The Vergecast - Pixel 11 and Pixel Watch 5: Our first impressions | The Vergecast Livestream

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Google just showed off its next generation of hardware, including the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel11 Pro Fold. (Whew, those names.) There's also the new Pixel Watch 5, the Pixel Tag, and a bunch of really interesting new ideas about smartphone cameras, GPS, and wellness. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Victoria Song went live to talk about the state of Google's hardware, and whether there's anything worth upgrading for this year.  Further reading: The 7 biggest announcements of Google’s Pixel 11 launch 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 [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sponsored by Deepgram, the leader in voice AI, so you can use voices like mine. Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization, disruption is inevitable, but struggling through it doesn't have to be. The KPMG Adaptability Index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy, and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit KPMG.com slash us slash adaptability to explore the adaptability index and pulse surveys today. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of QuickShare, which is kind of like AirDrop, only different.

I'm your friend David Pierce. I am joined by two of our friends in the New York studio, Nilai Patel. Hello, sir. QuickShare is European AirDrop. N.V. song. Hi, V. Hello. It's like kilometers.

Exactly. It's European miles. It works the same, but all the numbers are slightly different, and none of it matters all that much anyway. We are here because today is Pixel Day. Google in its inimitable wisdom has chosen yet another deeply bizarre way to watch a bunch of its new products. It told us about these products a while back.

They're launching this morning, and then there's a big event with Trevor Noah. tonight that, V, I believe you have been conscripted into attending, correct? I was voluntold to go. Yes. Trevor knows a delight. You're going to love it. He's fine. Do you right.

The Jimmy Fallon event last year was like, I would say, borderline awkward enough that it was maybe not a great time. I feel like Trevor Noah will at least be a good time. I lost my mind last year watching Jimmy Fallon, especially when he held the phone upside down and then clapped his hands like a seal saying, Tenser. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Look, there's a thing happening that we should just say out loud. There's the event for nerds to hold phones and write about specs. That's our event. Then there's what you have to do to get hundreds of videos that are like, come with me to Google's pixel event, where Jimmy Fallon says the word tensor for money. These paths are diverging. Inside of us, there are two wolves. Right. There's, yeah, there's the creator money, which makes.

And then there's like doing the news. And I think Google is just like, screw it, we got to split them up. Because I think they tried to do them both the same time last year. And it drove everybody bananas. No, the embargo was still earlier than the event last year. And everyone thought we broke embargo. And it's like, no, no, no. Oh, they think that this year too.

Don't worry about it. Yeah, no. But we didn't. It's all been very complicated. It's, you know what? It's not in Brooklyn Navy year this year. I don't have to trek to the most isolated part. Brooklyn that is accessible by ferry and like the F train via York Street.

I can go to Hudson Yards, which is like the other inaccessible part where no... Well, now you know where V is going to be today, everybody. Everybody goes to say head of V, but be cool about it. We should talk about all the stuff that they launch. So there's a new line of pixel phones. There's a new pixel watch. There's a new pixel tag. There's a foldable phone.

There's a couple of like little softwarey announcements we should talk about. but we should start with the phones, right? And to frame some of what we're about to get into, our friend and current contributor, David Amel, went and saw these phones. He is like gallivanting in Europe somewhere right now, so he couldn't be on the show, but he went and saw the phones and he made a hands-on video. We're going to show it to you right now,

and then we're going to dive into these phones. Thinner camera bar, so it's a little more, you know, edge-to-edge there. The glass on the cameras is straight across the camera. It's very edge-to-edge now. And overall, these phones are just a little, nicer and a little more refined than they were previously. Another new feature on the Pixel 11 Pro that replaces the temperature sensor from last year is the new highlight feature. Highlight is effectively

a little visual LED that glows when you're talking to Gemini and when you get calls from your favorite contacts. There aren't a ton of hardware changes this year in the phones, but there are a lot of changes in the software. On the pro this year, you are getting a 30% bigger telephoto lens. You're going to get a lot better optical quality on telephoto shots. You're also getting things like much faster night site on the pro, which is up to four and a half times faster than the previous pixel. But one of the new biggest camera features this year is the new camera looks mode. So camera looks as Google's response to people wanting a more vintage look out of their smartphone. Smartphone cameras have gotten a little too good in the last few years, so they've added

a bunch of new modes that kind of give you a digicam style look. There's about 10 total looks in the camera, but these aren't just filters. They're actually changing the way that they do the HTR capture at a sensor level, which is a pretty big deal. There's also a new magic capture mode, which is really front and center in the camera here. When you enable that and start recording, the phone will automatically pull out really good photos and videos from the scene around you when you wave your phone around. It's actually pretty cool. There's also the all-new creator suite in the video mode, which gives you things like

a teleprompter, automatic clip project folder saving, you've got an audio visualizer, kind of everything that a social media creator would need to make videos on their phone. Now there's a lot of colors available for these phones, so make sure you check out the website to see all of them. But the Pixel 11 is going to come in at $899 starting, and the Pixel 11 Pro is going to come in at $1099 starting. If you want to see more about all of this, make sure you go to Theverge.com to check it out.

It's great advice from David Amel, do all of that right after we finish this live stream. Don't go anywhere until then. So, okay, we should go through these phones kind of one by one, but the just basic sort of overall information about the new lineup of pixels. So there's a Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro, and the Pixel 11 Pro full, and the Pixel 11 Pro XL, four phones. with all different complicated names. Anyway, the phones are all, and, well, we'll get to the watch, V.

