Pixel reviewer roundtable

Pixel reviewers assemble: Senior reviewer Victoria Song leads a Vergecast roundtable with editors Dominic Preston and Cameron Faulkner to discuss the Pixel 11/Pro/Fold and the Pixel Watch 5. We discuss if HiLight is a LowLight, whether we miss the temperature sensor, and if the Watch 5’s GPS truly beats Garmin and Apple. And stay tuned for more camera discussion on Friday’s Vergecast. Further reading: Nvidia’s new financial strategy does not compute Amazon’s drones will soon deliver to nearly 500 US cities and towns | The Verge Framework gave its 12-inch laptop some hardware upgrades | The Verge This robot vacuum solves my kitchen stool problem The Pixel 11 isn’t the best Pixel of 2026, but it’s the smartest buy The Pixel 11 Pro is a great phone, no thanks to its flashiest new features Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era Google’s Pixel Watch 5 is promising — but it isn’t finished Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of wearing foldable phones on your head like a hat, which is what I'm currently doing right now. Anywho, I'm Senior Wearables reviewer Victoria Song, and the new Pixel devices are out tomorrow, and that's the Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and the Pixel Watch 5. Woo! If we have a general thesis about these devices, it would be that it's all about the software, baby. In any case, today, joining me are going to be my colleagues and editors, Dom Preston and Cameron Faulkner. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I'm Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 19th, 2026. Last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last-generation GPUs were basically worthless. This year, he says they're a new asset class. Liz Lapato has a report on the site today on the finance industry's latest innovation, which looks a lot like Nvidia trying to find more people to lend money to its customers to pay for more Nvidia hardware, instead of just handing the customers the money to buy the stuff themselves. Fascinating. Amazon's drone delivery service is expanding to Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Boise, and Syracuse, New York, with more to come by the end of the year. Amazon aims to deliver packages under 5 pounds in less than an hour, and each airbase has a delivery area of about

• 1:21Speaker 01

  175 square miles, according to the company. So if you're within 7.5 miles of an Amazon warehouse, watch your head. Framework is upgrading its 12-inch convertible laptop with Intel's latest budget processors. The pre-built version of the repairable, upgradable Laptop 12 starts at $699 and ships with Fedora Linux. Framework apparently found out that 80% of its Laptop 12 customers were already running Linux, and this just helps save some money. That's compared to 5% of the overall PC market. I love this. It's the year of Linux. Everyone should run Linux. And finally, today, on the site, Jennifer Tui tested a robot mop with a robot arm. It can scrub areas the mop is too tall to fit under or too wide to fit into, like around chair legs and under bar stools. If you have a dog, they will do

• 2:05Speaker 01

  the same work for less money. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 19th, 2026.

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• 3:15Speaker 00

  All right, Dom, Cam, thank you for joining me on this beautiful morning. Let's talk Pixels. Cam, you reviewed the standard Pixel 11. Before we get into the specs and the specifics, what are your overall impressions?

• 3:31Speaker 04

  My overall impressions are that it's a good phone. I mean, it seems like the culmination of the past few generations of hardware improvements bundled into one kind of like, I was gonna say entry level, but like, it's not an A-series phone. Those are much cheaper. It's the entry level of the flagship line. It starts at $899, and you get 256 gigs of storage, which is double from last year. But yeah, I switched from my Pixel 9 Pro, which I use as a daily driver, to this, and it was very simple for me because it's the same size. The performance feels just as snappy. The camera app boots and shoots really quickly. And it has some new features that I can't access on my old phone, which I'm a bit sad

• 4:15Speaker 04

  about. But yeah, the new features, I'm a little mixed on some of them. The proactive assistance AI feature with Gemini, David Amell and I kind of had some mixed experience getting that to work as intended. So the whole point of proactive assistance is to be able to do more for you on your phone so that you don't have to do like, the really difficult work of tapping your phone screen and navigating your apps. It's so difficult. I kind of kid, but yeah, it kind of falls a little short at launch of doing everything that we thought it would be able to. With enough tinkering, it was able to do most

