Google Pixel 10 Pro review: AI, Qi2, and a spec bump too

Last year, Google proved it could make a phone that looks and feels like a true flagship, despite the software feeling like an AI jumble. This year, the Pixel 10 Pro starts to put AI features together in a way that actually makes sense — and it manages to upgrade the hardware a bit, too.

Google has finally locked in a high-end finish and feature set for this phone, and it feels more polished than ever. There’s Android’s version of MagSafe, a flagship-worthy processor, and an excellent camera. All the stuff you’d want from a phone that starts at $999.

The 10 Pro also represents a baby step from AI’s party trick era to becoming genuinely useful on a mobile device. Magic Cue, which aims to surface information from your email and calendar contextually, lives up to its name for the most part — like the time it offered to put a coffee meetup with a friend on my calendar as we were hashing out the details over text. But alongside great features like Magic Cue, you’ll still find some that feel more like they’re there to satisfy an internal mandate to put AI into every available nook and cranny.

Between the hardware upgrades and a slightly more cohesive software experience, there’s something pretty special here. The Pixel 10 Pro is a phone with solid upgrades, though it doesn’t quite feel like a must-upgrade as long as your current device is working fine. It’s a glimpse of the future, with all the messiness of now mixed in there, too.

From the outside, the Pixel 10 Pro is very hard to tell apart from its predecessor. That’s just fine; this is a good template to keep working from. Inside is another story, and that story begins with Tensor G5.

I get the sense that Google’s fifth custom chipset is the one that the company has been waiting on. Tensor G5 is the first made by TSMC, and it seems to be the key to unlocking a lot of on-device AI. Magic Cue, for example, runs in the background on device. A camera feature we’ll get to later runs a diffusion model on device. Same with the phone call translator that mimics the sound of your voice. It’s more than just an impressive list; running these entirely on the phone means your data is much more private than if it had taken a trip to the cloud.

Just like last year, the Pro variant of the Pixel 10 comes in two sizes. Both the Pro and Pro XL come with 16GB of RAM, and variants with 256GB or more storage use faster UFS 4.0 memory. They all have the new chip, and while I can’t say I found previous Pixels to be laggy, this one seems snappy. It stutters a bit with dense, media-heavy web pages like character builds on Icy Veins. Android Authority has a good rundown on the nuts and bolts of Tensor G5, and confirms that there’s no ray tracing support. For what it’s worth, Diablo Immortal runs just fine on the 10 Pro. The phone also doesn’t seem to heat up quite as much or as quickly as previous Tensor-powered Pixels either, which have a reputation for running hot. I used the 10 Pro as a hotspot outside on a warm morning without a problem — something I’ve had less success with on previous Pixel phones.

The 10 Pro’s battery capacity is a little bigger this time around: 4870mAh versus 4700mAh, likewise 5200mAh compared to 5060mAh on the XL. Maybe it’s all that on-device AI, but battery life seemed a little worse than usual despite the slightly upgraded capacity. I tested it with the always-on display enabled and the highest screen resolution available. On a lighter day with the 10 Pro, I found the battery running down to around 50 percent by bedtime; a heavier day with a decent chunk of hotspot use brought it down into the 30s by night. That’s fine, and within the realm of a modern flagship phone, but not exactly stellar.

I’m still testing the 10 Pro XL’s battery stamina. Given all of the resource-intensive, personalized AI features on board, a week just wasn’t enough to draw solid conclusions about battery life on two different phones. I’ll be updating this review soon (with the help of my colleague Dominic Preston who’s also testing the XL model).

There’s not a lot to say about the Pixel 10’s other marquee addition, Qi2 support with built-in magnets, other than it’s great and I’m glad it’s here. On the 10, 10 Pro, and 10 Pro Fold, you get 15W wireless charging, and on the Pro XL up to 25W with the Qi2.2 standard. I throw my phone on a wireless charger at the end of the day so slower charging never bothers me, but the magnets sure are nice to have. I never put a case on my phone either, for better and worse (mostly worse), so I’m thrilled I can reap the benefits of what is essentially MagSafe on an Android phone without having to use a case like you do with Samsung’s latest flagships. Hardware is hard, and it took Google a minute to get here, but this year’s Pixel phones stand out in a way that has eluded their predecessors.

