when zooming in on fine details, which remain crisp under a closer magnifying glass. This isn’t to say the Pixel 9’s selfie camera is bad, but the 9 Pro’s is simply better and makes for truly great solo shots.
The Pixel 9 Pro also benefits from more nuanced control over the cameras with the Pro mode introduced on the Pixel 8 Pro last year. It allows manual lens selection and focus, both of which can prove incredibly handy. That manual lens selection can also be set as a default, so the phone never tries to use the main sensor at 5x or beyond – a handy feature. The Pro mode can be a little finicky, though, as it likes to bury away lens sensor selection once you enter it.
Google is plugging yet more AI into the cameras. The hyped Add Me feature stitches together two photos effectively, but requires a pretty steady hand keeping the phone framed up between shots. The new Panorama mode can also link a series of photos into a pretty good looking wide shot, though people and moving objects in those shots still end up with errors. The photo Magic Editor also gets a “Reimagine” feature, which can turn selected objects into other things. It did a poor job turning the lake into lava, but did a more satisfactory job turning a statue on a building into the Stanley Cup.
In addition to photography, the Pixel 9 Pro is able to tap into some extra video recording features, but they are more than a little confusing. A feature called Video Boost is particular to the Pro models and allows you to get footage that goes beyond the 4K limits of the camera hardware, but it comes with some weird trade-offs. For one, all the raw footage appears to end up recorded in 1080p even though the phone can record in 4K properly. It then also takes time to process before you get a final result. With even a couple seconds of video not seeing upgrades minutes later, it’s a bit too nebulous to rely on when 4K HDR recording is available right on the device. The phone’s Night Sight for video is more promising, as it took some grainy, dark video and readily improved the quality, smoothing out the noise and making for more pleasant footage. The phone also uses “dual exposure” on the main sensor while recording in dark settings to boost brightness effectively.
Mark Knapp is a contributing freelancer for IGN with over 10 years of experience covering a diverse range of tech and electronics, including everything from gaming PCs and peripherals to hi-fi home theater gear and electric bikes. His work has included hundreds of hands-on reviews, such as his testing of many of the latest smartphones for IGN. He’s worked with many other publications over the years, including PCMag, CNET, TechRadar, Reviewed, and CNN Underscored. When Mark isn’t writing up reviews, he’s still probably working, as the job of a reviewer knows no definite schedule. He’s often playing the latest competitive FPS with friends while testing gaming peripherals, cruising the streets on an e-bike for testing with earbuds under evaluation, putting a recent projector to task with his bad movie club, or posting up at the gym for yoga or rock climbing — his two main hobbies that involve actually unplugging. You can find Mark on Twitter @Techn0Mark or BlueSky at @Techn0Mark.
Google Pixel 9 Pro Review
Google’s new phones are here, and the Pixel 9 Pro is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch. It shifts the formula, offering the Pro camera setup and hardware enhancements but keeping them in the more small-hand-friendly form factor of the base Pixel 9. At $999, the Pixel 9 Pro is still a pricier option, but it comes with a number of meaningful upgrades over the base Pixel 9 that will be well worth it for photo fiends. And for anyone interested in the latest AI capabilities, the Pixel 9 will be an obvious choice, as its $200 uptick in price over the Pixel 9 comes with one year of Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage with Google One AI Premium, which alone is a $240 value. Anyone not sold on the AI will still get a great phone, though.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Design and Features
The Pixel 9 Pro shakes up the formula Google has been rolling with the last few years. Instead of being a larger model than the base Pixel 9, it’s exactly the same size but features all the key “Pro” upgrades. This sees the Pixel 9 Pro sit at a comfortable size with a 6.3-inch display and reasonably light weight, making it comfortable in the hand and easier to navigate with one hand than prior Pro models. (Meanwhile, if you prefer a larger phone, the 9 Pro is available in an XL variant that offers a larger 6.8-inch display for a $100 premium. Beyond the display and size increase, the 9 Pro XL just increases resolution and battery size but leaves the rest largely unchanged.) Flatter corners avoid creating sharp pressure points in my palm, which is a welcome change from the thinner edges of earlier Pixels.
The big outward difference between the Pixel 9 Pro and its non-Pro sibling is the style – it features a matte back glass and polished metal frame in contrast to the glossy glass and matte metal of the Pixel 9. Though the camera bump on the two phones is the same size, the Pixel 9 Pro fits in a third camera and a temperature sensor.
The Pixel 9 Pro bears some serious resemblance to recent iPhones with its flat metal frame, large-radius corner curves, and flat glass front and back. The camera bar on the rear is its big, stylish differentiator, which has shifted away from earlier designs that saw the camera bar slope down into the phone’s frame. Here, the bar juts up like a mesa rising from the back of the phone. It’s an engaging look, but can snag even more easily on pockets and still can gather dust.