• 4:55Speaker 04

  of the things that Google advertised that it could. Like, David and I spent quite a bit of time going back and forth in text trying to use like, natural language to trigger the Gemini chip to let us book a table at a restaurant that we knew was on open table. Like, we confirmed that the restaurants were bookable through open table. But there were times that Gemini would be like, "It's not bookable through open table. Here's all the information we can provide you, though." So we would go back and forth, refining the text, using the full restaurant name instead of kind of like a shorthand, using the day of the week, using the specific time. Eventually, we got there. We worked with Google a bit

• 5:38Speaker 04

  to troubleshoot this, and they didn't seem to think that we needed to be so precise, but that's not how it worked in real-world usage, at least with this pre-launch software. So with reservations, we eventually got there. It does quickly move through the process, like the flow. Like, a lot of it becomes invisible to the user, which is cool. It just, you know, if there's a reservation, it will pull up all of the screens that kind of drill down into the process where it's like, "Okay, now you can enter your email address to confirm." It's very cool. There was another instance where we were successful, but only after we kind of like, followed some rules that were invisible to us. Like,

• 6:23Speaker 04

  in order to get proactive assistance proactive, you have to connect apps to it. So it's like a manual opt-in process, which is good. You know, it doesn't just have access to everything right off the bat. So, for example, I wanted to do the thing that Dieter did in the hands-on video with all the Pixels, which is like, "I'm texting with my friend, and I need groceries. Let me hop over to Google Keep and da-da-da-da-da," and all of a sudden, my groceries are ordered." We weren't experiencing that being as easy as they made it look. And I know that there's a lot of magic added to those videos, just to like, make it seem very easy. But we figured

• 7:04Speaker 04

  out that, in my case, I had a grocery list. It was called Grocery List, as one might call their grocery list. And in it, you know, just I had a couple items. They were all like burgers, different kinds of burgers. And I was told from someone who worked at Google that the grocery list needed to have the name of the app that you would like proactive assistance to connect you to in the title. So instead of Grocery List, it was called Instacart, and that's not something that I would call my grocery list. Maybe it would work if I said Instacart Grocery List. But that's just kind of like, a strange way of

• 7:48Speaker 04

  having to alter my behavior in order for the thing to work for me. But again, just like the reservation system, once I followed its rules, it was fast. It pulled up, you know, the Gemini chip. It said that it was going to connect to the Instacart app, and the next screen that I saw showed a list of retailers that I could purchase all of those things from. So it was elegant once I allowed it to be, basically.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  I'm curious whether, how both of you feel about the lack of temperature sensors? Because when we did the live stream with Neelai and David, Neelai was like, "No, my temperature sensor." I can't tell if he was trolling me or not, but I think it was great that we got rid of the temperature sensor. I don't think it's a particularly useful thing on a phone, but I'm curious whether you guys, how you feel about it, and whether you think Highlight was a worthy successor to this particular useless feature.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  I agree that getting rid of the temperature sensor made sense. I don't remember ever using that on the Pixel 10s I've used, or like, any of the recent Pixels. I half get why it's there, but it feels like it adds cost to the build for this incredibly niche feature that most people will just simply forget their phone has. I regularly forget that those Pixel phones had a temperature sensor, and people mention it, and I go, "Oh, yeah, Google did a weird temperature sensor." That's like, the odd thing they begged into that. That's fine.

• 9:18Speaker 05

  I'm glad it's gone because I don't think it makes sense. I don't see why I was there to begin with. So Highlight takes over the camera flash on the back of the phone, which instead of just being a white LED flash is now a multicolored LED flash. So for camera flash, it works exactly the same. It's just the camera flash, it's white, it's normal. But this can be a colorful notification light, or at least it looks like a notification light. It doesn't really act like a notification light, which I think is the disappointing thing about Highlight. So it actually only does two things, which is it displays a kind of multicolored Gemini glow when you're talking to the AI assistant. But it only does this if you have the phone face down on a table or another surface.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  So if you're holding the phone or you've got the screen activated, the light won't activate. So it's not like other people will see it. Google's logic here was like, if you're using Gemini with the phone face down and you're just talking to it, then you'll be able to tell when it's thinking and ready to reply to you. I should say thinking with the, you know, the big quote marks around that. I just can't imagine, I have never intuitively used an AI assistant on my phone with it face down. I mean, I guess if you've got your phone face down and then you do the, you know, the voice activation and talk to it, you want to know it's heard you. So I can half see what they're going at here, but it just feels like they've replaced that one niche temperature sensor with this other really niche activation of a light. And they obviously recognize this and they've got this light

