Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro hands-on and first look!

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Hey guys, Google had an event today where they completely surprised us by announcing the totally out of the blue Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro and the Pixel Watch 2 that somehow never leaked.

I hope you can detect my sarcasm through the internet, but hey, we did get an event and it has some stuff that I was really looking forward to, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, mostly because I've been a Pixel fan, even though I know it has these big flaws, like the Tensor G2 had subpar performance and the somewhat average battery life.

And there's a lot that I was looking forward to for the next stuff.

So they delivered on a lot of that stuff, but it also comes with a new price.

So, okay, on the outside, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro do still look like pixels, right?

I told you they were sticking with this design language with the visor because it's very recognizable and they finally have that going for them.

But this year, it just feels like they rounded everything off.

Like that's the big visible design update this year.

I think it's been a pretty boring year for phone colors across the board, just putting it out there.

But with this 1, it's hazel, rose, and obsidian for the Pixel 8.

And then Obsidian, Porcelain, and this new blue color called Bay.

I think the blue is probably the most interesting of the whole lineup, combined with the new matte finish that's on the back of all the Pros.

I think it might be my favorite alongside matte black.

But then around the front, both displays have actually gotten better.

So the bezels are a bit thinner and they look pretty uniform all the way around to me.

And then they're both dramatically brighter, up to 2000 nits peak brightness on the Pixel 8 and 2400 nits on the 8 Pro.

I think that's the highest I've ever seen in a phone.

So I think it should look really good, both indoors and outdoors.

And then also the smaller Pixel 8 is now 120 Hertz as well.

I know people love just dismissing 120 Hertz on cheaper phones, but we're there.

That's still just the Pro, but yeah, just looking at these screens for the limited time that I spent with them, I am very excited to get them out in the real world.

They're calling it an Actua display and a Super Actua display, not sure why, but I guess you gotta name everything.

But anyway, this year, the really big physical change we're getting with these phones, I'm gonna say is the new Tensor G3 chip.

So it's the new third generation of Google Silicon paired with 8 gigs of RAM on the Pixel 8 and 12 gigs of RAM on the Pixel 8 Pro.

And to be honest, Google didn't really talk that much about or at least flex very much of like just raw performance improvements.

I'm gonna have to test these phones to see if they actually improved a lot as far as CPU and GPU and just overall power.

So definitely get subscribed to be first to see those reviews when they come out.

Also, here are the battery sizes, the new batteries of these new phones.

They're both a tiny bit bigger than last year.

But really the story with the Tensor G3 is there is way more TPU and way more processing power for AI related tasks.

And that checks out because the Pixel story has always been all about the software.

Like the Pixel is basically the smartest smartphone in the room.

It's not going to wow you with amazing numbers or incredible build quality or huge hardware features or anything like that.

It's gonna wow you with very clever software at every corner.

So here we're talking, there's a new Google Assistant feature where if you're on a webpage in Chrome, you can ask the assistant to summarize the webpage for you.

And then using the same tech, I imagine that's in Google Bard, it'll quickly give you a 3 or 4 bullet point summary that's hopefully accurate.

Speech to text is also now even faster and more accurate.

It's completely on device and does a much better job also at knowing that ums and uhs are not part of your actual sentence.

They're doing more stuff with the front facing camera to make stuff like face unlock and unlocking stuff in apps more secure.

There's also a new fix it feature, which will proofread your messages built into the keyboard before you send them with things like grammar and all that.

1 of the crazy ones is the new call screen voice.

So if you've used a Pixel, you know about call screen before, which is you're getting a call, it's an unknown number.

You just let the Google Assistant screen the call.

The new 1 has a much more human voice that I honestly don't really know if it's a robot voice or just a recording of a human, but it's much more human sounding.

And then also it has the chips that pop up that you can hit to respond to people that are now context aware.

So if it listens to somebody say, hey, I'm a UPS driver, you can now hit a button that immediately says, oh, you can leave the package at the doorstep.

Hi, I'm a Google virtual calling assistant recording this call on behalf of the person you're trying to reach.

I'm trying to drop off a package for Kenny.

They said you can go ahead and leave the package by the front door.

It sounds very human, but again, I don't know.

I could just literally be a human recording.

Either way, it says it's a virtual assistant.

But what would a Pixel be without some camera magic?

So let's just jump into the new camera stuff with the Pixel because there's a lot of software magic here, a lot of software magic.

So the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro now share the same upgraded 50 megapixel main camera system.

Then the 8 also has a 12 megapixel ultra wide, but the 8 Pro just sends it all the way with a 48 megapixel ultra wide and a 48 megapixel 5X telephoto.