Hiding underneath the display, Google includes an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which the company suggests is 50% faster than prior models, though I found it performed exactly as fast as the scanner in the Pixel 8 in side-by-side testing.
The screen on the Pixel 9 Pro is a great one. Its LTPO OLED offers a handful of upgrades over the OLED display in the base Pixel 9, which was already a looker. It boasts an extra-sharp 1280 x 2856 resolution that looks perfectly crisp. It’s also boasting a 3000-nit peak brightness and remains easy to see in most conditions. It also benefits from a wider refresh rate range, 1-120Hz, offering potential battery saving when displaying more static content. Where the whole display of the Pixel 9 can get a blue sheen when strong light is hitting it, the Pixel 9 Pro’s display remains a deeper black. It’s truly an excellent display, and the Gorilla Glass Victus 2 covering should help keep it intact if it’s dropped. It’s not immune to light scratching though, with some blemishes already showing on my test unit.
In addition to the full covering of Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front and back, Google has given the phone IP68-grade protection against dust and water ingress, so it should be safe around water, as long as you don’t let it sink into the deep end or spend too long underwater. Google claims to have made the phone two times more durable than last year’s model, but it’s unclear what that translates to in terms of drop resistance.
For audio, the Pixel 9 Pro features a set of speakers with one on the bottom and another stealthed away inside the earpiece. They provide bright and loud audio that’s easily loud enough to be heard while taking a shower and more than enough for casual listening with the phone at arm’s length in a quiet room.
In addition to its 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connections, the Pixel 9 Pro gets satellite communication. This will be activated when no other signals are available and a user dials 9-1-1. The service was unavailable for testing at the time of writing, but will be available free to users for 2 years after purchase.
The USB-C port on the bottom of the phone supports fast charging and data transfer, and this year it also comes with support for video output.
Purchasing Guide
The Google Pixel 9 Pro is available for pre-order from Google, Best Buy, and carriers starting at $999 for 128GB of storage or $1099 for 256GB. It comes in Obsidian, Porcelain, Hazel, and Rose Quartz.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Software
Google has launched the Pixel 9 Pro a bit earlier in the year than usual, and as a result, it comes with the same Android 14 operating system as the Pixel 8 before it. That’s not bad news, but it means there’s a little less to get excited about. Since Google is promising 7 years of OS and security updates, it will get Android 15 in due time, and theoretically will see a future Android 21 (though perhaps not Android 22). The software is smooth and effective on the Pixel 9 Pro, offering a stylish and polished interface. I still wish Google was more utilitarian with screen space, as it prioritizes looks over information density, but I can’t knock the Pixel 9 Pro’s swagger with rounded Android styling that blends great with the curves of the phone and screen itself.
Bigger than the OS itself is the suite of AI tools Google is pushing as a key feature for the Pixel 9 Pro. It has introduced Screenshots, a tool for analyzing screenshots stored on the device and providing insights into them when queried by users. Gemini fills in for Google Assistant, taking over many of its capabilities and adding AI generated responses to some queries. The conversational Gemini Live is perhaps the bigger get, as it’s specific to the Pro models this year and included as part of Gemini Advanced – a subscription which you get a year of with the Pixel 9 Pro. (If this sounds a little overly complex, that’s because it is.) Gemini Live lets you have spoken conversations with Google’s AI.
I found it an interesting tool to talk to as a substitute for Google search. It would dig up details for me about products and sometimes provide useful extra data. Alas, I found it could also provide wrong answers, as it tried to tell me the Pixel 9 Pro had a 12MP telephoto camera. When I corrected it, it apologized for the mistake and corrected itself. When I asked it why it had told me 12MP at first, it then asked me where I’d heard that the Pixel 9 Pro had a 12MP camera. This line of questioning got me nowhere. In many cases, Gemini Live would begin talking and then abruptly stop. I thought perhaps some ambient noise was interrupting it, but whenever I attempted to interrupt it myself, it never cut off quite as quickly. With little visual information in the applications, it’s impossible to tell what’s going wrong. It’s also unclear where the bounds of on-device processing and web requests is. I asked the AI if it worked offline, and it said it could to some degree, but it wouldn’t open if the Pixel 9 Pro was in Airplane mode.
Gemini Live is supposed to only be in English right now, but it actually spontaneously began speaking to me in Japanese (which is one of the languages I have set for my Google account). Questions posed to it in either English or Japanese were still registered, but it continued to respond in Japanese until I asked it to switch back. It was able to switch back and forth with prompts in either language as well. While talking with it, for some reason, it decided that it was a 3rd-year high school student, but when asked its age, it admitted that it doesn’t have an age because it is an AI.