Just, just, it's a fold. Oh, you have the fold on you? I have the fold on you. No, I have the fold on you. It's tall fold. And Fee's never getting it back. Okay, so these phones, there are a few things that are sort of overall true about this whole lineup. They're all $100 more expensive than last year.

Like David said, the 11 starts at 899 and they go up from there. The good news next to that is that they have gotten rid of, of the 128 gig storage model, and now the base model of all of these phones starts at 256. The lesson we're learning from the tech industry is that flash drive memory is cheap, and RAM is expensive.

So everybody is doing less RAM and more storage, and that's fine. Basically, they all run the TensorFlow G6 chip. The 12 gigs of RAM is the baseline now. Some of them go as high as 16. They're promising better battery life. They have Chi 2.2 charging. that's a little faster. In most ways, these phones are identical. And we can get to some of the ways in

which they are different. But the pixel lineup has always kind of been like this. Their big idea is about software and Gemini and AI and all of the things that they can do with out needing bleeding edge hardware. And it is worth saying, nothing about this is bleeding edge hardware, which is kind of where I want to start on these phones. Just from a pure, like, what's in the box here perspective, Nelai. I don't think we expected to be like blown away by what Google came out with on the spec sheet of a pixel. But this is pretty milk toast when it comes to pixels.

Yeah. I mean, I can probably spend the next half hour just talking about what they're doing in the camera. We're going to. Don't worry. Your point that Google never tries to be at the bleeding edge of hardware specs and is constantly trying to push forward what Android can do at the software level. obviously, you know, the amount of Gemini in this phone,

there's a literal light on the pro that's like, look at me, I'm Gemini. Like, that's what the focus of these phones really is. And then we can always just be honest about the reality of the pixel line as a whole, which is that it's for enthusiasts and to keep Samsung in line. Those are, that's its job, right? And as long as those two things exist, like job done, which is why I think Google rolls them out the way they roll them out,

fundamentally competing at the high end of Samsung is not the point. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's a mistake, honestly. Like, you look at this and the things that you just said, right, this is for enthusiasts. Like, God, you know who might care about the geek bench results for the pixel and all of these different devices? Enthusiasts. There was a whole mini kerfuffle around the last run of phones because the last version of the tensor processor did horribly in benchmarks. The overwhelming feeling was that actually it doesn't really matter.

You basically can't find a game on Android that uses all of the available CPU and GPU anyway. So who really cares? But we're also at a moment where I was like, okay, we're imagining all of the new things that your phone can do for you. Local AI is the future of everything according to everybody, including Google in many cases. Shouldn't you be investing in making my hardware as fast and capable as possible at this moment? moment in time. I can make it even stronger argument. You made the price go up. This thing should last a long time. Very true. Right. If you're going to charge more money, then I should expect this thing to last longer than usual. Now, it's not a huge jump the way that we've seen laptops take

huge jumps and other phones take huge jumps. It's 100 bucks. You need to get more storage. But I would say value for dollar is expressed now in time. Yeah. Right. If you spend a lot of money, you don't want it to just last two years, you want it to last four or five. And I don't know if this hardware has that longevity in it. I think your point about AI is interesting, but all of Google's AI is in the cloud. Like the real action here is the camera

and like being for creators and like making a lot of things more automatic in like interesting ways in terms of content creation. I don't think there's another big set of ideas here that you're not going to get on another phone. Yeah, I think that's right. You're less like CPU-pilled than some of our phone people. You also, you know, just saw the new Samsung devices.

Like, is this, were you disappointed by the hardware here at all? Not really. Well, you know, I usually am pretty far down on the list of getting a phone. So I'm just enjoying opening. That color is very pretty. It's a very pretty color. And I was like, ooh, I get to play with foldable and pretend to be Allison today. Is that the pistachio fold?

This is the pistachio fold, yes. Or olive or, you know, the green color. It's lovely. It's really nice. It's very nice. It's very pretty. I've been like, it matches my nails. I love it. It's a good little fold.

I did wear it as a hat. See, that's what else do you need to know? Trevor Noah, take notes. No, but it's nice. Like, actually, you know, as the premier color. obsessie on staff. I was looking at the colors very intently at this. Do you need us to make space for you to have a 10-minute crash out about the name of one of these colors as you want to do on this show? Listen, that was only about the Fitbit Air and it made a lasting impact. Okay. We had, I had many discussions with

various Google people about colors and what we name. I'm happy to hear that. But no, they're great. I really love the Hibiscus color, which is a very bright, bright pink. That's the Magenta. one, that is clearly the best color. Yeah. I feel like in every one of these lineups, there is a color that is just obviously clearly the best. And in this case, it is the magenta color, which I think is gorgeous. I fully agree with that, though David Amel does not. We had a, he was like, are your eyes not bleeding looking at this?

And I was like, no, they're crying tears of joy because it's a saturated color, which some tech companies don't love. Yeah, even Google, even this color is kind of a muted army green. Yeah, it's a very muted green. But, you know, like I like that there's options. You can have the aggressively pink phone or you could have the muted green phone. They're both beautiful colors. Wonderful palette this year. It was really funny because when we were at that content capture for the, you know, the regular 11 phone, I had like a Google guy run up to me.

