Pixel 11 Review: A Great $899 Phone Held Back by Google’s Own Chip

The Pixel 11 is the easiest phone of the year to recommend and one of the hardest to get excited about. Two months after launch, with full reviews in from outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, the picture is consistent: Google improved the camera, the battery and the display, then charged $100 more for a phone that still trails its rivals on raw speed.

Here is where it lands, and who should buy it.

What $899 gets you

The Pixel 11 starts at $899 with 256GB of storage. The 128GB tier is gone, which softens the $100 increase over the Pixel 10’s launch price a little, but only a little. You get a 6.3-inch OLED at up to 120Hz, Google’s Tensor G6 with 12GB of RAM, a 4,985mAh battery, IP68 protection, Qi2.2 wireless charging at up to 25W with Pixelsnap magnets, and Android 17 with seven years of OS, security and Pixel Drop updates.

The design is almost unchanged. The camera bar is now a full strip of glass and roughly 40% thinner, and the phone is lighter: Expert Reviews weighed it at 197g against 204g for the Pixel 10.

The good: screen, camera, battery

The display is the highlight. Expert Reviews measured an average Delta E of 0.67 in the Natural profile and called it “simply phenomenal.” One quirk worth knowing: 9to5Google’s unit shipped running at 60Hz by default, while BGR found 120Hz on out of the box. Check Smooth Display in settings on day one.

The camera got the most meaningful hardware upgrade. The 48MP main sensor grows from 1/2.0 inch to 1/1.56 inch, and Google claims 56% more light gathering than the Pixel 10. It sits beside a 13MP ultrawide, a 10.8MP 5x telephoto with AI zoom now reaching 30x, and a 10.5MP selfie camera. BGR’s verdict was that it takes excellent photos with almost no effort, which has always been the Pixel’s calling card.

Battery life is better too. Expert Reviews clocked 25 hours and 25 minutes in its looping video test, about three hours more than the Pixel 10, and BGR saw roughly seven hours of screen-on time on heavy days. Charging is a point of disagreement: 9to5Google’s early review reported 15W wired, but both later full reviews measured 30W, with about 55% in 30 minutes. We are going with the two full reviews.

The bad: Tensor G6 is still behind

The Tensor G6 is 15% faster single-core and 8% faster multi-core than last year’s chip in Geekbench 6. That is not nothing. It is also not enough. Here is how far ahead the competition sits in Expert Reviews’ multi-core testing:

In daily use, nobody reports the Pixel 11 feeling slow. But BGR saw sluggish multitasking with navigation, hotspot and music running together, weak gaming with no ray tracing, and speakers that turn tinny past two-thirds volume. Add Face Unlock that fails in the dark, Wi-Fi 6E rather than Wi-Fi 7, and no UWB chip, and you have a phone that cuts corners its $899 rivals do not. The Galaxy S26 and iPhone 17 both cost $899 with 256GB.

Gemini everywhere, for better or worse

The best new software trick is Rambler, Gemini-powered dictation in Gboard that strips out filler words and turns rambling speech into clean text. Both BGR and 9to5Google liked it, though it drops the finished text in at once rather than showing a live preview. The flip side is that Gemini is now woven into nearly every surface, from home screen widgets to search, and there is no single switch to dial it back.

Verdict

Buy it if you are coming from a Pixel 7 or older, or any phone more than two or three years old, and you care most about photos, a great screen and long software support. Skip it if you own a Pixel 10, game heavily or want the fastest phone for the money.

9to5Google summed it up best: “a good phone but an expensive phone.” Wait for the first real discount and it becomes an easy call. At full price, the Pixel 11 is a very good phone that Google’s own silicon keeps from being a great one. Score: 7.5/10.

Sources: BGR, Expert Reviews, 9to5Google. Photo by Thai Nguyen on Unsplash.