Google’s Pixel 10 Pro has landed, but you might have a hard time telling what you’re looking at. The phone isn’t substantially changed from last year’s model, offering only some very subtle tweaks and under-the-hood updates that almost don’t matter. All that comes with the same $999 starting price that the Pixel 9 Pro before it came with. What’s left to differentiate the new phone is some AI features, the long-term value of which only time will tell.
Pixel 10 Pro – Design and Features
Google’s rate of change for the Pixel family’s hardware has been slowing in recent years, and it shows more than ever in the Pixel 10 Pro. If it hadn’t come in different colors than the Pixel 9 Pro, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the phone apart without carefully inspecting its edges for the biggest visible change Google made: dropping the SIM card tray.
Yep, Google ditched the SIM card tray for – as far as I can tell – nothing. There’s a second grille at the bottom edge of the phone, but it has no apparent function. Only one of the bottom grilles emits sound. The second one likely houses one of the phone’s microphones, but I’d wager it’s no different from the Pixel 9 Pro’s mic, even if it gets a larger grille.
Google’s lack of reimagination isn’t too big a deal, though. The Pixel 9 Pro was a beautiful phone and felt good in the hand, and so the Pixel 10 Pro naturally does as well. Thankfully, aside from the obnoxious SIM card omission, Google didn’t make serious hardware changes, so it’s possible a Pixel 9 Pro case will fit on the Pixel 10 Pro. (Google's first-party Pixel 9 Pro case almost fits, but the tolerances are a bit too tight around the camera bar and thickness. Less precise cases might still fit though.) Having seen phone makers change almost nothing between models except button placement, thereby necessitating new cases for anyone upgrading from the prior year’s model, it’s nice to see this happen instead.
With little changed, the Pixel 10 Pro remains well built, with a shiny aluminum frame, slim bezels around the display, and tough Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on each side. The phone keeps its IP68 protection, which is great to have on a phone, though OnePlus has shown that there’s still room for improvement with the IP68/69 protection it put on the OnePlus 13 for anyone who accidentally puts their phone in a dishwasher from time to time.
The display remains excellent, offering a sharp 1280 x 2856 resolution with a 1-120Hz refresh rate so everything looks crisp and smooth while also having a chance to conserve power when displaying low-framerate or static content. The display can get very bright, hitting 2200 nits in HDR and 3300 nits for small highlights. This is a 10% bump over the Pixel 9 Pro, so notable but not game-changing.
The display pairs with a solid set of stereo speakers. They pump out enough volume for listening in a quiet room or catching a podcast in the shower. Even pumping out music at max volume, they avoid distortion or awkward ducking.
Perhaps the biggest physical hardware shift is one that’s not visible. The Pixel 10 lineup all gets support for the Qi2 standard. Google calls its implementation Pixelsnap. This is several years late, but it finally allows these Pixels to offer native magnetic accessory and charger attachment like iPhones have had with MagSafe since 2020. So far, most other Android phones have offered this sort of function only through special accessories or cases that add a magnetic ring to the back, as the OnePlus 13 did with its included case. I took a MagSafe wallet I had handy and it snapped right onto the Pixel 10 Pro without issue.
In addition to the fast wireless charging that Qi2 support allows, the Pixel 10 Pro still has its USB-C port for wired charging. The port supports USB 3.2 speeds and can send a video signal out if you want to wire the phone up to a TV or monitor, though there’s still no special desktop mode.
Just like last year’s model, the Pixel 10 Pro continues to support fast facial and fingerprint recognition to unlock the device.
It also provides strong wireless support with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, an ultra-wideband chip that could be used for precise device finding much like the iPhones do, and the same satellite connectivity introduced in the Pixel 9 lineup.
Pixel 10 Pro – Software
The Pixel 10 Pro launched running Android 16, and Google is promising seven years of updates. In my time testing, I didn’t notice anything too peculiar about this version of Android on the phone. It’s largely clean, and still has the minimalistics quick settings and notification shade I’ve disliked for years on Pixel phones.
More than any key Android upgrades with this version, Google seems focused on plugging its AI features, which could likely be an entire review of their own. My experience with them in the time I’ve tested the new phones has been limited, though. Some are region-locked by state, such as the ability to have Gemini automatically edit photos – a feature I couldn’t use while residing in Illinois. Google also plugged the Magic Cue feature, which is intended to sift through details from your emails, text threads, and calendar to provide contextual data when you might need it. Despite having the feature enabled and throwing it a softball – I opened an email with some flight data and then started writing an email to someone about that flight – I never saw Magic Cue pop up with the relevant info. In fact, I never saw Magic Cue pop up at all. I don’t know whether to chalk that failure up to pre-release jitters, software version issues, or the fact that I didn’t spend hours trying to get this feature to work, but it’s in line with my experience from freshly launched AI features in any case.
