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I love the Pixel lineup, and I always have! After having spent a year with the Google Pixel 7 Pro, I tried out the Pixel 8 Pro for a month and then the younger sibling the Pixel 8! While the Pixel 8, technically stands a step or two below the Pro model, it was still quite fun to use. But what are some of the things that come in the way of becoming a sureshot success?
Display
The first thing I notice is that the phone somehow feels a lot smaller than last year’s Google Pixel 7. I look up the numbers and it’s about 10 grams lighter, and the display is barely a smidge smaller at 6.2 inches. The rear panel continues with the reflective glass design and a matte-finish metal frame to house the camera module. I’ve got the Hazel colour variant and while classy it doesn’t outdo the elegance of the Rose variant. The smartphone’s display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus which ensures it stays scratch-free.
I’ve always loved the displays on the Pixel smartphones — they are sharp and vivid. The OLED Actua display on the Pixel 8 is no different, with no amount of sunshine drowning out its brightness. I tried out my favourite Alto on the display, and while I’m used to using a bigger screen, the experience was still quite enjoyable. The refresh rate has been upgraded to offer up to 120 Hz for smoother scrolling and gaming. I started watching ‘Daily Dose of Sunshine’ on Netflix, a feel-good Korean TV series about a young nurse who starts working in the psychiatric ward at a hospital, and the lives and the employees and patients around her. The visuals were crisp and engaging. The speakers offer flagship-worthy sound quality across various media and genres.
Camera
The primary camera on the Google Pixel 8 has a 50 MP Octa PD wide camera and a 12 MP ultrawide camera with auto-focus. While it doesn’t have the telephoto lens that the Pixel 8 Pro offers, the quality of photos and videos I snapped on the Pixel 8 remain impressive. The colours are always well-saturated, delivering beautiful photos taken in daylight. Google’s Real Tone continues to do a great job of rendering brown skin tones accurately. The portrait mode is brilliant, as is the blur mode for cinematic-style videos with only the foreground in focus. With photos captured beyond a 4-5x zoom-in, the clarity begins to suffer. The selfie camera has a 10.5 MP dual PD fixed-focus lens, which also delivers lovely photographs, thanks to the post-processing built-in. I love that all the software-based features — Portrait Blur and Magic Eraser — that were debuted last year. They continue to be easy and efficient to use.
Features such as Best Take (which lets me choose and edit the best portrait of multiple shots taken) and Audio Magic Eraser (which lets me erase distracting sounds from videos) continues to be impressive. I’ve written about both in detail in my review of the Google Pixel 8 Pro, and the experience remains the same with the Pixel 8.
Google Lens is also integrated to the Camera app and to all the things it offers — Translate, Text, Search, Shopping, Places and so on.
There are some new AI features added, which are US-only. Summarize, which quickly sums up a whole web page is one such. It’s a disappointment that this is not available for the Indian consumer.
I tried out the new ‘read aloud’ feature for webpages, the function of which is pretty self-explanatory. It was accurate but also a bit buggy as sometimes the narration would continue for a bit even after I’ve closed the web page. I also gave the new ‘Interpreter Mode’ a shot — it can be activated only through Google Assistant. It lets me select two languages that the people around want to converse in and for the most part does the translation quite accurately. The time it takes to translate the same sentence into Hindi kept varying over different conversations. However, the translation is accurate most of the time, and I can already imagine using this on my next trip abroad. The only downside is it doesn’t do well in detecting formal registers and colloquial language used in conversation.
Tech Specs
Google’s latest Tensor G3 is what powers the smartphone, which obviously features the latest Android 14 as its OS. There’s also a Titan M2 security chip built to ensure safety and privacy. The unit I reviewed has the typical 128 GB storage and 8 GB RAM combination seen last year. As with the Pixel 8 Pro, this smartphone too will receive OS and security updates for the next seven years.
The Google Pixel 8 has seen a minor upgrade in battery capacity. It now sports a 4575 mAh battery as compared to the Pixel 7’s 4,355 mAh battery. That, with the upgraded Tensor chip the smartphone manages to go on for a little more than a day with light to moderate usage. It usually took more than an hour to fully charge the device.
Verdict
The Google Pixel 8 packs a vivid display, a great camera setup and a ton of AI features that truly level up my smartphone experience. However, the price of the Pixel 8 at launch is much higher than that of the Pixel 7 (₹59,999) when it was announced last year. The price was one of the main aspects that made the Pixel 7 a compelling Android smartphone to invest in last year, and I can’t say that’s true for the Google Pixel 8. While the stunning camera coupled with Magic Editor capabilities, and meaningful AI perks baked into Google Assistant are alluring enough, I’d have liked the niggles of the handset getting a bit warm under the lens while shooting, and the inconsistent snappiness of some of the AI features to be completely absent for the price to be justified.
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