• 10:47Speaker 05

  and they should do more with it. But instead of just making it a full customizable notification LED, they allowed it to turn on when you receive phone calls from favorite contacts. Again, only if the phone is face down and the screen is off. It won't light up otherwise. It's only if your favorite contacts. And you can customize the color per contact, but you get a choice of five colors to pick from. You have no big color wheel, no huge set to select from. There's just five colors. I have more than five people who regularly ring me, so that just immediately breaks how useful this might be. You can't use it for any other notifications. Google said message alerts are coming down the line.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  Knowing Google, I assume that just means its own messages app, rather than other apps you receive messages on, which for me means WhatsApp is the only way I receive texts that really matter to me, so that will be useless. Maybe at some point, eventually, this will just be a general notification light where you can set the color and have it flash for different things coming in. It currently isn't that. It's just this really weirdly artificially limited feature, which it feels like basically this was a Gemini light. And maybe really late in the process, someone at Google said, oh, it has to do something more than Gemini. And so they threw this like basic ass version of call lights in and said, and we'll do more down the line, we'll figure it out, we'll figure it out. But come on, this is a notification LED.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  This is worse than notification LEDs were 10, 15 years ago. Why bring it back if you're just gonna do such a weird, bad version of it?

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just like, kind of like how Cam's experience with the proactive Gemini suggestions, you kind of had to be proactive about getting it to actually work. I found that like organically, it just never happened for me. And I'm someone who keeps my phone face down all the time. So I thought it would be useful for me, but it ended up being a thing that was just like, oh, it never ended up happening at all. Like at least not organically, if I was forcing it, sure.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  I had to get my phone's phone, make a phone call to myself from that just to confirm this does work, right?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I had the same experience. But like, Cam, do you feel like you missed out on a Highlight? Because it's not on the standard Pixel 11. Or listening to this, are you just like, cool, cool, bro?

• 13:08Speaker 04

  I mean, I'll never, I'll never turn away more features, you know, in the base model. It, you know, it's personally for my desires, it's nice to know that I'm not missing out on anything, especially like as someone who owns an older phone. But, um, but yeah, the, the lack of Highlight, while like not a huge deal to me personally, it really like calls into question the way that like Google is, is building the tiers of its phones. Like it is viewing Highlight as a premium feature. So to not really have anything interesting to show for what it does is kind of concerning at launch.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  And what these phones can do at launch is really important. And like, I know that Google promises seven years of OS updates for these newer phones, dating back a couple of generations too. And that's great. And they continue to get better over time, which is great. We don't know the ways in which they will get better. But going back to your point on Highlight, you know, only working when the phone is face down, I would kind of love if the Gemini light would show while someone is using it. So you could be like, that person is talking to an AI while they're out and about. That's pretty funny.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would love that too. But kind of to your point about like a little bit of confusion among the tiers. I mean, David Mel, he reviewed the Pros for us. He can't be here today. But what do you guys feel about the differences between the standard, the Pro, and then also like the Fold? I, I'm just, to your point, Cam, I'm just kind of sitting about, sitting here thinking about the differences between them. Also, the fact that a lot of the updates across the entire Pixel lineup this year are very software based. So it's sort of just like, I think a lot of people will be wondering if upgrades are worth it, if we feel the changes between both the tiers and the previous versions make sense. Like less RAM this year, right?

• 15:11Speaker 00

  On the base Pro compared to the Pro 10 and the 9 Pro. But at the same time, more storage, that's good. Like, how do we, how do we feel about the way Google's navigating Ramageddon? Because it comes for us all.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's tricky because I feel like we're, we're in the midst of the changes and it's tough to see what's going to come next. But the Pixel 11 series is certainly like an interesting first step through Ramageddon, I suppose. If you're not counting the 10A being very, very iterative of the phone that it succeeded. Yeah, it really just seems like for the Pro, it's the, it's the slightly updated camera specs, none of which are really all that new compared to the, to the generation that came before. It's just slightly better camera specs layered on top of some exclusive features that for now are exclusive to the Pixel 11 line. So, you know, I feel pretty mixed about it.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Like as a Pixel 9 Pro owner, I'm feeling, features aside, pretty content with my phone.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree. Like looking at the Pros, it's really just, how much do you care about the improved camera specs? If you aren't willing to pay, you know, a couple hundred extra or whatever it is for, for better sensors, I can't see much reason you'd go for it. I mean, if Highlight was more compelling, I think that probably would sway a bunch of people. At least in a sort of, among a diehard Android kind of crowd, I think some people would jump a big fancy new notification light. I think otherwise it is just, are you willing to pay a bit more for slightly better cameras? But I think the cameras, I mean, the, the Fold has a pretty similar set of cameras to the 11. And I've been pretty happy with them. So I, I don't know how compelling that