But let’s not get too carried away; Google isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel by adding magnets and an updated processor. Some of the AI features on board the 10 Pro are new and actually useful, though — starting with Magic Cue. This is the context-aware AI that’s designed to deliver helpful information when you need it, without you having to go look for it. That might sound vague and unserious, but it’s the kind of thing we’ve been promised ever since companies started talking about AI on our phones. And it actually does work. Was it magic? Hardly, but what I’ve seen so far makes me more optimistic about AI than anything else I’ve seen it do on phones.

Magic Cue is, by its nature, just kind of floating around in the background while you do stuff on your phone. It runs completely on device — it’s not offloading anything to the cloud — and only works in a handful of Google apps. But they’re important ones, including Gmail, Messages, Calendar, and the phone app as well as last year’s addition: Screenshots. If someone messages you and asks for information about a date or reservation, Magic Cue will check your calendar or your inbox and you’ll see the details pop up above the keyboard as a suggestion. You can long press to check where Magic Cue got the information or just tap to drop it into the conversation. I tried it out in a quick staged-but-plausible test with my colleague Vee Song by having her ask about a concert I’d already put on my calendar and it was honestly cool as heck.

Magic Cue is also supposed to help you search for stuff. It does this by paying attention to what’s on your screen, detecting the kind of app you’re opening up — it knows Amazon is a shopping app, for example — and suggesting text might want to paste into the search bar, like the name of a product you were just looking at in Chrome. Not quite as exciting as saving me a trip to my calendar, but I can see it being something I’d get used to using. Is the idea that my phone is monitoring what’s on my screen a little weird? For sure. But the fact that this information doesn’t leave the device makes me feel better, or at least as good as I can feel, knowing that Google knows everything about me anyway.

I saw Magic Cue most often offer to save calendar events based on my conversations. As I was figuring out a time to meet for coffee, Magic Cue offered a link to check the appropriate day on my calendar. When we landed on a time, it let me add the event with a tap. None of this is life-changing, and “magic” seems like a strong descriptor, though I’ll allow it. Mostly, this seems like a really handy feature that will take just a little bit of the friction out of using your phone. Remember the first time you saw your phone autofill a one-time 2FA code from a text? It’s like that. Ultimately, I think that’s what AI on our phones will become. Something that just happens, saving us a little time here and there, that fades into the background once you get used to it. I guess there is a little magic to that.

The on-device AI extends all the way to the phone app where it provides real-time voice translations on calls — a familiar feature, this time with a twist: it mimics the voice of the speaker. I once again called on my colleague Vee Song (literally) who was also using a Pixel 10. She enabled voice translations on her side and spoke in Japanese. I heard the translations in English — and in a voice that kind of sounded like Vee. According to Vee, the feature’s translation of my English into Japanese was pretty good, though it struggled a bit with what she calls her textbook Japanese. It got the point across, and I guess it was nicer than listening to a neutral-sounding robot.

But as Vee observed, this feature would likely work best for a tourist in a foreign country trying to make a dinner reservation, not for family members trying to catch up. And if that’s the case, the personalization of the spoken voice feels kind of unnecessary. It makes for a cool party trick, though.

If voice translation is halfway between a helpful feature and a gimmick, then Daily Hub leans even further into gimmick territory. It’s a lot like the Now Brief Samsung introduced on its S25 phones, and it’s supposed to act as a quick digest for your day as well as a place to find some inspiration based on your recent activity. It does the first part of that job just fine; it’s maybe a more longwinded version of Google’s At a Glance widget, which gives you a heads up on the weather and upcoming calendar events. But it also misconstrued some of my recent Google search history in puzzling and hilarious ways. I looked up the schedule for our recycling service, provided by Waste Management, and it took that to mean that I’m interested in learning more about waste management generally. Uh, not quite.

I had a similar experience with the new Journal app, which uses on-device AI to generate prompts and reflections based on what you write. In one entry I mentioned that my kid was sad because it was his friend’s last day at school. The app reassured me that it was okay to feel sad about her passing. To be clear, she was just moving to another school.

