The Google Pixel 8 series comes with big Tensor, camera, and display improvements

Summary

• The Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro offer upgraded features, including a new processor, brighter displays, larger batteries, and improved cameras.
• The Pixel 8 starts at $699 and the Pixel 8 Pro starts at $999, with pre-orders offering freebies like Pixel Buds Pro or the Pixel Watch 2.
• The Google Pixel Watch 2 boasts major upgrades, including a new processor and improved battery life. It is available for pre-order at $349.

The Google Pixel 8 series, as is tradition, has been leaked to high heaven in its entirety. That doesn't mean it's not an exciting launch though, and there's a lot to unpack here. Not only do we get the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro, but we get a new follow-up to last year's Google Pixel Watch as well, and this one has been modernised in practically every way possible.

Google Pixel 8 series: Pricing and availability

If you want to pre-order the Google Pixel 8 series, you'll get a freebie depending on what device you choose. With the regular Pixel 8, you'll get a pair of the Google Pixel Buds Pro, and with the Pixel 8 Pro, you'll get the new Google Pixel Watch 2.

The Google Pixel 8 starts at $699 for the base model and the Google Pixel 8 Pro starts at $999 for the base model.

• 

  Google Pixel 8

  SoC

  Google Tensor G3

  Display

  6.2-inch OLED (1080x2400), 120Hz refresh rate, up to 2,000 nits peak brightness

  RAM

  8GB LPDDR5X

  Storage

  128GB, 256GB UFS 3.1 storage

  Battery

  4,575mAh

  Ports

  USB Type-C 3.2

  The Google Pixel 8 boasts of the company's new Tensor G3 processor and features a refined glass and aluminum design. Compared to the Pixel 7, it has a brighter display, a larger battery with quicker charging, and upgraded cameras. 

  $699 at Best Buy $699 at Amazon

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• 

  Google Pixel 8 Pro

  SoC

  Google Tensor G3

  Display

  6.7-inch LTPO OLED (1344x2992) LTPO OLED, 1-120Hz, up to 2,400 nits peak brightness

  RAM

  12GB LPDDR5X RAM

  Storage

  128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB UFS 3.1

  Battery

  5,050mAh, fast wired & wireless charging

  Ports

  USB Type-C 3.2

  The Pixel 8 Pro is the latest flagship from Google, and it packs the best the company has to offer in 2024. It features the newest Tensor G3 processor, like its regular Pixel 8 sibling, but it comes with a 6.7-inch OLED display, a brighter screen, a larger battery, and more storage options.

  $999 at Best Buy $999 at Amazon

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Google Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro: Specifications

Google Pixel 8 series: Design

The Google Pixel 8 series refines the design language that the company introduced with the Pixel 6. It has the same camera visor on the back as the last two generations, and the rest looks fairly identical, too. The biggest change in design is that the Pixel 8 Pro now has a flat display for the first time since the Pixel 5, as both the Pixel 6 Pro and the Pixel 7 Pro had curved displays.

Aside from that, both of these phones still have an edge-to-edge display with minimal bezels and a centered hole-punch cutout on the front, volume and power buttons on the right edge, a USB Type-C port on the bottom, and a SIM card tray on the left edge. There were rumors for a while that the Pixel 8 series would lack an eSIM à la the iPhone in the U.S., but that thankfully isn't the case.

When it comes to the displays, the Pixel 8 Pro has an LTPO display that goes from 1Hz to 120Hz, and the Pixel 8 now has a 120Hz display as well for the first time that can drop to 60Hz. Both displays are also a good bit brighter, with the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro having 2000 and 2400 nit peak brightnesses respectively.

Google Tensor G3, RAM, and Storage

Google Tensor G3 is the latest iteration of Tensor, and it's a pretty sizable upgrade over the original Tensor and Tensor G2. Where Tensor G2 was a mild improvement over the original Tensor, Tensor G3 is a massive leap forward.

Tensor G3 drops one of the extra power-hungry X cores and introduces more performance and efficiency cores, but the biggest upgrade is not even the core layout changes. Google has finally caught up with Arm's core advancements and is using more modern designs, which are bound to see not just performance improvements but efficiency improvements too. That's not all, as the Immortalis G715 with 10 cores is here too.

It's a bit of a different layout to the rest of the industry on account of that extra efficiency core, but there are massive improvements regardless. Upgrading from the X1 to the X3, the A78 to the A715, and the A55 to the A510 may yield power savings thanks to architectural improvements over two generations. This may be what has given Google confidence to increase clock speeds, too.