He's like, if you put the case on, it'll lie flat on the table. And he's like, put the case on. So I put the case on. He's like, doesn't it lie flat? Do it on both sides. Does it lie flat? This is because there's a viral video of somebody cutting the camera bump off as you fold eight with a razor. Yeah.

They're just letting you know that you can spend more money to make the phone lie flat. Yeah, basically. And it is like, look, it's flat. And I was like, he was so excited. And I was like, you know what? You know what's not true about this phone, though? And it's expensive. I think the fold is, what, $1,900?

Yeah, I think it's about. This, we're in the time of no creases, right? Samsung really got that crease to go away. All the rumors are Apple's going to get that crease to go away. This is one of the creased crease phones in quite a while. And I think it's because of the durability. Like Google's like really very proud of how durable this is. You can't crack it, all this stuff.

And I think there's at least one hardware compromise here. It's funny because $1900 is not cheap. It's not like the Z-fold ultra is $2,100. Like I think I can see $300 here. Yeah, no, I went home and I was like, I finally got my hands on a foldable, because Allison is out until next week. And my husband went, and he went like, oh, yoink, opened it. He's like, there's a crease.

Yoink passed it back to me. So I was like, okay, well, I'm still having fun. So, yeah. So I think we can dispense with the specs of this phone fairly quickly, but I do think there's one thing that Nilai, as the resident display enthusiast, I have a genuine question, which is that one of the big upgrades, on the pro is that it has a brighter screen that this time, instead of being 3,300 nits of max brightness, is 3,600 nits of max brightness. I mean this absolutely sincerely. Is that a, does that matter? Like, is that a real upgrade that you will notice? It is hard to say without trying to get it to hit peak brightness in sunlight for more than five minutes. Because what they all, they can

all hit their peak brightness. And then they get hot and then they thrall. And like, we've all had this experience now. Yeah. So who knows? I like it. Everybody wants more searing HDR content when they're watching a movie on a plane, as Christopher Nolan intended on the back of their phone.

But it, the real question is the point of that peak brightness is not HDR content. It's sunlight viewing. And sometimes these phones can hit it. and then they pull back pretty aggressively, and we just have to find out. Okay. Okay.

But it's great if they can do it. I mean, they're also claiming vastly improved battery life. These are ideas that are in total tension with one another. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot here that is Google trying to convince buyers and users that raw specs don't matter because what they've done is actually make things more efficient, right? That night site will run faster.

They're not saying we have some shocking, new low light camera technology. They're just saying we can do this thing more quickly now. They're saying the thing is more efficient, which in theory should be good for battery life. It should mean it doesn't run as hot. There are a lot of upsides and downsides to Google's spec race here.

But the thing we have to talk about, which I cannot believe we have to talk about before we get to the software, is the temperature sensor, which is gone. And I think the temperature sensor to me is like, I honestly could not have told you why it existed, but it turns out that in the, what, couple of hours now since these phones have gotten lunch,

there has been an internet-wide morning of the temperature sensor. I want to talk in a minute about what it's been replaced by, but V, I think this feature existed in theory to let you tell the temperature of things. Like, this always struck me as a weird feature. Why are people worried about this feature? I don't know. Okay.

To be quite frank. I don't think it came, like, sort of after the COVID era where, you know, you might want to take the temperature of things. I vaguely remember testing it and being like, sure, okay. Wait, refresh me. This is an ambient temperature sensor or like a point and click infrared? It was, as I understand it, it was a point and search temperature gauge that you could take the temperature of a thing by point. Oh, sure. Like every single person who's like, I'm making a brisket on my trigger grid.

is like pointing the thing. I get it. I understand these people. You're my people. I love taking the temperature of things. What are you talking about? They ruled. Instead I got a notification light.

Get out of here. Okay. So this is the problem. They replaced it. There have been rumors about the pixel for some time. This, again, in Google's infinite wisdom, it loves to just launch its own phones, months before it launches its own phones.

This thing has been leaked to death. And there was this feature. I think people were calling it pixel glow, or the glow bar or something, there was this idea that there was going to be some cool new light feature. What it actually is, is a feature called Highlight, H-I-L-G-H-T,

hate that. It's a light that says high. No thank you. But anyway, what this thing is is it's a little light on the back on the camera bar that does precisely two things. It glows when you're talking to Gemini, and it will glow when you get calls. phone calls only from favorite contacts. That is the least interesting feature you could possibly launch in this space.

I don't know. I think it's kind of cute. I think it's cute. I don't really see the point of it lighting up while you're talking to Gemini because it's like I feel like we're trying or at least some people are trying not to advertise that they're using AI as much or whatever unless you like to have a robot look. book club. To that point, actually, I think you just answered your own question, which is that the whole idea here is that you can do this stuff with your phone facing down. And I think you are going to get a lot of people who want the tiniest little indication that Gemini is working without actually having to look at their phone and talk to AI. This is the same exact concept as any echo dot, any solo speaker with a voice light, like the home pod, right? The phone's upside down on your table.

You say, hey, big G. I'm trying to be polite to our audience. Hey, Big G. And then it boops at you, and now you're talking to your robot girlfriend. Yeah. Right? Aaron Rogers is going to talk to his wife. But it's trying to be really subtle about that.

There's a conspiracy theory that I'm hinting at here that I want everyone to latch onto. I want to ever understand what I just said. But right, this is the idea that we're going to have a screen-free future, and there's a class of devices that are totally natural language-operated. Sure. And maybe your phone can be that if you just replace the extraordinarily useful temperature sensor, a little light. and now you're going to have that thing. And it's going to be, I guarantee you the put all of your meeting notes into notebook LM happen in some way with this list.

