Google Pixel 11 Pro Review: Great Phone, Flawed AI
Google Pixel 11 Pro review explores its focus on screen-reducing software features, a hardware RAM downgrade, and a 100 dollar price increase.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Google Pixel 11 Pro heavily focuses on software designed to reduce screen time.
- Hardware remains similar to last year, but the base model gets less RAM.
- The prominent Proactive Assistance feature only works in very narrow circumstances.
- The base model is 100 dollars more expensive, starting at 1,099 dollars.
Google is attempting to get users off their smartphones, promising that the Google Pixel 11 Pro is a phone designed to help you use it less. The new device can proactively assist in booking restaurant reservations, capturing the best frames from a video, and enabling significantly faster voice-texting. The pitch focuses on repairing users' degraded relationship with technology over recent years.
However, the hardware on the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL closely mirrors last year's models, while introducing a downgrade in at least one aspect, leaving software features as the primary selling point. Spending a week testing the device, senior reviewer David Imel from The Verge noted that when the software functions as intended, it is genuinely helpful, though making it work often requires very narrow circumstances.
Google's heavy pivot toward digital wellbeing software in the Pixel 11 Pro highlights an industry-wide hardware plateau, shifting competition toward proactive AI agents. While innovative on paper, these features often require rigid contextual triggers, limiting their practical everyday reliability.
Hardware updates for the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL include brighter 3,600-nit displays, upgraded wired charging speeds, and Qi2.2 wireless charging up to 25W. The 5x optical telephoto camera features a larger sensor capturing 30 percent more light, storage now starts at 256GB instead of 128GB, and a novel notification light has been added.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Unfortunately, these upgrades accompany a hardware downgrade for the base model, which now features 12GB of RAM compared to last year's 16GB standard. Additionally, that base model carries a 100 dollar price hike, starting at 1,099 dollars.
With such minor specification changes, Google has gone all in on software to help users complete tedious tasks faster. The largest push in this direction is the new Proactive Assistance feature, consisting of dynamic chips that appear during specific phone interactions, such as scheduling inquiries from friends.
"For the most basic interactions, like checking availability or adding an event to my calendar, I found Proactive Assistance really helpful."
David Imel
For basic tasks like checking availability or adding calendar events, Proactive Assistance proved genuinely useful, though reliability drops significantly outside of those straightforward scenarios.
Source: The Verge
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