Dorothy

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.

If you’re less enthusiastic about AI enhancements, Google’s new Camera Looks feature lets you apply film-inspired color profiles before taking photos, bypassing the computational modifications that typically happen between you capturing and opening the photo in the gallery.

Pics snapped in both bright and low light environments were consistently sharper and more detailed than what I got from all of its rivals and I really appreciate Google's new slate of Camera Looks, which allow you to easily pick and customize a handful of onboard color profiles to match your style. Granted, I still prefer Google's default Natural option as it seems to be the most accurate setting. However, it's really nice to be able to quickly switch over to something like Shadows to get a dramatic pic with increased contrast or Digi, for a more nostalgic look that reminds millennials like me of simpler times.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Watch 5 takes a repairable model we already love and fine-tunes it, with most of the meaningful changes coming to Google’s health and fitness tools. Like the Fitbit Air, it leans further into proactive health insights. Most of our complaints about the Pixel Watch 4 remain, except that Gemini now has (some) offline functionality.

Why we like it: We heard rumors last year that Samsung was working on a wide-style foldable phone, and this July, the Z Fold 8 launched to global fanfare. After testing the phone, through the honeymoon phase and all, the group consensus is that the Z Fold 8 very much lives up to the hype.

Still, with Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 dropping the telephoto entirely, having any third lens here — and a pretty good one, at that — is now a big boon for the Pixel foldable.