Yes. Yes, the idea of being able to do things with your phone down and get some bit of information without looking at your phone. These are all good things, right? V, this is the stuff everybody's doing in wearables, right? How do we give you this like little bit of ambient information about what's going on without making you look at a screen or pull out your phone or do whatever? even if this was just a light that there was a settings menu for that you could be like, make it this color when this happens, make it this color when this happens, make it blink Morse code at me.

And Google sort of intimated to David that it's planning to do these things. But right now it basically does none of them. And this is just a useless feature. Like what an weird, incredible miss from Google on this to me. I don't know if it's a miss. I just even if all you did was have like it light up when a certain contact comes. I find that kind of useful. I keep my phone face down all the time anyway.

But like if I know that a certain special person is calling that I've allowed, I will pick up the phone. Otherwise I don't. So I don't know. I find it kind of useful. Maybe I'm in the minority, but why are we measuring things with temperatures? What if it could be anything? Well, sure. Like, I just find that infinitely more useful for more people.

I'm going to get you a cheap temperature gun and you're going to, your whole idea. I have a temperature gun. And it's just like, Oh, 98.6, just what I expected for a human. I'm just saying. We had different lives. I live more of a data-oriented life. And that's like, what's that goes?

Was your experience of getting a temperature gun, like my experience of getting a label maker, where it's a real, like, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail situation? Yeah, that's right. You're like, what are these children? Oh, they're a little bit under. Like, it's fine.

It's good. Sure. Just diagnosing strangers' children at the park. That's not weird. You don't walk around the park? with a higher type of gun. So there we saw the comment that's like, you can get the $20 gone off Amazon.

Yes, that's what I have. And I patrol my local playgrounds. Good Lord. I'm just saying, here, okay, I want to get to the camera. It's very important to me the way to the camera. The one thing I'll say about the light and flipping the phone over

and the whole point of flipping your phone over in social situations is to indicate, to communicate to everyone around you that you're not paying attention to this thing. Because otherwise, you just keep it in your pocket. Yes. Right? But if you're like me and you just carry your phone,

you're looking at all the time, I'm actively going to not look at it is a thing you communicate by putting it face down. Putting a light on the back that has your robot wife on it is the opposite of that. Right? It's now the phone can interrupt you and you can interact with it even though it's upside on the table. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm saying it is a change to the etiquette of putting your phone face down on the table. And I'm very curious how that plays out with this device in particular, given how much every AI company. company wants you to record everything all the time. And that is the point of this light in like a very important and meaningful way is to make

sure the AI is present, even though you've done the thing that says your phone is not present. Yeah. And Google is at the forefront of we want you to record everything all the time, right? Like the pixel recorder gets ever better. Gemini Notebook is very much an incredible input machine that is going to want all of this stuff. Like the, the, everybody is doing AI. notes thing, like, good Lord, is that coming for Google Meet at some point?

Like, Google is going to do this kind of thing. And I think you're right at it. But let's talk about the camera. This is fundamentally the thing. The specs are slightly different on the phones, but the big new stuff here is all about the hardware. And in fact, Google is shoving a bunch of new stuff into the camera app specifically, not doing stuff in Google Photos, not putting stuff sort of at the end of the

imaging pipeline, like actually changing the way that you are supposed to use and interact with your camera. And Nilai, can you just explain what Camera Looks is? We on this show spent, I don't know, 30 to 40 hours talking about the photography styles on the iPhone when that launched. This is like that only much more so. Yeah. And I'm very curious how you're thinking about it.

But can you explain like what this actually is first? Yeah, Camera Lux is a way of altering the imaging pipeline on the pixel. itself at the sensor level to basically compete with, I know, what Fuji does with film looks on their point in shoots. It's their recipes for HDR to make them look like, I think there's one called DigiCam. There's another one called Vanilla, which I think is just a very funny name for a photo look. And you are altering how the, how the camera itself captures light, captures information, does the HDR merge, thinks about sharpening to get drastically different looks off the sensor.

I would compare that to Apple, which runs their whole photo pipeline the same way every single time, and then lets you sort of adjust how the software cooks all that sensor data at the end. There's two approaches this. I really recommend reading David's interview with Isaac Reynolds, who runs a pixel camera. We've been talking to Isaac for years. He's very sharp about this stuff, and there's some stuff I want to call out from a piece. But I would just say Apple's approach lets you do non-destructive editing. So you take the photo and you can re-edit that photo, all kinds of ways.

and however you want, you can make a mistake. It appears the pixel way is like a runtime decision, right? You're going to take the photo and that's what you're going to get because you're not capturing all the frames of HDR. I think this is one of the smartest moves Google could make with its camera at this time. Really? Yeah, and there's a few reasons for that. One, Apple and Samsung are the volume players, and they both have a pretty basic problem, which is they can never get a photo wrong.