That extra efficiency core isn't so weird when considering Arm's "merged-core" architecture, though. Arm's merged-core architecture allows for two A510 cores to share resources with each other in a "complex" like L2 cache, the L2 translation lookaside buffer, and vector datapaths, saving on space and power consumption. This means that instead of having three efficiency cores (and one having to run solo), they can add an extra core at not much energy cost that can share resources with what would have been a solo core anyway.

A pretty big benefit of moving to Arm v9 architecture is that it allows Google to implement new technologies too, particularly in the realm of security. We spotted a feature in Android 14 titled "advanced memory protection", which likely makes use of Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE), a mandatory hardware feature of Arm v9 that protects against memory safety bugs. It comes with a slight runtime performance cost by providing detailed information about memory violations but can help prevent memory safety vulnerabilities which make up the majority of severe Android vulnerabilities.

When it comes to RAM and storage, the base Pixel 8 will come with 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM and the Pro will have 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Both devices will only have UFS 3.1 storage speeds (not UFS 4.0, for some reason), and the Pro in the U.S. will be able to get up to 1TB of storage. Neither device has expandable storage.

Cameras

Like its predecessor, the Pixel 8 features a dual camera setup on the back with a 50MP primary sensor and a 12MP ultra-wide sensor. Over on the front, both of these devices have a single 10.5MP selfie shooter. The aperture has been widened slightly on the main camera and the ultra-wide camera has a slighter larger field of view, but that's about it for improvements in the base Pixel 8 model.

When it comes to the Pro though, it's a bit of a different story. The Pixel 8 Pro has a wider aperture on both the main sensor and the 5x telephoto, but the biggest upgrade is in its ultra-wide lens. The ultra-wide lens on the Pro has now jumped up to 48MP, a significant improvement over last generation. The ultra-wide camera of the Pixel 7 Pro was certainly its Achilles' heel. It's a shame that the base model doesn't get the benefit of an upgrade (as it also doesn't have a telephoto), but both devices are very neck and neck aside from that.

Aside from that, both phones offer 4K 60FPS video capture support on all cameras, improved Night Sight capabilities with faster photo capture, and Cinematic Blur support to capture video with a shallow depth of field. The devices also offer 10-bit HDR video capture capabilities.

Battery, charging, and software: 7 years of updates!

When it comes to battery, charging, and software, the Google Pixel 8 series makes very few changes. The battery sizes are roughly on par with last year, coming in at 4485 mAh for the base model and 4950 mAh for the Pro. Both also charge in roughly the same time as last year's models, with 50% in half an hour of charging using Google's official charger, and that's about it. However, the biggest change is in software, where Google promises seven years of software updates. That's not just seven years of security updates, that's seven years of software updates, meaning that you'll go all the way from Android 14 to Android 21. That's a lot of updates.

To be clear, that puts the Google Pixel 8 series not just the best of all of the flagships, it puts it ahead of even Fairphone, who have been lauded for their long update supprot times. That's an absurdly long time, and it's a major commitment to make, too. It sets a new standard too. Will other companies try to do the same? Samsung has been trying to offer long support periods for its flagships too, with the Galaxy S23 series seeing four years of OneUI updates. We're really excited about this change for the Pixel 8 series, and hope that it pushes the rest of the market forward, too.

Google Pixel Watch 2

The Google Pixel Watch 2 is the other star of the show and packs some major, major upgrades over last year's model. Not only does it upgrade from a four-year-old smartwatch processor to the much more modern Qualcomm W5 Gen 1, but it also has some decent software features and a much longer battery life thanks to that. Google says that you can get 24-hours of battery life with the always-on display enabled, something that the company very clearly omitted last year. If you weren't a fan of last year's bezels though, then you'll be sad to know that the Pixel Watch retains the exact same form factor as last year.

The Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 is fabricated on Samsung's 4nm node and comes with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 1.7GHz. With that improved SoC, the Pixel Watch 2 can do things like automatic workout detection, stress management and intervention, better Google Assistant queries for health and fitness.

The Google Pixel Watch 2 is available for pre-order now at $349 for the Wi-Fi variant and $399 for the Wi-Fi + LTE variant. You'll get this for free when pre-ordering the Google Pixel 8 Pro as a limited-time offer, too.