After months of leaks, teasers and anticipation, Google has finally official launched its latest Pixel phones – the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro. Not having cracked the high-end market with its previous attempts, Google believes they are now ready to take on the likes of Samsung and Apple.
Read: Apple announces new 14-inch and 16-inch Macbook Pro
The biggest change in the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro compared to its predecessors is in design. The design language has been completely rethought, trying into what the company is doing with their Android platform. These phones are more refined than prior models – flashier, shinier, with a polished metal finish on the frames and glossy backplates. Each of the two models are available in three colours, but the Pixel 6 Pro’s colour selection is more “professional” (a.k.a. more boring).
The flashiest and most prominent design feature is undoubtedly the camera housing on the back, or what Google refers to as the “camera bar.” If you aren’t into big camera bumps, this will irk you – it is a massive protuberance the spans across the entire width of the phone. The Pixel 6 has two cameras in this “bar,” while the Pixel 6 Pro has three. While it can be jarring at first, you get used to it quickly. A big benefit of this kind of camera bump compared to the ones on the Apple and Samsung flagships is that it won’t rock while laying down on a table.
Of course, Pixel phones are notorious for their great photography, assisted by Google’s impressive software enhancement features using AI. This time around, Google has included a brand-new sensor (it used the same one for the last four iterations of the Pixel). Both phones have a 50MP main sensor, although the output is 12.5MP via pixel binning. It is a significantly larger sensor than before (even larger than the new one on the iPhone 13), which includes Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) and an f/1.85 aperture. Google says it can capture 150 percent more light than the one it replaces in the Pixel 5. Next to it you will find a 12MP ultrawide camera with f/2.2 aperture. The Pixel 6 Pro has an additional 4x telephoto camera, which uses a similar periscope design like on other Android flagships, and comes in at 48MP and an f/3.5 aperture lens.
Both devices have large OLED displays. The Pixel 6 has a 6.4-inch display with 1080p resolution and a decent 90Hz quick refresh rate. The screen is completely flat, but has slightly larger bezels than the ones you’ll find on the Pixel 6 Pro. The Pro device has a 6.7-inch 1440p display and uses LTPO technology to vary its refresh rate from as low a 10Hz all the way up to 120Hz, depending on what you’re doing on the phone. Both devices’ screens are covered in the latest Gorilla Glass Victus and support HDR.
Both devices support wireless charging, have IP68 water and dust resistance in-display optical fingerprint sensors, stereo speakers, and fast charging support. The batteries have also been increased in size – the Pixel 6 has a 4,614mAh battery and the Pixel 6 Pro 5,004mAh battery, the largest ever installed on a Google phone.
The most important announcement of the device is arguably the fact that the new Pixels is running on a custom-designed ARM System-on-a-Chip (SoC) called Tensor, Google’s first silicon. Google says that is it competitive with the Snapdragon 888 flagship chip from Qualcomm, although we’ll need to wait for performance metrics to confirm. The most important part of this SoC is its custom TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) for AI built right into the chip and many main processing pipelines. In addition, there are two high-power application cores, two mid-range cores, four low-power cores, a dedicated coprocessor for security, a private compute core, and an image processing core. The Pixel 6 pairs the new chip with 8GB of RAM, while the 6 Pro has 12GB.
All that being said, the most impressive part of the new Google Pixel 6 range is perhaps its price. Google has offered its devices at lower prices for some time, since the Nexus days. This year, the Google Pixel 6 costs $599 and the Pixel 6 Pro costs $899, undercutting the competition from Samsung and Apple significantly.