Right? If you're the average customer of the average iPhone and you are like, family, we're at the restaurant, stand in front of this giant window on the way out to get the group shot, you cannot under expose the faces,

you cannot blow out the window, you just got to get that right. That same camera has to take a picture of like a receipt and not get it wrong. That same camera has to absolutely get the video of your kids singing at the recital. Like the camera can never get it wrong. And so they produce what we're really used to,

which are these ultra averaged out pretty clinical smartphone photos that are over HDR. And then there are some settings you can go in and screw with it if you want, but they also really don't want you to make a mistake. So the settings are non-destructive. And there's a limit to what you can do. Google doesn't have the volume problem, right? Like they don't have to ship a phone to 10 billion people that can never get a photo wrong. They know what they're doing.

Like, they know they're playing a much smaller market. And so they've gone and said, look, we have the ability at HDR capture to not take as many frames, to blow out the window, to have 50 different looks, right, in the HDR. And instead of picking the default that we'll always get it right, we're going to let you pick. And maybe you got it wrong, but that's an artistic choice that you've made. And now that will attract people who want more control over their camera in ever more dramatic. dramatic ways. And I just think back to the pixel two. The pixel two had a look and people chased that look. Apple had to react to that look. It was contrasty. It was they talked about Caravaggio. Like they were talking about painters and they got away from that. And they got to the same

average that look as every other camera over time. And the last time I sat and did a really intense camera review with Allison over a last iPhone. The point I got to you is all these phones are the same. It truly you cannot tell these cameras apart anymore unless you have a sickness in your mind like I do. But on a phone screen, they all look the same. And I think Google's saying, nope, we're going to be really different. We're going to let you take better photos. And when people on Instagram say,

what camera is that the answer will be the Google pixel out of the box, not I shot raw in halide on an iPhone and put it through lightroom, which is my answer all the time. And I think that in terms of just differentiating this phone saying, actually, there's a lot of different ways to do HDR. You can get a lot of different looks out of computational photography. And we're not going to pick the average. So we're always right. We're going to let you pick a literal artistic interpretation.

Like in the smartphone camera market right now, there are very few players doing that. The thing I love about this, too, is that Google is implementing this feature by just giving you a bunch of knobs. and buttons. Yep. Like there's a great moment in David Mell's story where he's talking to Isaac Rarland's about this. And they land on essentially we are going to give people so many settings that it made Google uncomfortable.

Like we are just, seriously, I mean, he says it in the story very directly that he had to have like an escalation meeting with PMs at Google because they were going to do something that is considered so anathema to software design now, which is you can't expose how things work. You can't give people choices. You have to just make a bunch of decisions on people's behalf. and sort of obfuscate the way that everything actually works. What they said is literally, we are just going to give you the controls.

We are going to make it so that you can actually do all of the things, or many of the things at least that you would do on a camera. And we're going to do it at the very beginning of the image process. I have no idea if people will use this. My sense is most people don't even use the photography styles on the iPhone, which are designed to be vastly more approachable. Like, I don't even think people use the camera control on the iPhone, for God's sake. Like, it is hard to get people deep in these menus to do things.

But just for Google to give you the option that if you are somebody who wants to, and a lot of this is being aimed at creators, particularly sort of small and new creators. And I'm going to talk about that approach in a second. But the idea that just you can if you want to is so nice and refreshing and rare at this moment in time that, like, I just love seeing that from the picture. So I'm guessing. We have mostly Android users listening to the Pixel Livestream. Just a shot in the dark. But if we have any iPhone people, a thing you can do with camera control to just get a taste of this is you can set it to control tone, which is tone mapping, right? And tone mapping is, are the highlights and shadows going to be the same?

Or are they going to be really? Are we going to have more contrast, basically? More complicated than that, but that's what it is. And I have it sets that and I slide up and down on tone all the time. because when I'm taking the big backlit photo, you want tone to be 100. You want everything to be exposed at the same level. And when you want to take something more,

already set it down to like negative 50 or whatever it is to get more contrast back in the photo. This is a wild amount of control over HR compared to cameras, smartphone cameras passed. But you can see if you use it enough, the limits of it become totally clear to you. Right?

You're like, I basically am just letting things blow out. And that looks less. like a robot took this photo. It looks less like CGI than the normal iPhone photo. You see that with Google and you're like, oh, I get it. Like, you're in addition to giving people all these additional controls, you're going to let people make the photos look so much different from the beginning that maybe they will come back and pick the pixel again,

which is a real problem for Google. And if all this run at creators, everybody wants to be a creator. You know, like we see it. It's in the data, right? Young people want to be YouTubers. Making a little a phone that out of the box is we're going to shoot clips. We're going to shoot great Instagram photos. We're going to auto edit the clips and put them in folder structures for you.

All of that is, to me, actually compelling if what you want to do with your phone is use the camera, right, in a way that, you know, Marquez Brownlee runs around me. Like, if you want to start YouTube channel, just start shooting on your phone. And then you're like, my camera roll is a disaster. my plans to be a YouTuber have come to an end because my camera role is bad. And actually, the first step of being a video creator is considering file structures, right? Like, no. Like, there's something here that I just think is very smart in terms of what people are actually doing with their cameras and how to make those cameras look like anything other than the most averaged out ultra-processed HDR photos that we see young people turning against pretty rapid clips. Yeah.

Fee, what do you make of all of this? I think about you in this context, also as somebody who has spent a lot of time with smart glasses, trying to figure out, like, is this the new camera that people want? Is this the camera that I'm going to start toting around with me? Do you look at things like camera looks in these new tools as a big win for pixel owners?