The Screenshots tool is meant to be a repository of data that Google’s AI can sift through and source for answers. Sometimes, it does the job, albeit with mixed results. For instance, using a screenshot of my calendar as a reference, it told me how many work shifts my girlfriend had for September when asked, but it read the calendar wrong and overcounted (adding dates from October as well, presumably because they were visible in the screenshot). Meanwhile, asking it the same question multiple times can cause its cracks to show. In a couple cases, it mistook other events for work shifts and completely ignored the labeled shifts. Asking when a funeral was scheduled in my calendar – which there is only one of – the AI pulled up the screen shot of my calendar but presented me with the wrong answer, suggesting it was today.
I tried almost the same thing Google tried in its Pixel 9 launch demo of Gemini, taking a picture of some event details and asking Gemini to check my calendar and see if I would be available. In one case, it simply reported that I would be free, assumed I was attending all three events in my photo, and then said I looked pretty busy that day – swing and a miss. In a second case, I asked it more clearly to check my calendar specifically for availability (needing to find the right wording to ask a question defeats the value of this kind of service), and it simply said that it couldn't help me and that I should check my calendar app – strike two. Or perhaps that’s strike three, because even Google couldn’t get this one to work in its demo. Curiously, Google’s demo used a Samsung device, so it seems that the feature’s inability to work is device agnostic.
Pixel Studio is Google’s image generation tool. It often misses the mark on generated images, takes a bit of time to process, and it also doesn’t work when the phone is offline. At this point, it’s becoming unclear what role the phone’s own AI processing capabilities are for if so many features require an internet connection and seem to be offloading to the cloud.
These new AI features are interesting, but I don’t find them a compelling part of the Pixel 9 Pro. They certainly don’t stand out as the reason to choose the Pixel 9 Pro over other phones – thankfully, it has more going on than just these features.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Gaming and Performance
The Pixel 9 Pro runs on the Tensor G4 chip, which is a minor upgrade over the Tensor G3. It’s not offering leaps and bounds of extra performance, but it’s no slouch when it comes to day-to-day use and even some heavier gaming. Given the Tensor G3 was already well behind its Snapdragon rivals, I’m not expecting the Tensor G4 to do much to narrow the gap, but we’ll have to wait until benchmarking software is available for the Pixel 9 Pro to see just what difference the new chip makes (at the time of writing, popular benchmarks like Geekbench 6 and 3DMark were not available for the pre-launch device).
Turning the Pixel 9 Pro to the heavy task of running Zenless Zone Zero at high settings and 60fps, it happily plugged along. It ran the game with relative ease, though it suffered some tanked frame rates during one early sequence, likely as a result of trying to load in large files while playing an animated sequence, and the issue never repeated. Over prolonged gameplay, the phone heats up, but doesn’t get painfully hot.
Overall, the Pixel 9 Pro’s performance is satisfying, and with 16GB of memory, it should also be able to hold up well for some time. But it remains to be seen whether the hardware will continue to keep up as processing demands grow over the years the phone receives software support, or if the gap between Google’s Tensor chips and other flagships’ Snapdragon chips will only grow more apparent as performance demands increase.
Battery performance is as expected, with the large 5060mAh battery happily chugging along all day with modest use, including gaming, some video playback, browsing, and some conversations with AI.
Google Pixel 9 Pro – Cameras
The Pixel 9 Pro may be the same size as the Pixel 9, but it fits in an even better stack of cameras. While it shares the wide and ultra-wide sensors with its cheaper sibling – sensors which are, in turn, little different from those found in last year’s Pixels – it gets a bumped up selfie camera and a 48MP telephoto sensor with 5x optical zoom. This array allows for some properly diverse shooting capabilities that all benefit from that knack Google has for smart photography.
Here are the cameras the Google Pixel 9 Pro packs:
50MP (binned to 12.5MP) Wide, 1/1.31" sensor, f/1.68, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
48MP ultrawide (binned to 12.5MP), 1/2.55" sensor, f/1.7, 123-degree FOV
48MP telephoto (binned to 12.5MP), 1/2.55" sensor, f/2.9, 5x optical, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
42MP Selfie, f/2.2, 103-degree FOV
The Google Pixel 9 Pro offers up a superb camera system. The main sensor captures wide scenes with loads of light, excellent color, and plenty of sharpness. Scenes look natural, with vibrance where it’s called for and tamer color in all the right places. Zooming beyond 2x on the sensor isn’t a compelling option, with noise readily showing up, and some will even turn up at 2x if you look in the right areas (usually untextured surfaces).