And I also really like the new camera app layout, which is now separated basically into photo and video mode.

And then all the various settings and modes are inside of each.

So I think it makes a lot of intuitive sense.

You could just switch to photo and then go to a specific photo mode.

It's not the first time I've seen it laid out this way, but when you get so much stuff happening in a camera, you don't wanna move it out or hide it.

You just need to sort of organize it in a capable way.

So I'll have to save my photo and video quality analysis for the full review.

But like I said, there's a lot of software features that they've added that just seem, they just get more and more wild as you go on.

So the really insane 1 is the magic editor.

So you've probably already seen, you can erase people from the background of photos with magic eraser, but now this magic editor will let you straight up select subjects and just move them around and completely alter the entire photo with just a few taps.

So they showed me this example of like moving a subject to a different spot in a photo on the beach, but there's also all kinds of other demos of like changing the sky or changing shadows or all kinds of other stuff.

Honestly, it seems like nothing is off limits.

And then there's also a feature I didn't get footage of, but it's called Best Take, which is like, you know, when you're taking a photo of like a group of a bunch of people and you're like, all right, everybody try to smile at the same time and you take a bunch of photos, but there's always somebody blinking in 1 of them.

It's never perfect with everyone's faces.

You can probably see where this is going.

So Google detects that you're taking a burst photo of a bunch of people and it will take all those together and give you the ability to tap on people's faces and change them to a different instance of a different face that they're making at a different time.

Just to stitch together this Frankenstein photo with everyone having perfect faces, even though it's a moment that never happened, What is a photo?

But then there's another 1 called audio eraser.

It's just on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, but you can actually use it on any video you've ever taken in your library, but that literally just erases background sounds from like a video of a subject.

I got to test this on more stuff, but the 1 they showed me worked amazingly well.

And all of this is basically along the theme of awesome software magic enabled by Tensor G3.

Like all of the neural cores and all the things that it's doing with AI processing is what's enabling all of this awesome, weird, fancy software magic stuff.

And then there's 2 other little things that didn't really fit into the rest of this video, but 1 is there's a new hole on the back of the Pro Phone, as you could probably see, and that is a temperature sensor.

So there's a new thermometer app on the phone.

And when you open it, it asks you to select a material to measure the surface temperature of, I guess to be the most accurate.

So you pick your material And then you just get up close to your subject, like within 2 inches of it and tap to measure and you get your temperature, which is, it works.

I don't know that I would use this very much.

You may also notice that humans are missing from the object selection menu because measuring human temperature is still awaiting FDA approval.

Maybe that'll get added to the menu when it gets approved later this year.

Although I guess technically you could just tell it you're a ceramic or like a hot liquid or something and then measure yourself anyway.

It, there's a temperature sensor now on the 8 Pro.

And, but the other thing is number 2, the haptics.

Oh my God, I was typing on these phones and this is like the number 1 thing I noticed on the 8 Pro is the haptics are so much stronger.

I mean, I was just poking around the UI and scrolling a bunch, but especially when I was typing, the haptics are super strong and really refined.

So there's a difference between strong haptics and like clean, refined haptics.

This was both, and I think that's super underrated.

I don't know if they're going to mention this or put it in the marketing materials at all But but I just loved the haptics from the hour or 2 that I spent with this phone.

All right quick interjection There's actually 1 more thing.

I wanted to mention with these that's called video boost and It's 1 of the weirdest.

I don't you know if I can call it a software feature actually, but it's 1 of the weirdest things yet.

So, first of all, it's only available on the Pro Pixel.

Second of all, it doesn't actually launch with the phone.

But basically what it is, is you take some video on your Pixel and it looks okay at first, but then you have it uploaded to the cloud where it then processes overnight or for a few hours, and then comes back to you with a result that looks dramatically better, better HDR+, better color grading, and looks much better than the video you originally took.

I don't know why it's only on the Pro phone.

I don't know why it has to upload to other servers.

It's just this weird video magic feature.

We'll see what happens if it actually comes out by review time, but just wanted to throw that in there.

So Pixel 8 is gonna start at 699, which is a hundred bucks more than last year.

And then the Pixel 8 Pro is gonna start at 999.

I mean, the base pixel just got upgraded to 120 Hertz display to a much brighter display with thinner bezels to the Tensor G3.

That's the same as a more expensive phone.

So I still feel like that's a fair price for it even though It's not the bargain of the year like it was before.

And then the other massive update that's for both of these phones, this is awesome, is 7 years of OS security and feature drop updates for the 8 and 8 Pro.

7 years, which seems like something they probably should have already been doing with Google's own phone, running Google's own chips and Google's own software.

