Google Pixel 10 pro review – four months later
The Pixel 10 Pro is not the fastest phone you can buy. It does not try to be. After years of Android tinkering, I realized that is exactly the point.
I have been an Android person since 2011 when I picked up a Huawei U8800 and fell headlong into the open ecosystem Google was building. Before that I was nerding out over Nokia Symbian devices. The E65 specifically. Even back in 2005 I could see that a phone capable of installing apps was going to eat the world. Most people thought smartphones were clunky business tools for syncing calendars. I thought they were the future of personal computing. I think I was right.
But something changed. Not with Android. With me.
The tinkerer grows up
For years I loved Android precisely because it was the enthusiast playground. Sideloading apps or roms (remember Cyanogenmod?). Skipping the Play Store entirely. Customizing every launcher icon and notification shade toggle until the phone felt like mine. That freedom was intoxicating.
These days I do not have the luxury of spending evenings tweaking my phone to perfection. Smartphones have matured past the point where that is even necessary. The things that matter to me now are brutally simple conssisting of battery life, camera quality and also very much how much friction the device puts between me and the thing I am actually trying to do.
That last one is the reason I am typing this on a Pixel 10 Pro instead of an iPhone 17 Pro.
Why I almost switched to Apple
I came very close to leaving Android altogether. I am entering my 10th year as a filmmaker. Apple integrates pro grade video controls directly into the stock camera experience. On an iPhone you get manual controls, LOG recording, and genuinely competitive video quality right out of the box. On the Pixel? Google Cam has long been the standard for computational photography in stills but its video capabilities fell behind the competition. If you want iPhone caliber video on a Pixel you need third party apps. That introduces its own problems.
The overheating issue has not fully gone away either. The Tensor G5 runs significantly cooler than its predecessor thanks to the move to TSMC 3nm manufacturing. Reviewers across the board noted the improvement. But push it with a demanding camera app, like motioncampro and you still feel warmth creeping in, and the evntual loss of frame and lastly the overheating. So Google still has a bit of way to go here.
Then there is the small annoyance that drives me disproportionately crazy. You cannot reassign the double press power button shortcut to a custom app. Google hardwired it to Google Camera. For someone who actively dislikes the processing decisions Google Camera makes for both photos and video, being forced to launch it with the most convenient hardware shortcut on the phone feels like a slap. I would very much like to choose what video camera app as well as photocamera app I launch with the lock button. Doubble tap could have been a shortcut to open camera. Tripple tap a shortcut to the blackmagic video camera app.
The iPhone 17 Pro can do this.
And the Pixel 10 pro video from the google camera app is subpar compared to the output of motioncam pro or black magic camera. Same goes for stills. The raw file sarent even real raw files.
Let me explain what I mean by disliking Google Camera output. The images are heavily processed. Google computational pipeline has always been aggressive about merging multiple exposures, sharpening, and applying its own tone mapping. For most people this produces photos that look great on a phone screen. For me, someone who shoots RAW and edits in Lightroom, it produces files that fight me at every turn.
As previusly mentioned even Google Camera “RAW” files are not truly raw. Frame stacking still happens behind the scenes. If you pixel peep at branches, and other high contrast edges, you can see stitching artifacts. Technically impressive but subtly wrong in ways that make serious editing unpredictable.
So I built my own workflow. For stills I use Open Camera to capture genuine RAW files from the sensor then edit them in Lightroom Mobile. The results are more predictable, more malleable, and more mine. For video I split my time between MotionCam Pro, which I bought the full version of, and the Blackmagic Camera app, which has a far more intuitive interface and produces genuinely cinematic footage. I know this is not for everyone – but for a device priced eqully to the iphone 17 pro you would expect it to perform as good if not better.
But google has given us the ability to do this at least, but at the cost of added friction by unlocking the phone and then choosing the app from the screen.
The Pixel 10 Pro actually has a hidden advantage that Google never mentioned at launch. The Samsung ISOCELL GNV sensor supports Dual Conversion Gain, a hardware feature that enables true 12 bit RAW video capture. Previous Pixel and Samsung phones had sensors with the same capability but locked it away from third party apps. The Pixel 10 Pro is the first mainstream smartphone to expose it. In MotionCam Pro, DCG is enabled by default. You get noticeably cleaner shadows, better dynamic range, and footage that closes the gap between a phone and a cinema camera in ways no amount of computational HDR trickery can match.
Arguably the most exciting camera development in smartphones this year. Almost nobody talked about it. But sadly this feature is data HEAVY (14gb of data per minute) and requires a raw-video workflow. I would rather choose the direct to log feature. Sadly both leads to overheating on the pixel 10 pro. On the Galaxy s25 Ultra or the Motorola moto Edge 50 it does not.
