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Google takes its smartphone hardware to another level. It's now just waiting for the promises of the software to catch up.

A woman holds a mint green Pixel phone to her ear, taking a call. She wears a green sweater and stands in front of a fancy artistic building.

The Jimmy Fallon Made By Google event had its awkward moments, but one thing was clear. Google believed in this year’s hardware line up and wanted to reach a more mainstream audience for its phones, earbuds, and watch. And it is true that the Pixel 10 Pro deserves to be considered by more buyers! It’s a great device that only falters where the software isn’t quite up to the pitch. But phone software gets better. This smartphone will be a good place to watch things improve over the seven years of Pixel updates to come (that's 2032).

Excellent hardware

The hardware is lovely. Nice in the hand, the triple camera system in the iconic camera bar is first class, and the screen is gorgeous. That Super Actua display (an LTPO) gives us 3300 nits peak brightness for excellent daylight performance with dynamic refresh rate from 1-120Hz which enhances the feel of the phone performance.

The camera system is a 50Mp wide, 48Mp ultrawide, and 48Mp telephoto, with a 42Mp selfie camera that has an ultrawide field for fitting friends in the frame nicely (AI companions need not apply). Optical zoom ranges across 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 5x, and 10x, with optical and electronic stablisation on the wide and telephoto lenses. Then we get Pro Res Zoom out to 100x, which adds some AI to clean up the otherwise messy long range effort by the system. We'll get into the AI more in a minute. But first lets talk some camera features.

Camera cleverness

A smartphone is the most important camera in your life. You can absolutely feel like you can rely on the camera system in your pocket if you choose the Pixel 10 Pro. Alongside its core features, the standard Google camera features are now well established and do an excellent job in all kinds of situations.

Night Sight set a standard for shooting in the dark, Unblur has done wonders for reclaiming otherwise botched shots, and Add Me was a big hit for putting yourself into a group photo with some double frame trickery. Now we also have Auto Best Take for more automated adjustment to get everyone's best smile in a shot.

As for other editing options with an AI touch, we still have Magic Eraser to do that all important trick of removing annoying people from the background of your shots.

An upside-down Pixel 10 Pro top section with a corner touching a water surface. Grey phone and grey background.

One the Pro Res Zoom 100x promise, I'd be careful to stick to shorter ranges if you want a great image. It's very impressive at 30x. But once you really stretch it out you start to get the feeling that what you're seeing is probably more AI than reality.

Then there is Camera Coach. This is my first example of the caveats on this year's phone. I love the idea of AI helping to suggest interesting or alternate framing for how I could take a photo of a scene. It feels like an example of clever multimodal AI that helps us humans do something better with real-time feedback and encouragement. Right now, it's just not quite there. But it's not useless either.

In my tests, Camera Coach told me to change where I was standing, change my height, move for better sunlight, or to think about different angles. However, sometimes the advice contradicted itself to make things confusing. But once you know that's the case? If you want some ideas and you have the time, Camera Coach can give you some suggestions. Just know that the suggestions might put you back where you started. It's not a serious coach. It's just something to play with.

AI is in the future

Probably the biggest ticket sales pitch on the AI front for the Pixel 10 Pro was Magic Cue. And the simple answer in 2025 is that the reality is a long way from the promise.

It's interesting that Apple made similar promises in 2024 – an AI that would know your message and email history so it could contextually give you important information when you needed it. And that is a wonderful idea! It makes sense that, at some point, this kind of personal knowledge index attached to a language model will be a powerful tool.

Apple took the L by walking back the promise and parking the technology until who knows when. But Google has pressed ahead with Magic Cue and it makes for an interesting comparison. Do we want to play with the flawed tool and watch it get better? Or would we prefer to wait for the polished version (if it is ever possible)? It fits the corporate pedigree that Google is the one to press ahead more and, hopefully, learn through feedback to iterate toward something that really works in public.

Do not expect Magic Cue to be the personal assistant you dreamed of. It is genuinely unreliable. But if Google can solve for the hit and miss inaccuracy in future then it will sit wonderfully on this piece of hardware.

Personal AI dilemmas

Of course, even 90% reliability is not good enough if you want to ask an AI for a specific flight number or address or phone number or some other fixed answer to a question that LLMs otherwise like to return probabilistic answers to. That's the next great AI challenge. A little bit of random is not OK in many contexts. Can they put the compute layers in place to solve that issue?

In other areas, AI is showing good value in a smartphone. Voice Translate is showing tremendous promise for ongoing improvement with real utility today. The image editing features are excellent. And pushing to do more local AI instead of relying on the cloud will add to the feeling of these tools being 'personal' and only using up power in ways you directly control. Gemini AI integrations like Gemini Live also offer interesting options for searching and getting real-time feedback on the world around you.

I've said it before, but it's important to flag that I know many wish AI would just crawl back in a hole and disappear. Everyone should feel like they can choose when and where AI appears in their life – and that it should not be anywhere at all. Google is clearly all in with its AI initiatives and the Pixel 10 Pro is for users who want to explore its potential over the years to come. It is far from perfect today. But it's certainly on a journey and Google is going to do what it can to keep making the Pixel experience better through AI tools and services.

Make your Pixel 10 Pro and Google AI choice with that clearly understood.

Hardware ready for the software of the future?

Choosing a Pixel 10 Pro gives you a great piece of hardware for today that has the build quality and the potential to serve you well for years to come. In those years to come, some of the much touted AI features (especially Magic Cue) will evolve and hopefully get closer to the promise.

For most of the Pixel era it's been arguable that the software led the hardware. Perhaps this year the hardware jumped ahead of the software. That's good news if you want to own a phone that feels like it will only get better with age.

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Pixel 10 Pro review: a great device well ahead of its software