This is a phone that's gonna get its last software update in 2030.

But also, yeah, they announced an update to the Pixel Watch 2.

It is in the same super sleek pebble design.

So it's gonna look the same from the outside.

But now inside there is a new quad core processor that should speed things up significantly and also potentially extend the battery life by a little bit, because they're promising 24 hours but with always on display on now instead of off.

And there's a bunch of newly redesigned apps like Gmail and Calendar.

And then it just felt like they added a bunch of stuff that we also recently saw added to the Apple Watch.

So there's a new safety check feature that works almost exactly like the 1 Apple just announced.

They also added a skin temperature sensor that can be helpful for monitoring patterns.

They also now have auto workout, start and stop detection.

And they also added backup and restore which actually other watches have had for a while and they should have had this ages ago but they also now have that.

If you look at the back of the watch there's a bunch of improved sensors that should better monitor heart rate and health data while you're moving around a lot more vigorously.

And this watch will launch at the same price that last year's did.

So 349 for the wifi only and 399 starting for the LTE watch.

And that's a pretty good spot for our segue to the sponsor of this video, which is the dbrand ghost case.

They're gonna make 1 for these new pixels, pixel 8 and 8 pro.

So you can see that matte finish or that new color through the case while keeping it protected.

And that even though it doesn't have Qi2 wireless charging, like it was rumored that they might, that didn't stop dbrand from just putting a MagSafe compatible ring on the back anyway.

And I also kind of liked what they did with the question mark design compared to the classic Apple MagSafe layout.

But also I like the fact that dbrand says the ghost case will never turn yellow unlike every other clear case.

So if you wanna pick up a ghost, which will never turn yellow, I'll leave a link below.

Let me know what you guys wanna see in the reviews of each of these devices, the phones, the watches, because my name is Marques Brownlee and it is Techtober officially and there's gonna be a bunch of videos in the next couple of weeks.


Speaker 0: Hey guys, Google had an event today where they completely surprised us by announcing the totally out of the blue Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro and the Pixel Watch 2 that somehow never leaked. It just completely caught us off guard. I hope you can detect my sarcasm through the internet, but hey, we did get an event and it has some stuff that I was really looking forward to, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, mostly because I've been a Pixel fan, even though I know it has these big flaws, like the Tensor G2 had subpar performance and the somewhat average battery life. But like, I still like the Pixel. And there's a lot that I was looking forward to for the next stuff.

So they delivered on a lot of that stuff, but it also comes with a new price. So, okay, on the outside, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro do still look like pixels, right? I told you they were sticking with this design language with the visor because it's very recognizable and they finally have that going for them. But this year, it just feels like they rounded everything off. Like that's the big visible design update this year.

Everything's a bit more rounded. And then there's the new colors. Now, honestly, I'm just gonna say it. I think it's been a pretty boring year for phone colors across the board, just putting it out there. But with this 1, it's hazel, rose, and obsidian for the Pixel 8.

And then Obsidian, Porcelain, and this new blue color called Bay. I think the blue is probably the most interesting of the whole lineup, combined with the new matte finish that's on the back of all the Pros. I love that. I think it might be my favorite alongside matte black. Maybe it's a toss up between the 2.

But then around the front, both displays have actually gotten better. So the bezels are a bit thinner and they look pretty uniform all the way around to me. And then they're both dramatically brighter, up to 2000 nits peak brightness on the Pixel 8 and 2400 nits on the 8 Pro. I think that's the highest I've ever seen in a phone. So I think it should look really good, both indoors and outdoors.

And then also the smaller Pixel 8 is now 120 Hertz as well. Love that. I know people love just dismissing 120 Hertz on cheaper phones, but we're there. Now it's not LTPO yet. That's still just the Pro, but yeah, just looking at these screens for the limited time that I spent with them, I am very excited to get them out in the real world.

They're calling it an Actua display and a Super Actua display, not sure why, but I guess you gotta name everything. But anyway, this year, the really big physical change we're getting with these phones, I'm gonna say is the new Tensor G3 chip. So it's the new third generation of Google Silicon paired with 8 gigs of RAM on the Pixel 8 and 12 gigs of RAM on the Pixel 8 Pro. And to be honest, Google didn't really talk that much about or at least flex very much of like just raw performance improvements. Like it's not really about that.

I'm gonna have to test these phones to see if they actually improved a lot as far as CPU and GPU and just overall power. So definitely get subscribed to be first to see those reviews when they come out. Also, here are the battery sizes, the new batteries of these new phones. They're both a tiny bit bigger than last year. But really the story with the Tensor G3 is there is way more TPU and way more processing power for AI related tasks.