• 17:01Speaker 05

  sales pitch of pay more for better cameras will be for most people. I think you've really got to deeply, deeply care about the camera in your phone to see that as a compelling jump from what they've managed to put in, in the 11. On the RAM side, coming from reviewing the Fold, I've got this sort of, it's a slightly different perspective with the Fold because it's gone the same hundred dollar price bump as the other phones. But it's got the same RAM and storage as last year. So it hasn't had the RAM drop, but also that's not had that storage bump. It's still at a 256 gig starting point, and that's what it was last year as well. So you can kind of justify that price bump on some of the other Pixels by saying, well, look, you're getting more storage. It's, it's kind of a price hike. It's kind of not a price hike.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  The Fold, it really is just, yeah, it's a price hike. It's a hundred dollars more than last year's for not that many big changes in terms of the improvements, which makes it a harder pitch, I think, in that, in that Ramageddon context.

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• 19:50Speaker 00

  Now, Dom, this is kind of like a natural segue to talk about the fold and the fact that I've had fold envy as a whole, because, you know, as a wearables reviewer, I don't get priority to touching the fun foldy phones. So I actually got to play around with one and I legitimately was just like, I don't know what I'm doing. So I need your fold expert insights onto this thing. How does this compare to the wide boy Galaxy Z Fold? And also, like, when I was at the Made by Google event, I was talking with, I was like, hi foldable friends who are experts. How should I feel about this gigantic crease right here? And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on all of that.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, the fold is in a really funny position because the foldable market has changed a lot in the last year or two, and we're expecting it to change a whole lot more in a month from now.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  The Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels a little dated to me. I'm coming from the context, I have reviewed both of Samsung's new big folds, the Z Fold 8 and the Z Fold 8 Ultra this year. But I've also been reviewing things like Honor and Oppo's foldables this year. So these are the kind of China and Europe only flagship foldables, which have been pushing the hardware side of this for a while. Compared to those, the 11 Pro Fold is thick and it is heavy. It is thinner and lighter than the 10 Pro Fold, but they haven't done enough to get it into the same ballpark as what Samsung, Oppo, and Honor are doing. So if you pick this up and compare it to any others, you will basically be like, oh, this is hefty. It's still got that problem foldables had a few years ago in general, where everyone picked one and be like,

• 21:33Speaker 05

  oh, that's such a bulky, heavy phone. I'm not happy with that. The latest foldables, Samsung's ones this year, you know, they are basically the same weight as a big iPhone or a, you know, Pixel Pro XL. There's not much of a weight difference. There's not much of a size difference. That's not true here. If you're going to go for the foldable, you are getting a bigger, heavier phone, and you've got to make a peace with that. You've got the crease. We have seen, particularly from Oppo and also kind of from Samsung, they did really well this year. People have been working so hard to get rid of the creases. Oppo had this fun technique where they 3D printed to fill the gaps in the hinge. Samsung basically rebuilt its display tech with all these titanium layers. Both had the same effect, which is that the crease is much less visible than before. Head on, you just don't see it. You can't really feel it. Particularly in the Oppo, you've really got to like,

• 22:18Speaker 05

  hold it round at weird angles to try and catch the light just right to be like, oh yeah, there's the crease. I can, I can kind of see it if I really go hunting for it. It's very visible on this phone. It is there. It is head on. You can feel it. If you run your finger over the gap, there is a very noticeable dent where your finger goes over. And that's fresh out of the box. It will only get worse from here because that's how these foldables work. Over time, the creases deepen and become more pronounced. I have generally been of the view with foldables that the creases aren't that big a deal and that once you use one for a week or two, you kind of stop noticing it. Once it's just your phone, you get used to that being how your screen feels. But if the crease bothers you, I would not buy this foldable in particular. And if you're in the US, where basically your option is this or Samsung,