The ultra-wide sensor is a great complement to the main sensor, giving you even more range to work with. It pushes the center of the scene back quite a ways, but lets you capture a ton in one shot. The colors and lighting line up nicely with the main sensor as well, so it feels like zooming out more than it feels like switching to some wider but inferior camera – a common experience on many phones.
Now, since the Pixel 9 Pro relies on the same main and ultra-wide cameras as the Pixel 9, it’s really offering no upgrades from that main sensor and shots on each phone look all but identical. But the Pixel 9 Pro gains a 5x telephoto sensor that really steps up its photographic potential. Where the Pixel 9 struggles to push past 2x, the Pixel 9 Pro can snag great shots of more distant subjects. Signs and buildings that were hard to make out in shots on the main sensor can come right into sharp focus with the telephoto camera.
With a tighter aperture, much less light is reaching the telephoto sensor though, and Google appears to overcompensate a bit, resulting in shots that brighten subjects a bit more than those taken with the main or ultrawide sensor snapping the same subject. It’s not egregious, but the noise in the images becomes easier to spot when zooming in on the photos. It can also lead to slightly washed out visuals for especially zoomed-in shots. Comparing back to even old shots I took on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, I still see the benefit of its 10x sensor over the Pixel 9 Pro zooming into 10x on the same subjects. Google now offers a Zoom Enhance photo editing tool meant to upgrade even these zoomed photos (though it works on other shots as well), and while I found it does sharpen the images and up the contrast, it’s nowhere close to making the photos appear as though they were shot with optical zoom.
The selfie camera on the Pixel 9 Pro provides a straightforward upgrade over the Pixel 9, going sharper and wider without any notable sacrifices. It gets a broad 103-degree FOV ready to capture you and your surroundings or a couple friends. While the color is nearly identical to the Pixel 9 – which is to say quite good – the extra sharpness is evident when zooming in on fine details, which remain crisp under a closer magnifying glass. This isn’t to say the Pixel 9’s selfie camera is bad, but the 9 Pro’s is simply better and makes for truly great solo shots.
The Pixel 9 Pro also benefits from more nuanced control over the cameras with the Pro mode introduced on the Pixel 8 Pro last year. It allows manual lens selection and focus, both of which can prove incredibly handy. That manual lens selection can also be set as a default, so the phone never tries to use the main sensor at 5x or beyond – a handy feature. The Pro mode can be a little finicky, though, as it likes to bury away lens sensor selection once you enter it.
Google is plugging yet more AI into the cameras. The hyped Add Me feature stitches together two photos effectively, but requires a pretty steady hand keeping the phone framed up between shots. The new Panorama mode can also link a series of photos into a pretty good looking wide shot, though people and moving objects in those shots still end up with errors. The photo Magic Editor also gets a “Reimagine” feature, which can turn selected objects into other things. It did a poor job turning the lake into lava, but did a more satisfactory job turning a statue on a building into the Stanley Cup.
In addition to photography, the Pixel 9 Pro is able to tap into some extra video recording features, but they are more than a little confusing. A feature called Video Boost is particular to the Pro models and allows you to get footage that goes beyond the 4K limits of the camera hardware, but it comes with some weird trade-offs. For one, all the raw footage appears to end up recorded in 1080p even though the phone can record in 4K properly. It then also takes time to process before you get a final result. With even a couple seconds of video not seeing upgrades minutes later, it’s a bit too nebulous to rely on when 4K HDR recording is available right on the device. The phone’s Night Sight for video is more promising, as it took some grainy, dark video and readily improved the quality, smoothing out the noise and making for more pleasant footage. The phone also uses “dual exposure” on the main sensor while recording in dark settings to boost brightness effectively.
Mark Knapp is a contributing freelancer for IGN with over 10 years of experience covering a diverse range of tech and electronics, including everything from gaming PCs and peripherals to hi-fi home theater gear and electric bikes. His work has included hundreds of hands-on reviews, such as his testing of many of the latest smartphones for IGN. He’s worked with many other publications over the years, including PCMag, CNET, TechRadar, Reviewed, and CNN Underscored. When Mark isn’t writing up reviews, he’s still probably working, as the job of a reviewer knows no definite schedule. He’s often playing the latest competitive FPS with friends while testing gaming peripherals, cruising the streets on an e-bike for testing with earbuds under evaluation, putting a recent projector to task with his bad movie club, or posting up at the gym for yoga or rock climbing — his two main hobbies that involve actually unplugging. You can find Mark on Twitter @Techn0Mark or BlueSky at @Techn0Mark.
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