Dorothy

I feel better about Google’s other new AI tool, called Magic Capture. This essentially shoots a short video clip and then uses AI to select the best still frames from it for you. It’s aimed at parents taking photos of their kids messing around, and indeed, I used it to snag some cool shots of a young skateboarder hitting a ramp in the heart of Paris. The shots it selected were indeed the best from the set.

“Magic Camera” is an AI camera feature that can actually be useful in some situations. The idea is that you record a video, and then Magic Capture will automatically find “moments”—based on signals like smiles, laughs, and action—and save them as 12-megapixel Ultra HDR-resolution still photos. It’s a neat mode that works completely on-device that could save you from burst-shooting dozens of photos, but it’s also hit or miss. I found it’s better at making photos with people smiling or laughing than it is at understanding an action shot. I tried taking photos of my cats chasing a wand, and the photos that Magic Capture created were mostly blurry. I’m sticking to rapidly pressing the shutter button.

As is tradition, Google also introduced a bunch of new camera features this year, and perhaps the most prominent is Magic Capture. The feature is front and center in the camera app right next to the photo and video modes, which tells you something about how confident Google is in it. Start a Magic Capture, point it at what’s happening, and when you’re done recording, Gemini will do some processing and pull out what it considers the best photos and video clips from the session.

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.

One cool feature I hope to use is called Magic Capture, which pulls out still frames from videos the AI thinks are relevant or exciting. I tried it with my teenage daughter, but not at an activity that anyone would normally video -- just strolling down a path in the woods, early in the morning (while grumpy).

More useful to me is Proactive Intelligence, a re-naming and slight expansion of the Magic Cue feature introduced last year. When you're having a conversation in Google Messages, you'll get Gemini-powered suggestions based on the conversation. For example, when a friend asked in a group chat if we wanted to come over for dinner on Wednesday or Thursday this week, a suggestion chip appeared that pulled up the details of my calendar at those times. Following up and saying that Wednesday sounded good brought up a suggestion to create a calendar invite.

Rambler is the breakout software feature for me this year, but Google is also highlighting Gemini Intelligence and “Proactive Assistance,” where Gemini will surface helpful actions. For example, my friend suggested getting dim sum this weekend, and when asked when to meet, a bubble popped up in the Messages app letting me quickly view my calendar without leaving the app. Then, when we settled on a time, another bubble popped up asking if I wanted to create the calendar event.

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.

The two big hardware changes to the camera system are the new 50-megapixel main sensor and a new 48-MP telephoto zoom with 30 percent better light sensitivity. But the Tensor G6 chip is also powering many imaging improvements that should result in stronger photos overall.

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.

Battery life so far I still need to run our battery test to get better numbers for comparison, but in my experience so far the Pixel 11 Pro lasts decently long. I charged it fully on Saturday evening and it only gave up on Monday morning. I need more time with it to get a better sense for how it performs once it's fully loaded with all my extra apps and games, but I'd expect runtime to dip a bit once I account for the endless doomscrolling and mindless gaming that I usually do when not in the middle of a ton of work.

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.

Google reeled in the zanier AI camera features this year and focused on authenticity. Instead of forcing you to accept the default richer contrast tones, all of the Pixel 11 phones let you adjust the default image to “Natural,” “Shadows,” or “Vanilla” and also dial in exactly how you want settings like highlights, shadows, and grain. It makes for a more personalized shooting experience that spits out photos better to your liking. There are also six “Camera Looks,” which are basically filters that you can also dial in the settings for.

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.

The nice thing is that Google finally gives you a little more control over how your photos look. Camera Looks, tucked away in the camera settings, lets you choose a different visual style. That might mean purposefully taking a worse photo, maybe with crushed highlights or lifted shadows, so your photos aren't this perfect slice of life, but imperfect and you. I seem to be gravitating to the Vanilla and Velvet looks the most.

I’ve taken a ton of photos, including around Paris, and I’m impressed by the Pixel 11 Pro’s results. Images are packed with detail, with evenly lit exposures that avoid looking overprocessed. To take my shots further, I also used the Pixel’s new Camera Looks tool, which offers a variety of color profiles that give photos a more creative style than the default camera.

Google is also expanding the Pixel's photography software toolkit. Features like Camera Coach and Best Take are returning, and joined by a few new additions, primarily Magic Capture and Camera Looks.

Night Sight mode is also noticeably faster on the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL. Night photos process up to 4.5x faster than on the Pixel 10 Pros, according to Google. Whereas I would need to hold steady for a few more seconds and then wait for processing to finish, Night Sight photos on the Pixel 11 Pros is more instant. For me, this is more meaningful than modes like Best Take and Add Me.

Night Sight on these Pro devices is now Instant Night Sight, and is supposedly up to 4.5 times faster. I think Google may have jumped the gun on Instant because there's still a small pause when you hit the shutter button, and if you or your subject are moving slightly, it will still probably come out a little blurry. But it's certainly not as long of a pause as before, which makes low-light photography a smidge more forgiving to those kinds of smaller movements.

Low-light photography is also getting some attention. Night Sight will benefit from the Tensor G6 platform, enabling clearer low-light images. But I wish the Pixel 11 got Instant Night Sight -- a feature exclusive to the Pixel 11 Pro models that processes nighttime photos up to 4.5 times faster.

In practice, I did find Night Sight to be a lot faster than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. I used both phones to take pictures in a pitch black room and the Pixel was consistently quicker to finish capturing the shot. When there was a little bit more light, the Pixel finished getting the shot before I even counted to two. I know what phone I'm taking with me the next time I go on a night hike.

My conundrum here is that none of the photos I took on my iPhone 17 Pro Max were much better by comparison. Google continues to prove it is technically superior at computational photography, but maybe we don't need to keep pushing this particular envelope.

The Creator Suite that’s geared towards content creators, with features like a teleprompter that scrolls when you talk, social media gridlines for framing vertical videos, and a speech enhancer that reduces background noises like wind, is useful but clearly has a very specific use case. It’s nice all of these settings are built into the default camera app, rather than needing to use a third-party app that, in my experience, usually records worse-looking video.

Elsewhere, you get familiar features like a side-mounted fingerprint reader built into its power button, a USB-C port on bottom and a big triple cam module around back. Google has also retained native support for magnetic accessories, so unlike with the Z Fold 8 line, you don't need a case to attach things like wireless chargers or stands. Finally, I should note that while the rest of the Pixel 11 family (at least in the US) is eSIM-only, the Pro Fold still has a physical SIM tray.

While bubble anything is available across all devices with Android 17, it's particularly impactful on the Pixel 11 Pro Fold because it gives you yet another way to multitask. Instead of opening apps in the classic side-by-side mode, you can also long hold on an app icon to bring up additional options including the ability to launch software in a free-floating window. In effect, this means almost any app can do the picture-in-picture thing you get from YouTube and other video players, which is perfect for keeping tabs on stuff like food deliveries while you watch a show or letting a text convo play out in the background while you get some work done.

You can technically have multiple apps open at the same time on Android 17 thanks to the new floating bubbles feature, but it's not as intuitive to multitask as Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold models.

That's something users may appreciate years down the road, when they're preparing to switch to a new phone and realize their shape-shifting handset is still fully functional. (This is also still the only foldable phone this year that natively supports Qi2, magnet-based charging.)

Content consumption remains a primary reason shoppers consider a foldable phone, according to multiple carrier store representatives I spoke with this past week, and it's contributing to Samsung's recent success with the Galaxy Z Fold 8. I hope Google keeps up with the trend, because Apple's impending iPhone Fold may set the Pixel even further behind going into 2027.

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.