• 23:03Speaker 05

  or maybe whatever Apple might do soon, then go for the Samsung because the crease there has been made a lot better and a lot subtler than on the Pixel. Then there's a size thing because Samsung has just rejigged its sizes. As you said, we now have a wide boy. We think Apple might do a wide boy, though we're not sure. We're going to find out. This is a slightly funny one because the Pixel has always sat a bit wider than Samsung's regular fold line. Well, Samsung's folds have always been these really tall and thin ones. And Google's have always been a little wider and often a little shorter. So in a funny way, this actually sits neatly in between Samsung's two sizes. That could well do it a favor because I think some people might go and be like, wow,

• 23:47Speaker 05

  Samsung's are these two extremes and I can buy this really short and wide phone or I can buy this really tall and thin phone. And if that's your reaction to Samsung's options, then this might feel a bit like the Goldilocks foldable from a form factor perspective because it is not quite as skinny as the Z Fold 8 Ultra. It's taller and slightly slimmer than the regular Z Fold 8. That said, you open it up, it's still basically square-ish. It feels closer in size to Samsung's Ultra than it does to its Z Fold 8, despite being a price match for the regular, the wide Z Fold 8. I really like the Z Fold 8 form factor. I really enjoyed it. I found it suited how I use these foldables,

• 24:31Speaker 05

  which is as like content devices. I open that screen up basically when I want to watch something or when I want to read something. And that four by three form factor on the inside really suited me. I find these squarer ones, it feels like it's more designed for multitasking. It's that split screen. I'm working on my phone. I need my emails and my stocks and all these things going on all at once. And I need to multitask and tap between five different apps on the fly. And I have never used a phone like that. I've tried, you know, I've tried for reviews to be like, let me simulate this version of myself. And I find it very unnatural. So there's an audience for that. And if so, this still fits squarely in that audience.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  I guess the last thing I wanted to ask you about the fold was, you know, Google kind of positioned this as the durable fold, maybe. And that's the trade off you get because it's more durable. So deal with the extra chunkiness. Do you think that's like a valid argument? I feel like if I spent close to $2,000 on a foldable, I would wrap it in bubble wrap everywhere I went because that's a huge chunk of money. So on the one hand, I could see that as a really compelling argument, but you've used all the foldables, all the foldables. How convincing is that?

• 25:50Speaker 05

  I think this one is going to vary a little depending on where you live and those what other foldables are available to you. So if you're in the US and right now your options are Samsung or Google, and again, that may, that may change with an iPhone soon. We don't want to come there, but right now you've got Samsung and Google. So you're choosing between the Pixel, which is IP68, and Google is already touting the durability of its design. It's got this new composite back material. It says it's three times tougher.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  That is going to be more durable than either of the Z Fold 8s. They are IP48. That basically means they're just as protected against water, but they are more vulnerable to dust. I fix it, did a tear down of one of the Fold 8s and kind of made that point. They really emphasized this is still very vulnerable to this stuff, even though kind of pocket lint can get inside this hinge and you can get hinge damage from, you don't have to kind of go to the beach and dunk it in sand for it to be vulnerable. Just little bits of dust in the atmosphere and in your pocket and places you lay your phone down can get inside the Samsung ones and potentially cause you problems down the line. In theory, the Pixel is more protected against that. The caveat for that is, like I said, it depends on where you live