And that checks out because the Pixel story has always been all about the software. And that's still super true with these. There is so much software. Like the Pixel is basically the smartest smartphone in the room. It's not going to wow you with amazing numbers or incredible build quality or huge hardware features or anything like that.

It's gonna wow you with very clever software at every corner. So here we're talking, there's a new Google Assistant feature where if you're on a webpage in Chrome, you can ask the assistant to summarize the webpage for you. And then using the same tech, I imagine that's in Google Bard, it'll quickly give you a 3 or 4 bullet point summary that's hopefully accurate. Speech to text is also now even faster and more accurate. It's completely on device and does a much better job also at knowing that ums and uhs are not part of your actual sentence.

So it doesn't write them down. That's smart. They're doing more stuff with the front facing camera to make stuff like face unlock and unlocking stuff in apps more secure. There's also a new fix it feature, which will proofread your messages built into the keyboard before you send them with things like grammar and all that. 1 of the crazy ones is the new call screen voice.

So if you've used a Pixel, you know about call screen before, which is you're getting a call, it's an unknown number. You just let the Google Assistant screen the call. The new 1 has a much more human voice that I honestly don't really know if it's a robot voice or just a recording of a human, but it's much more human sounding. And then also it has the chips that pop up that you can hit to respond to people that are now context aware. So if it listens to somebody say, hey, I'm a UPS driver, you can now hit a button that immediately says, oh, you can leave the package at the doorstep.

I got to record this. I'll just let you listen to it. Hi, I'm a Google virtual calling assistant recording this call on behalf of the person you're trying to reach. Can you say what you're calling about? I'm trying to drop off a package for Kenny.

They said you can go ahead and leave the package by the front door. OK, thanks. That's great. Great. I'll see you soon.

So yeah, that's pretty good to me. It sounds very human, but again, I don't know. I could just literally be a human recording. Either way, it says it's a virtual assistant. But what would a Pixel be without some camera magic?

So let's just jump into the new camera stuff with the Pixel because there's a lot of software magic here, a lot of software magic. So the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro now share the same upgraded 50 megapixel main camera system. Then the 8 also has a 12 megapixel ultra wide, but the 8 Pro just sends it all the way with a 48 megapixel ultra wide and a 48 megapixel 5X telephoto. And I also really like the new camera app layout, which is now separated basically into photo and video mode. And then all the various settings and modes are inside of each.

So I think it makes a lot of intuitive sense. You could just switch to photo and then go to a specific photo mode. There's manual controls. It's not the first time I've seen it laid out this way, but when you get so much stuff happening in a camera, you don't wanna move it out or hide it. You just need to sort of organize it in a capable way.

I think this does a good job. So I'll have to save my photo and video quality analysis for the full review. But like I said, there's a lot of software features that they've added that just seem, they just get more and more wild as you go on. So the really insane 1 is the magic editor. So you've probably already seen, you can erase people from the background of photos with magic eraser, but now this magic editor will let you straight up select subjects and just move them around and completely alter the entire photo with just a few taps.

So they showed me this example of like moving a subject to a different spot in a photo on the beach, but there's also all kinds of other demos of like changing the sky or changing shadows or all kinds of other stuff. Honestly, it seems like nothing is off limits. And then there's also a feature I didn't get footage of, but it's called Best Take, which is like, you know, when you're taking a photo of like a group of a bunch of people and you're like, all right, everybody try to smile at the same time and you take a bunch of photos, but there's always somebody blinking in 1 of them. It's never perfect with everyone's faces. You can probably see where this is going.

So Google detects that you're taking a burst photo of a bunch of people and it will take all those together and give you the ability to tap on people's faces and change them to a different instance of a different face that they're making at a different time. Just to stitch together this Frankenstein photo with everyone having perfect faces, even though it's a moment that never happened, What is a photo? But then there's another 1 called audio eraser. It's a video editing feature. It's just on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, but you can actually use it on any video you've ever taken in your library, but that literally just erases background sounds from like a video of a subject.

It supposedly works really well. I got to test this on more stuff, but the 1 they showed me worked amazingly well. And all of this is basically along the theme of awesome software magic enabled by Tensor G3. Like all of the neural cores and all the things that it's doing with AI processing is what's enabling all of this awesome, weird, fancy software magic stuff. And then there's 2 other little things that didn't really fit into the rest of this video, but 1 is there's a new hole on the back of the Pro Phone, as you could probably see, and that is a temperature sensor.

