Google’s Pixel phones are great, especially the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. But they’re also facing serious problems that are hard to overlook.
Almost every single review of the Google Pixel 8 and Google Pixel 8 Pro talks about how these two take us to the promised land of AI nirvana on smartphones. Google Assistant screening calls for you? Check. More intelligent smart reply suggestions? Of course, my lazy soul deserves that convenience. Enhanced zoom that relies on pixel-level image reconstruction to de-haze blurry edges? My Instagram dump would love that.
Erase noise from videos? I want that, too. Summarizing web articles? That’s every tab-hoarding journalist’s dream. Those all are the AI features that rightfully put the Pixel 8 duo in a different league. But they are not impossible to emulate. Moreover, it also appears that Google intentionally locked some camera wizardry to the Pixel 8 Pro to justify its thousand-dollar asking price.
The pitch for a Google Pixel phone is still a good one, but between some questionable decisions from Google this year — and fierce competition that just won’t stop — it’s not unreasonable to think the Pixel family is in danger.A dragon burning down Google’s house
For ease of comparison, let’s focus on the Pixel 8 Pro. It’s a great phone for $999. But it’s not the best phone for $999. And once smartphones powered by Qualcomm’s AI-loving Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip hit the shelves, the vaunted AI edge of Pixels will dilute further. Take a look at the Xiaomi 14 duo, launched on October 26, and also the OnePlus 12 sitting right around the corner.
Thanks to the new Qualcomm chip inside and the new HyperOS software, the Xiaomi device offers AI-aligned perks like speech generation, an article summarization trick that transcribes video calls into notes and makes short summaries, AI image generation, text-to-slide creation, and the ability to turn doodles into artwork. Just like the Xiaomi 14, Honor’s upcoming flagship using the same Qualcomm chip will also be able to natively run foundation generative AI models on smartphones.
But that’s not all. Qualcomm says the upgraded NPU and the AI stack on its latest flagship chip will allow users to remove undesirable objects from videos, just like the Pixel phones. Expanding the canvas of images using AI plugins to get multi-step complex tasks done with a voice prompt, plus text-to-image generation, are among the many other tricks it can pull off.
The latest Qualcomm chip doesn’t entirely strip away the Google Pixel’s AI” credentials, but an average Android flagship has never been this close to matching the intelligence that Google often touts for its phones. Will the Pixel suddenly become “just another premium Android phone” after the onslaught of Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phones? Not really. But is their value deprecated? Absolutely, and for more reasons than just fancy AI tricks.
And that’s just what Qualcomm is doing. On November 6, MediaTek announced the Dimensity 9300 — its own latest generation of mobile chipsets. Similar to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the Dimensity 9300 also touts big AI upgrades that impact display output, 5G, and other aspects of your phone. We may not see the Dimensity 9300 in as many handsets as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will likely be in, but regardless, Google’s days as the AI champion are quickly running out.