The lens lineup saves it
What keeps the Pixel 10 Pro in “great camera phone” territory for me is the lens selection. The ultrawide is genuinely ultra. Wide enough to produce those slightly surreal, stretchy compositions I love using for B roll and creative YouTube content. The 5x telephoto is outstanding. It pulls in tight compositions with real optical reach rather than digital crop and pray. The main lens sits at roughly the same focal length equivalent as my old Pixel 7, so I know exactly what to expect from it.
I have been using this phone for filming assignments and YouTube content creation. Having three distinct optical perspectives in my pocket, all capable of capturing proper RAW, changed how I work on the go.
Also the bright screen is great as a wireles monitor for my sony aA7IV with the Sony Monitor & controll app.
The AI promise. Mostly unfulfilled.
Google marketed the Pixel 10 series as an AI first phone. The Tensor G5 chip packs a 60 percent more powerful TPU and the latest Gemini Nano model running locally. The headline feature was Magic Cue, a contextual assistant that surfaces the right information at the right time across your messages, calls, and apps.
I have not seen it. Not once.
I live in Norway. Thanks to EU regulation many of these AI features simply are not available here. Magic Cue, which I was genuinely excited to try, remains completely absent from my Pixel 10 Pro. Google phased rollout and regional restrictions mean a big portion of what they pitched as the phone defining experience just does not exist for European users.
The built in transcription features are another disappointment. In theory the Pixel 10 Pro Recorder app uses an on device AI model to transcribe speech in real time. Sometimes it works, other times id doenst. Wierd and dissapointing. Also the Gboards speach to text it is maddeningly inconsistent. Sometimes it captures my full sentences perfectly. Other times it just stops. My Norwegian accent probably does not help. But the experience falls far below what I get from simply recording audio and sending it to NotebookLM, which handles transcription in both Norwegian and English with far greater accuracy.
My actual AI workflow looks like this. I dictate raw monologues into the Recorder app. I send the audio to a preset notebook in NotebookLM. Then I work with Gemini to shape that transcription into articles, scripts, or video outlines and cowrite using the canvas feature. It is surprisingly efficient compared to writing from scratch. But the Pixel native transcription plays almost no role in making it work. NotebookLM does the heavy lifting.
Even the simple act of sharing audio from Recorder to NotebookLM is bugged. The share button does not actually send the file the first time. You have to open NotebookLM separately, then resend, and then it starts uploading. A niche bug for sure. But for someone whose primary content creation workflow depends on this pipeline, it is the kind of friction that makes you question whether anyone at Google actually uses these features the way they advertise them.
I was exited to try out the airdrop when google had reverse engineered it to work with Pixel phone. I havent gotten it to work until this day.
Also I had an issue with the Entur travel app in Norway sometimes triggers a progress bar on my screen showing my journey status, similar to Dynamic Island on the iPhone. Other times it just does not appear. The inconsistency of Android live activities implementation compared to Apple frustrates me, especially when the feature works beautifully the 40 percent of the time it actually shows up.
Besides all the niche issues – the phone just works
Here is what the Pixel 10 Pro does brilliantly. It is an incredibly smooth, reliable phone. And I think most people will
The Tensor G5 will not win any benchmark battles. It trails the Snapdragon 8 Elite by roughly 30 percent in single core performance and even more in GPU tests. In my daily use none of that matters. The operating system is buttery smooth. I have not experienced a single stutter or hiccup in four months. Apps launch instantly. Animations are fluid – also I have set the animation speed to 0,5 in the developer settings in order to feel a lot snappier.
Google clearly optimized Android for the Tensor G5 strengths rather than trying to compete on raw horsepower. The result is a phone that feels fast even when the silicon technically is not. Do not let the spec sheet fool you. For everything that is not mobile gaming at maximum settings the Pixel 10 Pro is more than fast enough.
Battery life improved too. Google claims over 30 hours, up from the Pixel 9 at 24. I consistently end the day with charge to spare, which was not always the case with previous Pixels. With light usage the Pixel 10 pro lasts about two days until you need to plug it into the charger app.
Not a spec monster and not trying to be
The Pixel 10 Pro does not compete with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra for the spec crown. It does not try to match the iPhone polish in every category. What it tries to be is the most Google phone possible. A device where the software experience, the camera intelligence, and the ecosystem integration matter more than the number on a benchmark chart.
For me, after 14 years of Android and four months with this particular phone, that became exactly what I want. I stopped chasing the customizable dream and started valuing the phone that gets out of my way. The Pixel 10 Pro does that better than anything else I have used. Even if it occasionally makes me fight for the camera experience I actually want. That beeing said – the iPhone also does this – and the best tip would be to stick with what feels familiar. I have always been OS agnostic and the day the network effect of either iMessage, airdrop or any other iPhone spesific feature leaves me out of the family, friendgroup or work it proobalby switch.
Would I recommend the Google Pixel 10 pro? If you are invested in Google ecosystem, shoot RAW, and care more about real world fluidity than synthetic benchmarks, absolutely. If you are in Europe waiting for the AI features Google promised you, maybe wait and see what the Pixel 11 brings. Google still owes us that future.
Get the Google Pixel 10 pro here