Dorothy

Performance / battery Powering all this is Google's latest Tensor G6 chip, which has an upgraded image signal processor (ISP) that handles all of the Pixel's computational photography tricks like the 30x Super Zoom. Google also says that the upgraded Tensor Processing Unit is 50 percent faster than the G5; this helps power the on-device Gemini Nano model for handling tasks like the aforementioned Proactive Intelligence features.

Magic Capture Funnily enough, Google introduced a new feature that is supposed to help you stay in the moment. Instead of carefully framing up a shot and waiting for a picture perfect moment to happen, Magic Capture allows you to hold up your phone and just point it at whatever is happening. It'll basically capture a video while you do that, then pick out some highlights it thinks are worth saving.

Magic Capture allows users to simultaneously record video and capture high-quality still photographs that are automatically cropped and ready to share. Camera Looks, meanwhile, lets users apply custom filters to shots while preserving Google's Real Tone software, helping skin tones remains accurate even when a filter is applied.

Pixel 11 Pro: Battery life and charging Google has equipped the 11 Pro with a 4,850-mAh battery, which the company reckons will last for over 30 hours of use. And maybe it can, but it’d have to be through a day of light use, as our own battery test results didn’t exactly impress. After one hour of streaming a 4K YouTube video at max screen brightness, the battery had dropped from full to 95% remaining.

As far as battery life goes, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold just barely gets me through the day, with roughly 10-15% battery by the time I'm preparing dinner. Perhaps it's the phone still needing to learn my usage patterns before it can effectively run things in the background, or the fact that Google downsized the battery capacity this year to 4,806mAh (from 5,015mAh), but I wouldn't trust the device to handle a road trip without having a portable charger beside it.

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold isn't a bad phone per se; it's arguably the safest foldable phone you can buy today, with an IP68-rated enclosure that shields the device from everyday splashes, dust intrusions, and debris. It also helps that the outer screen is made with a new glass-ceramic material that the company tells me is more than twice as scratch-resistant as its predecessors.

In my own testing, I set the feature to translate from German to English and settled in to watch a cake recipe on YouTube in German. The results were… weird. The speech came back in sporadic chunks, with slightly different tones of voice and some inaccurate words, making the video difficult to follow. I thought I’d give it an easier challenge with a “German for beginners” video, but it had the same problems and was basically unwatchable. It’s a nice idea in theory, yet in my early testing, it’s not exactly breaking down the language barrier for me.

Most Android phones today should last at least seven years. For example, the latest handsets from Google and Samsung come with up to seven years of software support, meaning they'll receive updates and security patches for the long term. Of course, this applies more to flagship and some mid-range phones, whereas budget devices that sell for $300 and less tend to receive shorter commitments.

The Pixel 11 Pro's Camera Looks feel like the initial version Apple rolled out. There are four looks that are more permanent: Original, Natural, Shadows and Vanilla. Pick one of these and your preference will remain active the next time you open the camera. From the Looks picker, you can swipe through a carousel of six additional filters. These will remain active for that shooting session and revert to your default look after. The options here are: Default, Editorial, Velvet, Classic, Digi, Black Tie and Minimal.