Maybe knowing that you’re going to get some kind of feedback at the end is motivation for people to journal when they wouldn’t have otherwise? And I guess I did make a point to write an entry every night before bed, which is not a habit I’m in currently. But aside from that, I can’t say I found the prompts or bits of reflection helpful.

AI shows up in yet another place: the camera app. And not just as a tool for adding wild stuff to your photos — it’s in the actual camera. On the 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, there’s a new feature called Pro Res Zoom that aims to make digitally zoomed photos look a little less like garbage. Once you get past 30x zoom and up to the maximum of 100x, Pro Res Zoom will kick in and use a diffusion model to try and clean up your image.

This happens after the fact; the original image is retained, and it all runs on your device. It also doesn’t attempt to enhance any people it identifies in an image, which is for the better. The results depend a lot on your subject, the conditions, and how far you’re pushing the zoom range. With enough light, a predictable subject, and moderate zoom, the results can be really good.

Pro Res Zoom has a harder time with writing. If you take a picture of a sign in the distance, you’ll see the telltale signs of generative AI — something similar to real writing that’s actually an alien language when you look closer. And all the way at 100x zoom there’s only so much even AI can do to give you a usable photo.

In a shot I took of a crane wading in a pond, it didn’t know what to do with the leaves and bits of debris on the surface of the water and turned them into little white points, like dozens of tiny sailboats. Kind of poetic but not what I had in mind. And this goes without saying, but Pro Res Zoom isn’t going to give you anything that looks as good as an optical zoom lens. Trust me. I lugged around a Nikon Coolpix P1100 with a 3000mm equivalent lens just to be sure.

Pro Res Zoom photos are tagged with C2PA metadata that identifies them as captured with a camera and edited using generative AI. In fact, all photos taken with the Pixel 10 are tagged to reflect whether or not AI was involved, which might seem like overkill but feels increasingly necessary in a world with accessible, capable gen AI editing tools.

Does it still creep me out a little? Yeah. Is a picture I took with Pro Res Zoom still a photo, or is it something else? I’m not so sure. But I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear of diffusion models in phone cameras, so we’re all going to have to find our own levels of comfort with this kind of thing.

Elsewhere in the camera there’s some good news: portrait mode is much improved. The Pixel camera had some catching up to do here, and it’s not perfect, but subject isolation is a lot better on the Pixel 10 series than on the 9. Reynolds tells me that this revamped portrait mode pays “particular attention to hair,” which is great news for me, personally, because my kid’s hair is ungovernable. In photos taken with the 10 Pro, I can see where the camera retained individual strands of hair rather than just blurring them into the background the way the 9 Pro tends to. It goes a long way to making that photo look more convincing.

The Pixel is in kind of a funny spot, especially in the US. Year after year its market share is comparatively small in our iPhone and Galaxy-dominated landscape. In fact, Counterpoint Research counts its percentage of the market in the single digits and lumps Google into the “others” category, far behind Apple, Samsung, and Motorola. But what Google is doing on Pixel phones matters more than its sales figures suggest. The Pixel is a showcase for the Android ecosystem, particularly in the last few years as Google has pushed it into proper flagship territory. The 10 Pro feels like that symbol of what’s possible on Android more than ever.

The Pixel 10 series represents the first phones from a major OEM to get full Qi2 support. They’re the first phones to put C2PA content credentials on photos taken with the camera. They offer a glimpse of what AI can actually do to save us some time and effort tapping around on our phones. It still feels like AI is being shoved into corners of the device where it doesn’t really need to be, but for the first time it feels like there’s a kind of connective tissue between the useful bits.

There was a time, particularly in the Tensor era, where using a Pixel phone felt a little bit like being an early adopter, and not in a good way. The prices were lower, but the hardware felt cheaper, software bugs persisted, and the chipsets ran hot. But the Pixel series has evolved into something better, something worthy of the title “flagship.” If the 10 Pro represents the best of what Android can do, then there’s a lot for Android fans to look forward to — whether it’s on a Pixel or not.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge