Pixel 10 Review: Flashy New Features, but Not Google's Best Entry-Level Phone

Design and Pixelsnap

With the addition of an extra camera lens and the MagSafe-like "Pixelsnap" feature, the standard Google Pixel 10 is almost a dead ringer for the Pro model, although a few gripes still drag it down for me.

Chief of these is the glossy back, which feels hard in the hands and catches glare and reflections almost like a mirror. This shiny look may have seemed high-tech about a decade ago, but nowadays, it just gets in the way and comes across as trying too hard. I much prefer the matte backing on the Pro models, which is soft to the touch and doesn't give off any glare, although I'll admit a case solves this issue right away.

Oddly enough, though, the aluminum sides on the base Pixel 10 are matte, while the Pro's sides are polished, which reverses the issues. This is something else you won't notice with a case on, but it is one point in the regular Pixel 10's favor, even if I tend to care more about the back of my phone than the sides.

Aside from that, the Pixel 10 is the typical rectangular candy-bar shape that's become the norm these days, albeit with the Pixel's trademark camera bar stretching the width of the top of the phone. It kind of looks like your phone is wearing Geordi La Forge's visor from Star Trek , and I've never been a big fan of it. It sticks out visually, the extra width it adds to your phone is awkwardly placed, and it makes placing your fingers while holding the phone horizontally a bit harder. I much prefer the approach taken in Samsung's Galaxy phones, or even Google's own Pixel 9a, where the camera lenses are kept to one corner of the device, but with rumors pointing to the iPhone 17 potentially adopting its own camera bar , maybe I'm just behind the times.

One place where I will give the standard Pixel 10 some flowers is the color selection, which includes a funky neon green and brings back the indigo colorway from the Pixel 1. You've got some much more playful choices here than on the Pro, which, aside from a muted light green, only comes in gray, black, and white.

The biggest win for the Pixel's design this year, though, has little to do with aesthetics, and is available across both the base and Pro models. That's "Pixelsnap," which is what Google is calling its implementation of what everyone else calls MagSafe. Yep, magnetic chargers and accessories can now connect right onto your Pixel, no adhesive metal ring required. There are a few official options already, but the trick is that it also works with your existing MagSafe accessories; I was able to charge the base Pixel 10 with my Belkin iPhone charger, plus slap a third-party portable charger on it while on the go, as well as take it to the store with a MagSafe wallet playing ride-along. I still got faster charging speeds out of the official Google Pixelsnap Charger, since it supports Qi2, but either way, Pixelsnap is still my favorite thing about this phone.

And yes, all of Google's Pixel cases this year support Pixelsnap. Minor gripes aside, with the right case on your base Pixel 10, and the right stand to snap it to, the standard Pixel 10 still looks plenty premium at a glance. All but the most trained eyes probably won't notice that you cheaped out instead of getting a Pro.

The Pixel 10's AI isn't worth the upgrade

Pixelsnap might be my favorite thing about the Pixel 10, but Google's full marketing weight has been behind the AI—yes, they spent Jimmy Fallon money on this. That's a bit of a shame, because as I've gotten used to saying with these phones, I left pretty unimpressed with what the AI had to offer.

Most of the additions this year are to the camera app , which means that if you aren't interested in potentially introducing AI hallucination to your photos, you're probably not going to use the new features much. Worse, the Pixel 10 loses out on " 100x zoom ," a Pixel 10 Pro feature that I had issues getting reliable results from, but that nonetheless makes the most enticing pitch on paper out of all these new AI features. Without it, the regular Pixel 10's AI is mostly dominated by gimmicks.

Ask Gemini to edit your photos

Without 100x zoom, the most useful AI trick added to the Pixel 10 is probably the ability to ask Gemini to edit your photos for you by using natural language. Rather than having to sift through dozens of buttons and submenus, now you can simply open up a chat with Google's AI, tell it what you want your photo to look like, and it'll do its best to follow your directions using all of the tools at its disposal.

The results are a mixed bag, although I won't deny the convenience. I quite liked how it removed the glare from this photo of a truck:

But I wasn't a huge fan of the extra foliage it added to delete a fence from a photo of some bushes, or a sign from a photo of a potted plant:

The trick is that Gemini will use basic tools like cropping in addition to more AI-powered edits, and it's not always clear when it's doing what. You can check whether AI was used to touch up your photo by clicking on its metadata, but if you're not a fan of AI-generated imagery, know that Gemini won't make any special attempts to avoid it or put it behind its own special setting. If you're like me, and you think filling in blank spaces in a photo with AI imagination tends to look more off-putting than not, you'll probably still have a faster, easier time making your edits yourself.

Camera Coach is a one-and-done

If you don't want AI-generated imagery in your photo, but you still want some AI help taking it, there is still one trick for you with the Pixel 10. Dubbed "Camera Coach," this feature uses AI to help you ideate potential shots and guide you through taking them.

Essentially, you ensure you're connected to the internet (most of the Pixel 10's AI runs on device for extra privacy, but Camera Coach needs access to more powerful models), then point your frame at something you want to take a photo of and click the Camera Coach button in the top right corner of the Camera app. Gemini will then show a few suggestions for photos you could take based on what it sees, and you can even ask it to guess about what's out of frame to come up with more ideas.

Pick a shot you want to take, and your phone will give you a step-by-step guide to taking it, including how to position the camera and which settings to enable.

In theory, it's a decent start to get more creative with your shots, and Google told me its camera team personally developed the model here by feeding it examples of both good and bad shots. Unfortunately, using it extends the time it takes to actually get a photo by quite a lot, and I found the advice it gave me wasn't really worth the time spent.

Maybe I'm puffing myself up a bit too much here, but being told to follow the rule of thirds or to zoom in past my subject's knees seemed a bit obvious to me, and I often accidentally followed Google's instructions before it even told me to, as a matter of instinct. Luckily, you're able to actually take your photo at any point in the process, so if you've skipped ahead of Camera Coach or don't agree with a particular bit of advice, you can ignore it. But for now, the AI rarely gave me more instruction than the steps I could obviously infer by just looking at the goal photo it wanted me to take. I don't see many people sticking with this tool for long, at least if they have the same basic knowledge of photography that I do.

Magic Cue and Voice Translate

Most of the Pixel 10's new AI features live in the camera app, but there are two other additions this year. You're not, however, likely to get much use out of them.

Magic Cue is the biggest of these, and essentially pulls data from Gmail, Messages, Keep Notes, Contacts, Google Calendar, and Pixel screenshots to intelligently put reminders on your screen as you need them. All of this is on-device, so there shouldn't be any privacy concerns, but the idea is that if you, say, call an airline about a flight reservation, your phone will pull your boarding pass information from your emails and show it on screen for you to reference during your call.

In theory, I love this. It's an unobtrusive way to incorporate AI into your daily routine on your phone without needing you to change how you use it too much. Unfortunately, because it only works with Google's own apps right now, I didn't actually see it pop up while I used my Pixel 10.

I mostly use my phone to open up third-party social media apps, encrypted chat apps , video sites, and games. Your routine may vary, but if it's anything like mine, be prepared to mostly sit out on Magic Cue. 

But even if you use Google's own apps more than I do, I have my doubts. Automatically helping you while you chat with an airline sounds nice during a press conference, but is that a daily scenario people are likely to encounter? What about double-checking fancy dinner reservations—another use case Google touted for Magic Cue?

My hunch is that Magic Cue doesn't actually fit too naturally into how most people use their phones on a day-to-day basis. It won't help with TikTok, and it won't help with Whatsapp. It's not going to hurt, either, but it's probably not worth buying a new phone for.

Also in this category is Voice Translate, which can mimic your voice during phone calls and make it sound like you're speaking another language, to help you more naturally talk with someone who doesn't speak the same language as you. Getting past my inherent apprehension with my phone deepfaking my voice (again, this is on-device, so it's theoretically secure), I was impressed by it when it copied Jimmy Fallon's voice to speak Spanish during the Made by Google event where it was announced. But unfortunately, I didn't have anyone else I could test it with, and I think that'll be the case for most people.

Right now, Voice Translate requires both callers to have a Pixel 10, which highly limits who you can use it with. Unless you intend to open all your cross-language chats by checking in on what phone your conversation partner has, you'll probably never actually try it out, which means it makes for another neat back-of-the-box feature that's probably still not worth upgrading over.

There's a telephoto lens, but with a tradeoff

For the base Pixel 10, there's one more key upgrade that Google pushed during its launch event. Now, the telephoto lens that used to be exclusive to the Pro model is on the standard Pixel phone, albeit with a resolution drop from 48MP to 10.8MP, although its addition does come with a few drawbacks.

On the plus side, this means you can now zoom in five times before your phone has to start cropping your photo and crunching your resolution to make it work. This is called an optical zoom, and before, you were limited to a 2x optical zoom. It works great, as you can see in these before and after photos below:

But in order to fit the telephoto lens on the base Pixel 10, Google had to cut the resolution to both the main lens and the ultrawide lens. For the main lens, that's not too much of an issue, since it only goes from 50MP to 48MP, both of which are pretty high-resolution. Check these photos to see the difference—Pixel 9 is on the left, and Pixel 10 is on the right.

But the ultrawide lens is a different matter. This is what your camera uses when you press your 0.5x button to "zoom out," and while the Pixel 9's ultrawide lens was a generous 48MP, the Pixel 10's is just 13MP. The result is much less detail, as you can see in the below photos (again, Pixel 9 on the left and Pixel 10 on the right).

Google told me it's aware of the compromise, but strongly hinted that the company thinks more people zoom in with their phones than zoom out. Representatives also told me the team has done its best to adjust the Pixel 10's post-processing cleanup to hide the loss in quality, but still, it's noticeable enough to me. Maybe you're with Google, and the tradeoff is worth it. But know that if you use your 0.5x button a lot, the Pixel 10 might actually give you a worse experience.

Google's first fully custom chip is still a Tensor

The final major hardware upgrade Google's added to the Pixel 10 is a new chip—the Tensor G5. This is Google's first fully custom chip, which means the company's finally broken away from co-producing its chips with Samsung. Unfortunately, it still behaves a lot like its predecessors.

That means that it'll play well with Google's own features, like the new AI tricks outlined above. Google said the chip's new efficiency is what's allowed it to move so much of its models on-device, to help enhance privacy. But for third-party programs, the Tensor G5 still trails behind alternatives.

In Geekbench 6, a synthetic benchmark that simulates general phone usage across common tasks like browsing or photo editing, the Pixel 10 scored 2,309 on single-core tasks and 5,642 on multi-core tasks. That's about 1,000 points less than the iPhone 16 on the former and about 2,300 points less on the latter. It's in a similar boat with the Galaxy S25 , and it still trails slightly behind the last-gen Galaxy S24 on multi-core tests.

That trend continued in my Geekbench GPU test, although I recognize we're working with a lot of abstract numbers at this point. To put this all in perspective, the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test, which checks how well a phone can render a demanding scene in real time, ran at 20.46 fps on the Pixel 10, which is about five frames per second behind the iPhone 16.

For some real-life testing, outside of benchmarks, I also used the Pixel 10 to play a few sessions of Genshin Impact , a graphically demanding open-world game. Here, I was only able to hit high settings at 30fps before my phone started overclocking, which is doable, but I normally like my gameplay smoother than that. For what it's worth, you can run at highest settings with the framerate set to 60fps without technical hiccups on the Pixel 10, although the phone will quickly heat up enough to get uncomfortably warm. I probably wouldn't overclock often, which is a shame—my iPhone 15 Pro can run Genshin 's highest settings at 60fps for over a few hours without getting too hot to handle. To get 60fps without the heat on the Pixel 10, I have to bump the game down to its lowest settings.

If you've read any of my previous Pixel reviews, you'll know this is about par for the course for Google. It's not a bad approach, especially if you mostly stick to Google's ecosystem of apps. But if you like to game on your phone or even use it for occasional heavy productivity tasks like video editing, you can still do better than a Pixel.

The display is a little brighter

The display on the Pixel 10 is almost identical to the Pixel 9's screen, which is a good thing. It's a 6.3-inch OLED, a little larger than the 6.1-inch screen on the iPhone 16, and its 1,080 x 2,424 resolution is more than enough on such a small viewing area. You can also push it up to 120Hz if you enable smooth display , so in addition to looking great, it's also plenty responsive.

The one upgrade here is that it's a little brighter, at 2,000 max nits (vs. 1,800 on the Pixel 9) for HDR content and 3,000 max nits (vs. 2700 on the Pixel 9) overall. Honestly, the previous brightness was already more than enough, but if you had trouble seeing your phone in direct sunlight before, this might give you just the edge you need.

Battery life and Qi2 charging

Finally, battery capacity on the Pixel 10 has been bumped up from 4,700mAh to 4,970mAh. Google says that translates to over 24 hours of battery life, and while that didn't hold up in my testing, I was still pretty happy with what I got.

In my typical battery test, which involves streaming a video over wifi at 720p and 50% brightness (with all battery saver and screen dimming settings turned off to ensure consistency), I got an impressive 20 hours and 18 minutes of life. That actually beats what I got on the Pixel 10 Pro by four hours, although I should note that 50% brightness on the Pro is a bit more power hungry than 50% brightness on the base Pixel 10, so it's not exactly a one-to-one comparison.

Still, over 20 hours of video streaming is great. If you're only using your Pixel to stream TikTok during your lunch breaks, or call an Uber to your dinner date, you can probably leave your charger at home.

Speaking of chargers, I also tested quick charging via Qi2 wireless on the official Pixelsnap Charger. In a half hour, I got a modest 16% of power on my phone, which is unfortunately 10% less than what I got on the Pixel 10 Pro. I'm not quite sure what made the more expensive phone more efficient, but it's worth keeping in mind if you often find yourself needing to do a quick top up while near a plug.