That's a hard no. I don't know. I don't know. You just choked. No, I didn't joke. It's just more like, you know, I've played. I played around with it on the iPhone before I've been like, okay, cool, but no, I'm just going to do it myself and post if I want a nice picture. I didn't get around to playing with it as much on these because I am the wearable lady, so I did focus more heavily on the pixel watch.

But I do kind of take less photos on my iPhone than I used to in the past just because they do look very boring. And so, you know, I am looking forward to playing around with it a little bit more. I'm a little more interested in the creator suite that they kind of released. Like, it's kind of like a thing of our job where having to remember what I'm going to say in a social video. Sometimes I'm just like, blah, sorry, sorry guys, got to do another take. So the idea of having the teleprompter there, I was like, oh, that's useful. I might actually try doing that if I could think of it as a, like I said it multiple times before. I've never really been into foldables, except whenever I see Allison at one of these events,

just doing maximum productivity and blogging on these things. And so I'm so excited to try and be Alison later tonight with this. But also I was thinking like, oh, you know, if I had the expense for a work phone that did have creator tools and I only ever used it to film social video standups for The verge, that would be useful because usually in my camera roll when I'm doing it. like the social videos, it's like 4,000 takes of me going, and I forgot what I was supposed to say because the script that I wrote is over there, and you can see my eyes moving over to the script, and I feel bad.

They'll just cut that in post, but, like, it's, you know, I get it. And my, like, 11-year-old cousin has told me that she wants to be a better version of what I do, like creating stuff on YouTube. She's like, I could be so much better than you. Look, the Google Pixel is a phone for every aspiring real estate influence. in America.

Yeah. There you go. Now it's the time to take your walkthroughs to the next level. You say that like it's a joke, but that is a way bigger market than anyone thinks. It turns out. We should actually pivot and talk about the pixel watch and the pixel tag and the other stuff that's coming out. But first, we have to take a break. So here's an ad.

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Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. All right, we're back. V. Hi. Pixel Watch 5. I was going to say, because you just talked about your video prowess, I'm going to play a video of V to V.

But that seems cruel. So instead, I just want you to explain what's up with the Pixel Watch 5. Well, not much in terms of hardware. You would be very forgiven for thinking this is the same thing as the Pixel Watch 4. But there is a lot of software updates this year. Like... Wait, to that point, though, real quick on the hardware, I think.

Yeah. That seems fine, right? Like, I feel like the story of the Pixel Watch 4 is like, this hardware is very good. I don't know that anyone came out of the Pixel Watch 4, like, furious about the way that it looked. I like the Pixel Watch quite a bit. Did we have big hardware dreams that didn't come true? No. I think some people want the Pixel Watch to have like sapphire glass to be more durable. You know, the big thing last year, hardware-wise, is that they made the Pixel Watch more repairable, which, you know, Chris Welch, God rest his soul, because he's dead to us now.

He cracked the first one. We still have the mystery of how my Pixel Watch 2 got scratched up to hell and back. The theory is it was Pee-D, my cat, as a kitten, did something to it, even though he had baby cat teeth at the time. We don't know. They actually took the scratched-up pixel watch two from my house to a lab to, like, discover what happened to it. We don't know. It's still just- Like detectives? Yeah, like detectives because they were like, they didn't detect cat hair in the thing,

but they were just like, all we can tell is that there were abrasions. And I was like, I don't know how it happened. But, you know, that hasn't happened since then, but it was a thing. that a lot of people had issues with at the time. So, you know, they did the repairability last year. So, you know, hardware-wise, you have a slightly faster Qualcomm chip in here. Cool. Like an itty-bitty little battery boost.

Like, we're talking 10-m-m-a-million-hours, depending on the size. So nothing too crazy. There is a new satin-pirate finish. Cool. Sure. Those are words that I've heard before. None of this is making your heart race, is what I would say. And you know that for sure.

It's very obvious to me how excited it is right now. No, because I did bring up the heart rate on there all of a sudden. Yeah, so hardware-wise, you know, the pixel watch has finally reached a point where it's like, okay. And, you know, I would say that most smartwatches have reached a point where, like, we've hit kind of max smartwatch innovation in a lot of ways, like the hardware. Unless they figure out a way to make things even tinier, you know, like the hard. Where is, here's a new sensor. Here's this. It's more efficient.

So like right now, a lot of the hardware bumps in smartwatch land is like, we figured out a way to cram more battery life in there. Sure. I mean, that's what everyone needs. Let me ask you this, though. Yeah. We've been talking about the whoops of the world for quite a while. Yes, the screenless. Obviously, Google just launched the Fitbit Air.

The opportunity for the pixel watch, unlike the pixel phones, is to go get the whole Android market. Right? They work with all the Android phones. Yes. At least that's what it says on the tin. So you could go much bigger and you could say, well, we have the Google Health platform. We have the Fitbit air. If you don't want to wear the watch, you can wear the Fitbit.

It's going to catch on our platform. Like there's a whole argument you could make, especially to the wider world of Android owners, why this ecosystem, this watch, this health fitness system is the one. And it doesn't feel like Google is making that argument. I actually think they are. You think they are? Yeah. Like it's so like when we were talking about the phones earlier about how like Google knows it has a niche phone audience and like you know they're not catching up to Samsung it's opposite in the wearable land.

Okay. Because Samsung has been coasting in the wearable watch field for a very long time. Like from the Galaxy Watch 6 to the Galaxy Watch 9, I was like, well, the biggest change that I can tell you off the top of my head is that they made some really wonky health metrics. Like I fooled a antioxidant center last year with a cheese it. Like, that's what I was doing when I was testing these things. That's the title of V's memoir. Yeah, I pulled Samsung's antioxidant sensor with a Cheez-It. That's my memoir.