Another highlight feature of the Pixel 10 Pro is its Pro Res Zoom feature, an AI-powered zoom capability that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You can find more detail about it in my camera breakdown.
Pixel 10 Pro – Gaming and Performance
Performance has generally been fine but not exceptional on the Pixel family, and that’s the case again this year. The Pixel 10 Pro runs on the new Tensor G5 chip, and though it generally offers a bump in performance over the Tensor G4, it’s not helping the Pixel lineup keep pace with the recent leaps and bounds of Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs and Apple Silicon.
In Geekbench 6, the Pixel 10 Pro’s Tensor G5 offered a modest 17.5% increase in single-core performance and a 34.8% increase in multi-core performance, but this still falls well short of the iPhone 16’s A18 chip and the OnePlus 13’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. The GPU is an even worse matter. In Geekbench 6, the Pixel 10 Pro actually performed substantially worse than the Pixel 9 Pro, which was already behind the pack. This might have been a fluke, as the Pixel 10 Pro pulled it back together in 3DMark’s gaming graphical benchmark.
The Pixel 10 Pro offered a 3289-point average in Wildlife Extreme, a tidy 27% increase from the Pixel 9 Pro, though an increase that may have come more from the CPU improvements than GPU. Its performance in the more GPU-demanding Steel Nomad Light only managed to tie the Pixel 9 Pro. At that level, it offered less than half the graphical horsepower of the OnePlus 13 and was still trailing the iPhone 16 by a decent margin.
The phone also gets pretty hot while running. Playing BlazBlue for about 15-20 minutes had much of the phone’s chassis sitting at upwards of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The upper portion, near the cameras, even had a hotspot of 111. It’s not scalding, but it’s unpleasantly warm. Interestingly, the Pixel 10 Pro appears to hold its performance steady even at high temperatures. Despite watching the phone heat up while running 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Light Stress Test, the phone maintained 96% consistently between each of its 20 runs. The flip side of that is that the phone is consistently not very fast in this kind of demanding scenario.
The speeds are ample for everyday use, but if you’re a gamer or try to do any kind of heavy workload on your phone, the Pixel 10 Pro is likely going to leave you stuck in the slow lane. Booting up Delta Force, the game had many graphics quality and fps setting combinations it simply wouldn’t allow.
With a 4870mAh battery, the Pixel 10 Pro doesn't have battery life to get excited about either. You can easily make it through a day of texting and browsing with some light gaming and photography mixed in. But don’t plan on getting two days of heavy use.
Pixel 10 Pro – Cameras
With so little improvement in the performance department over the Pixel 9 Pro, you might expect some upgrades in the camera department, but that didn’t happen either. The Pixel 10 Pro offers the exact same suite of cameras as its predecessor on the front and back. Here’s a look at what’s on board:
- 50MP Wide, 1/1.3" sensor, f/1.68, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
- 48MP ultrawide, 1/2.55" sensor, f/1.7, 123-degree FOV
- 48MP telephoto, 1/2.55" sensor, f/2.8, 5x optical, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
- 42MP Selfie, f/2.2, 103-degree FOV
Luckily, that means the Pixel 10 Pro still has a great set of cameras. Each of the sensors in this collection offer solid shooting capabilities and work together well to provide consistent results when switching between them.
The main sensor is a sharp shooter with fairly neutral color and white balance, not pushing too far into any direction and leaving plenty of room to play with tuning features to find a look you like. The ultra-wide lets you pull back good and far without moving and still get a sharp picture. And the telephoto punches into 5x zoom for a nice close-up.
Next to the OnePlus 13, I’d give the edge to OnePlus for the main and ultra-wide sensors, which have a warmer tone and slightly more vivid color (though not over-saturated). Though the Pixel 10 Pro’s 5x zoom is more useful for long-range shots than the OnePlus 13’s 3x zoom.
The Pixel 10 Pro’s special AI-powered Pro Res Zoom function is meant to step things up even more, but let’s just say that I’ve seen this kind of trick before, and Google hasn’t somehow made it anything other than a trick. At 30x zoom it can do a fine job appearing to sharpen an image that already had a pretty clear picture, but it can start to look truly outlandish when working with challenging lighting or actually distant subjects. It’s just trying to invent an image based on the photo you took, and when compared against an actual close-up of the subject, it’s clear how much the feature just fudges it. In some cases, it makes it even harder to surmise what the camera actually saw, as I watched a blurry checkerboard and hazy letters turn into very definitive horizontal lines and weird figure-eights with no trace of the original image. Take the above license plate for example – reading the characters correctly in the original seems more likely than in the Pro Res Zoom version.