• 26:59Speaker 05

  because the Honor foldables are IP, I think they're IP69 now, which is even tougher. It's got even better water resistance. That's like protection against high temperature and high pressure water jets, which I probably wouldn't expose a foldable to anyway. At the, you know, if you can avoid it, no matter what the box says. But yeah, so if you're, if you're outside of the US, you do still actually have another phone that's also offering that level of durability, but is thinner and lighter and has a bigger battery. So there you might look at Honor. I think there are good software reasons to maybe prefer the Pixel anyway. I'm not sort of saying it's totally clear cut and the Honor's a better phone.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  But that narrative of, well, this is the tough foldable, I think that will work in the US and I think that might make sense to a lot of people in the US. I think outside the US market, there's still a little more choice in that sense.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Any other thoughts on phones? Because if not, we can move to this little guy on my wrist, the Five, the Pixel Watch 5. So just curious.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  I would love to know about the watch. Tell me about the watch.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. This is a weird review period because all the health features are not available yet. Ha ha. That rolls out in September. So check back in October because some of these health features will take a while to populate. But yeah, so kind of a weird review for me because on the one hand, I'm just like, yeah, compared to the Samsung watches, it's really striking how it's kind of the opposite of the phone thing where I think Samsung is still leading the way, innovating, doing stuff with the, with the phone space. And in the watch space, it's just sort of like, Google's sort of been leaving Samsung. It's been its dust over the five iterations of the Pixel Watch.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  So that's interesting, but it's the same story where the hardware has not really been updated that much and everything is a software update, except the software updates. It depends on each software update, but you know, they'll come, a lot of them will come to the Pixel Watch 3. A lot more of them will come to the Pixel Watch 4. So I'm just like, hi, hi, guys. Here's my review. The hardware is basically the same as last year. Slightly new chip, slightly bigger battery.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  There's AI watch faces, guys.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Okay, now you got me. You got me. So does it just generate the design with AI? Or is it like?

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it generates the the design with AI, but you're kind of constrained. So like the prompts that they told me were to be like, "Design a watch face with X with this type of font and maybe this type of color scheme." So, you know, I love cats. I was like, oh, give me a cat watch face based on a brown tabby with an elegant font design. And then it'll show you like three versions that it's created. The one that it gave me, because I have a brown tabby, so I was like, oh, yeah, it'll be like Petey. It'll be so cute. It's a little cursed looking. I would describe it as like a tiger print that's just blobby. It's a little, it's a little challenging. There were like three iterations and I chose this one. They basically all look the same.

• 30:09Speaker 05

  It's just kind of making the numbers out of whatever material you say, rather than sort of creating backgrounds or patterns or anything. They're just weird, misshapen numeric versions of potentially cute things.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  I actually have a question about generating them. Do you have to generate them through the phone app? Or can it all be handled on the, on the device?

• 30:28Speaker 00

  You can do it all on the watch face. You don't actually have to do it on the phone app at all. It takes a hot second to generate them. So like maybe 30 seconds or so, not too long. But when you're watching something generate in real time, you're like, wow, this takes forever.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  With a very finite battery life.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  You know, battery life has actually been pretty decent when I've been testing. I got, I think, about 36 to 40 hours, which not horrible, pretty good.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  The other thing that I really like in terms of the UI is that the pinchy pinch and the wrist flick, which is not new or unique to Pixel. We've seen them on other smartwatches from other smartwatch makers. But it is just the, the chips activate when you can use it. So I thought that was really smart because sometimes when they introduce these gesture features, you don't remember that you can do it. So it kind of teaches you in a really organic way, which I liked. And then, yeah, to, to, to your point, the proactive Gemini. I was just like, this is not popping up super organic for me in testing. So I kind of had to fake push the, the stuff. And it was mostly calendar things.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  It is super helpful to be like, oh, check my calendar. No, I'm not free. But sure, sure, it's there. The GPS was an interesting thing to test. So I went on a series of walks in the West Village and other areas, which are not that friendly to GPS. Because Google did go and, and say, shots fired, everybody. We are going to, uh, we do believe that our GPS is better than the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the Garmin Phoenix 8. And so I was like, whoo, bold claims, very bold claims. I will say, off of roughly three 20-minute walks,

• 32:23Speaker 00

  the Pixel Watch 5 did outperform the Apple Watch Ultra 3. I, I did some crazy tests where I went zigzag across the street and I would like run circles around my friend to see if it could pick up these like silly little shapes and things. It did. I was like, oh, crap. Like it, it did catch this one time where I did a loop-de-loop around my friend being annoying. Or it did catch this one street where I kind of zigzagged down. Was it a perfect zigzag? No, but it did like render it more accurately than my Apple Watch did in a very challenging environment. We'll see if the, the differences really compound in a less challenging environment. Maybe the, because it depends on where you live.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  If you're in an area where it's not challenging for GPS, you might be like, okay, go like, okay, whatever. It's not that much of a difference. But if you do run in cities a lot, I did find that it was marginally better.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  I, I have one question about this, which is like, after multiple seemingly like successful wearables, I, I guess I'm kind of like curious on your thoughts on this. Like, how, how much has Google primed itself to, to be able to have tiers, different tiers of wearables? You know, they obviously have the Fitbit lineup in, in their portfolio. But like, Apple makes a budget-friendly wearable. They make an Ultra. You know, you were saying that the GPS in this watch out, you know, outperforms the Ultra 3 based on your testing so far. It just makes me wonder for a company like Google that has many, many phones in its, in its portfolio,