Yeah, actually. So there's a new thermometer app on the phone. And when you open it, it asks you to select a material to measure the surface temperature of, I guess to be the most accurate. So you pick your material And then you just get up close to your subject, like within 2 inches of it and tap to measure and you get your temperature, which is, it works. It's pretty neat, I guess.

I don't know that I would use this very much. You may also notice that humans are missing from the object selection menu because measuring human temperature is still awaiting FDA approval. Maybe that'll get added to the menu when it gets approved later this year. Although I guess technically you could just tell it you're a ceramic or like a hot liquid or something and then measure yourself anyway. I don't know, whatever.

It, there's a temperature sensor now on the 8 Pro. And, but the other thing is number 2, the haptics. Oh my God, I was typing on these phones and this is like the number 1 thing I noticed on the 8 Pro is the haptics are so much stronger. I mean, I was just poking around the UI and scrolling a bunch, but especially when I was typing, the haptics are super strong and really refined. So there's a difference between strong haptics and like clean, refined haptics.

This was both, and I think that's super underrated. I don't know if they're going to mention this or put it in the marketing materials at all But but I just loved the haptics from the hour or 2 that I spent with this phone. All right quick interjection There's actually 1 more thing. I wanted to mention with these that's called video boost and It's 1 of the weirdest. I don't you know if I can call it a software feature actually, but it's 1 of the weirdest things yet.

So, first of all, it's only available on the Pro Pixel. Second of all, it doesn't actually launch with the phone. It's coming soon or later. But basically what it is, is you take some video on your Pixel and it looks okay at first, but then you have it uploaded to the cloud where it then processes overnight or for a few hours, and then comes back to you with a result that looks dramatically better, better HDR+, better color grading, and looks much better than the video you originally took. I don't know why it's only on the Pro phone.

I don't know why it has to upload to other servers. I don't even know what's happening. It's just this weird video magic feature. It's called Video Boost. We'll see what happens if it actually comes out by review time, but just wanted to throw that in there.

Another weird feature. So then the new prices. So Pixel 8 is gonna start at 699, which is a hundred bucks more than last year. And then the Pixel 8 Pro is gonna start at 999. I think you can justify it though.

I mean, the base pixel just got upgraded to 120 Hertz display to a much brighter display with thinner bezels to the Tensor G3. It's got a new primary camera. That's the same as a more expensive phone. So I still feel like that's a fair price for it even though It's not the bargain of the year like it was before. And then the other massive update that's for both of these phones, this is awesome, is 7 years of OS security and feature drop updates for the 8 and 8 Pro.

7 years, which seems like something they probably should have already been doing with Google's own phone, running Google's own chips and Google's own software. But yeah, that's, think about that. That's pretty sick. They're leading the way. This is a phone that's gonna get its last software update in 2030.

Good looks, Google. But also, yeah, they announced an update to the Pixel Watch 2. It is in the same super sleek pebble design. So it's gonna look the same from the outside. But now inside there is a new quad core processor that should speed things up significantly and also potentially extend the battery life by a little bit, because they're promising 24 hours but with always on display on now instead of off.

And there's a bunch of newly redesigned apps like Gmail and Calendar. And then it just felt like they added a bunch of stuff that we also recently saw added to the Apple Watch. So there's a new safety check feature that works almost exactly like the 1 Apple just announced. They also added a skin temperature sensor that can be helpful for monitoring patterns. They also now have auto workout, start and stop detection.

And they also added backup and restore which actually other watches have had for a while and they should have had this ages ago but they also now have that. If you look at the back of the watch there's a bunch of improved sensors that should better monitor heart rate and health data while you're moving around a lot more vigorously. And this watch will launch at the same price that last year's did. So 349 for the wifi only and 399 starting for the LTE watch. And that's a pretty good spot for our segue to the sponsor of this video, which is the dbrand ghost case.

They're gonna make 1 for these new pixels, pixel 8 and 8 pro. So you can see that matte finish or that new color through the case while keeping it protected. And that even though it doesn't have Qi2 wireless charging, like it was rumored that they might, that didn't stop dbrand from just putting a MagSafe compatible ring on the back anyway. And I also kind of liked what they did with the question mark design compared to the classic Apple MagSafe layout. But also I like the fact that dbrand says the ghost case will never turn yellow unlike every other clear case.

So if you wanna pick up a ghost, which will never turn yellow, I'll leave a link below. And so that's it. Let me know what you guys wanna see in the reviews of each of these devices, the phones, the watches, because my name is Marques Brownlee and it is Techtober officially and there's gonna be a bunch of videos in the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned for that stuff. Get subscribed.

All right, catch you in the next 1. Peace.

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Google Pixel 8/8 Pro Impressions: Software Magic!