And, you know, like, the big thing last year was like, it's a squircle now. Everything's a squircle. And then you look at the Galaxy Watch 9. It's sure is a watch that is, like last year's watch, very much kind of coasting. It's a good product, but it's just coasting for a long time. Whereas the Pixel watch when you go from one where everyone was telling me like, this will be dead in the air to the two to the three to the four. My review of the four last year, I said this is the Android watch to beat. And the five, yeah, like in terms of the health space, they are running circles around Samsung.

Like, it's pretty like crazy. Some of the health features that they are releasing with the five. I was just like, this is novel. like no one else is doing that. Can you talk through a couple of those? Actually, like the three that you call out specifically are breathing emergency detection, which as far as I can tell, just calls emergency services if it detects you stopped breathing, which seems good.

Yeah. I'm in favor. And then there's blood pressure trends and insulin resistance trends. And I'm particularly curious to hear more about the insulin resistance stuff because this is a thing that is obviously of deep personal interest to you, as you've talked about on the site and on the show. So this is also a feature that is not, like every smartwatch is getting into sort of similarly niche features, but this seems like a big one and a new one simultaneously for Google. Yeah. So just like kind of going down the orders of things, like no one else has a breathing emergency detection feature. And so what it is is it's like detecting your SPO 2 levels or your blood oxygen saturation. And if you go below around 83%, which if you're at 83% blood oxygen saturation, for an extended period of time, go to Hopital.

Hopital now. Hopital now, that is a crisis. So, you know, it's not for people with sleep apnea. The feature will turn off after it detects 30 minutes of sleep because smartwatches are terrible. If you're a side sleeper, like the same sunglasses would always say that, like, my sleeping SPO2 is like 82, which, again, hopital. Hopital now, if that's your SPO2. So, you know, they are mitigating for false positives there. It's an extension of last year's loss of pulse feature, which if it detects that you have no heartbeat, it will call emergency services.

So it's sort of like for an acute attack where maybe you're choking and you stop breathing, but your heart is still beating. It'll call emergency services or something like that. It's using a bunch of sensors and AI to call for help. Not in the U.S. at launch is only going to be in Europe because they have to go through all these regulatory things. But it's like an interesting thing. That's not a feature that we've seen on other smartwatches yet. Google is the first to that, which is like, oh, you're the first to an advanced due health feature. Interesting.

And then moving on to blood pressure trends, like, speaking of whoop again, whoop got in trouble with the FDA last year because they're like, we have blood pressure trends too in beta. We'll tell you, like, kind of an estimate of your systolic and diastolic and whether it's high or low. And the FDA was like, eh, eh, eh, that's diagnostic. And we was like, no, that's a wellness trend. And they kind of got into it. The FDA tweaked to the rules a little bit. And then everyone else was like, we also do blood pressure trends.

Like Apple did hypertension notifications last year. ORA is like kind of poking around with sleep time blood pressure trends. It's like, okay, you're using a bunch of the optical sensors to measure pulse wave velocity in your fingies. and your wrists and cool. It's not going to give you an actual reading, but it'll tell you if your blood pressure is trending high or trending low. And it's going to require a minimum of seven days of data. And then it only gives you that data once a month.

So this is meant to be like a check engine light feature, not a diagnostic feature, which is like why for me, the insulin resistance trends thing is super interesting because like do that but for insulin resistance. But typically, and like I had a 10-year journey trying to find out that I was insulin resistant. That was literally 10 years of going to doctors and them telling me, well, girl, I don't know what to tell you. If you have a hard time losing weight, try like eating less and exercising more. And I was like, Jesus. It's an idea.

Jesus Christ, do I have to pull out my exported PDF files of my exercise data? Okay. So, you know, I went on this like pretty invasive journey. I got a lot of different blood draws. I was using CGMs, which I also got one in right now. The things you do for this job. The things that I do for this job and for all of you, like, y'all don't understand. Like, I have three smart scales that I weigh myself on every morning and make me feel terrible.

So that's neither here nor there. But the insulin resistance stuff, it's non-invasive because usually when you're testing for insulin resistance, you have to get a blood draw and It's not a typical metabolic panel. You have to get your fasting glucose and your fasting insulin, and then they do little math equation, and you get something called a Homa IR score. And then if you fall within a certain range, you're insulin resistant. But that doesn't, we're getting really into the weeds here. But basically what this is doing is it's looking at your lifestyle trends. And they said because they have such a large data set, they're able to kind of tell whether your metabolic stress, which is what insulin resistant,

is, it's your body being unable to use and unable to use blood glucose effectively. So your pancreas has to work harder to create more insulin. So they're saying like, well, you know, based on certain factors, your lifestyle factors and the data that we're collecting passively over a minimum of a seven-day period, we can tell you within a month whether your insulin resistance is trending high or low. And I was like, show me the science nerds. Show me the science. They have it.

It's published, peer-reviewed in nature. The sensitivity and specificity, which is like whether you're going to get false positives or false negatives and is always inversely related. I looked at that and I was like, hmm, it's not like super high in the 90s numbers, but it's decent. I'm very curious to see how it will work on me because I'm building a digital AI twin for my metabolism at the moment. I'm psycho, guys. I'm really psycho. I'm getting so much blood drawn. Huh?