• 34:05Speaker 04

  to only have two sizes of one watch version seems, I don't want to say like a missed opportunity, but it's just kind of interesting at this point because they seem to have landed on an aesthetic, a fit

• 34:22Speaker 04

  that works for them. So I'm just, I'm curious what you think about that.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is something I asked Google this time around. And they were talking about hardware differentiation because they're like, if you're entry level and you're not that into fitness, you obviously now have the Fitbit Air. It's a cross-platform, it's platform agnostic, rather. So you can have an iPhone and use the Fitbit Air, which that's frankly really great. And when you get to the smartwatch level, you do need an Android phone to be able to use this. You can't use it with an iPhone. So it is still very siloed in the smartwatch space. I directly asked if they were ever planning on like an Ultra version of it. Didn't sound like it. It seems like they think this is kind of where you're going to go for the premium experience.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  And because last year they made it repairable, they're like, it should be, it should be good. We can talk about more durable materials like Sapphire, because these clearly don't have Sapphire yet. And there was, listen, we cracked two Pixel Watches early on in the Pixel Watch journey, seemingly for reasons we don't fully know how they cracked. But, you know, there, there has been an acknowledgement about the durability in the sense that they've made these more repairable. But I don't think we're going to see an Ultra anytime soon from them, which I don't know if that's because they plan on having something more under the Fitbit brand or not. We have to remember that the, the Google and Fitbit merging was a little bumpy

• 35:52Speaker 00

  and continues to be a little bumpy as they integrate this AI coach. So I think they're still sussing out if they want to differentiate the hardware further and under what branding they'll do it for. But I don't think we're going to get like an Ultra Pixel Watch anytime soon. And by anytime soon, I mean in the next year or two. So, yeah. Anyway, that's all the devices. Is there any last takeaway that we should think about for Google's hardware strategy? Particularly since a couple of weeks, we're going to be seeing new iPhones, new Apple Watches.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  I mean, I think as we, as we've said, the big takeaway here is just the focus is software, not hardware. And that's clearly partly a response to the Ramageddon stuff. It's a way of trying to minimize how much their prices have to climb. They don't want to cram loads of new stuff in. They've clearly been a bit careful to make sure kind of every phone gets some sort of camera bump. And that that maybe feels, it feels to me like maybe they see that as the big upgrade incentive is that they'll make sure there's some sort of camera hardware change across the phone lineup to push people to say, look, no, we are doing hardware stuff. But really, this is them just saying, right, we're going to play to our strengths. Our strengths are software. Our strengths are having full control of this platform in Android and being able to do this Pixel exclusive stuff. So let's just lean into that as much as we can

• 37:11Speaker 05

  and hope that that kind of covers them. I think especially in that foldable space, it's about making sure that they kind of know that they're being lapped a little on foldable hardware right now. But there's enough software stuff being thrown into these phones that they, they can kind of protect themselves a little bit from the behemoth maybe about to enter that market.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'm personally a little bit more interested over the next six to nine months in what the Pixel 11s innovations mean for the rest of the Pixel lineup, including older Pixels currently on the market as well as, you know, the possible Pixel 11A. As Dom said, a lot of the focus this year was on software. And as I mentioned early, earlier, Google is really good about kind of democratizing a lot of features across Pixel phones. But it definitely remains to be seen which of these features, if any at all, come to other Pixel phones. Will this be kind of like a line in the sand moving forward of, if you want these features, you need to pay? Versus, we want everyone to have a good time. Just have, get a Pixel. We're good. We're all friends here.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  So I, I feel like Ramageddon has definitely kind of spurred some change. And we may have only just seen the beginning of it. So we'll just have to stay tuned.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys, for joining me.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for joining us. Are you getting the new Pixel stuff? Send us your thoughts and questions to [email protected] or call the hotline at 866-VERGE11. To support everything we do here and get ad-free episodes, subscribe to The Verge, please. Help us keep the lights on. The Vergecast is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. See you next time, nerds.

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