You're building a digital AI. metabolism twin? Yes. Are they going to be cool? They're not going to be cool, but it'll be able to like tell how I will personally react to certain foods. Can you give it a cheez-it? Yeah, I can basically go like, if I eat a cheese it, how is it going to affect my

metabolism and we can model it basically? Sure. It can help me taper off some of my medications, hopefully. I see what you're saying. Yeah. My digital metabolism twin is such a good hang. You guys, like, you don't even, you don't even know. Most twins are evil.

Like, I don't know what you're saying. Oh, my God. No. No, my AI metabolism twin will not be cool. That is very true. But the whole point is that I'm so excited to test whether it says that I'm insulin resistant or not. One, because I'm on medications that mess around with my insulin sensitivity.

Two, I am very insulin resistant. I have, it used to be called Picos. Now it's called P-MOS, which is polyendocrine metabolics. Obolic Ovarian syndrome, which Fs up my metabolism and all of that. It's been a journey, guys. But the point is that a lot of people have insulin resistance. It is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. It can be invisible for years. So getting this kind of detection, if it works, which is the big, if it works, could be really helpful for people because, like I said, I went on a 10-year journey to find out I'm insulin resistant. And it was a lot of poking with needles, and I'm not good with

needles. Like, I remember. considering my giant tattoos, but I'm not great with needles. I'm always like, please, oh. I do feel like America, 26, Google has a big data set. Yeah. They could just be like, most people are probably a little insulin resistant.

And then it's like a short hop to, and Google shopping is going to order you a GLP1. You know, like the agents are going to do it. Like, you see where this heads inexorably, given what we see all over the rest of the wellness space. As you cover, it's like maha adjacent. It's maha.

It's peptide adjacent. It's fair. The whoop is so peptide adjacent. That's right. Like there's, there's a thing that every Google demo ends in a transaction. And I'm always like, where is the transaction going to come from?

Like this, this is kind of an interesting thing because Google also announced a partnership with Abbott to pull in their, uh, which I was like, uh, the metabol, like health tech right now is very focused on metabolism and tweaking metabolism.

and tweaking metabolism and all the things that are happening there. But it's very hard to get any kind of like data or insight non-invasively. So that's the thing that I'm very much like. It's huge of true. It's huge of true. I'm curious to see what will result from the insulin resistance trends. Lord knows I am a finally, finally, this is like a health. detection check engine light feature that applies to me because they're doing sleep apnea and I sleep

with almost no snoring. So I'm useless test subject. I can't do this for you. I can't do this for you. I also think it is like everyone on earth who buys one of these should spend a long time staring at themselves deciding whether they want to put their information into Google Health. Because I've been using a Fitbit Air for a while now and that thing wants you to have such a specific and different kind of relationship with your ongoing health data that even if you are a person who is just like, I want very basic sleep and step tracking and, you know, screw the rest of this. You can't do that, right? Like this thing is, once all of this data about you and it wants to spit it all back at you and tell you a lot of things about yourself and give you a lot of recommendations

and tell you all sorts of things, all of the, like, this is not just a simple relationship anymore with technology. And you should. You should look at it carefully. It's very interesting because I was talking with Rishi Chandra and Sandeep Warwick, who are kind of in charge of Fitbit and the pixel wearable things. And it was like a really big philosophical debate about what a health experience is now, because wearables are at a very weird inflection point. And on the health side, they are just cramming AI into every bit in corner that you can get into.

And to your point, I spend a lot of time handholding the Google Health AI coach because you have to. Like, I lose my mind on a weekly basis. I actually went screenless during my two-week vacation prior to this week because I was like, I have so much data and AI health training fatigue. It was driving me a little cuckoo. But everyone's going to have a different health journey and everyone's going to have different things that they're kind of zeroing into for their health. health trends. So you can go into Google AI health coach and have a bad time. I went in because I have no concept of health data privacy thanks to this job and I gave it everything. I was just like, here's everything. I'm going to handhold you through everything that I possibly want. I actually had

a decent experience with it. Like I've had a trash garbage experience with every AI health coach. And I've tested every I've tested every single one basically at this point. My whoop is often like, good job drinking all that bourbon. That's not right. That's not the right answer at all. I mean, my smart bed told my spouse to drink every night. That's not relaxation. That's smart recovery.

It's like, sure it is. Sure. You know, it's not great. And there are a lot of issues with the Google Health AI coach, which they acknowledged. It's very fixated on how my calves and shins are feeling because one time I mentioned I'm prone to shin splints. So it still has a lot of those issues. And, you know, I talk to other reviewers and some of them have been like it's trash and others have been like it's super helpful, which is really funny because, you know, we talk about personalized health. We talk about everyone having their own bespoke, like,

experience within these apps now. And that's all dependent on how much information you're willing to give it. And I think if you are not willing to give it a lot, your, your mileage is not going to go very far. So it is a thing that you have to sit and think about what your goal is. What are you trying to solve. But if you do have a chronic illness and you're very well informed about your chronic illness like I am and a little bit the most annoying patient to ever exist for any doctor anywhere, you can do a lot with it. It's just it's a very steep learning curve at this point in time.

Yeah. So that's my health feel. But GPS, we should talk about the GPS on this thing because shots were fired. Shots were fired. Do them very quickly because we got to, we promised a half an hour, we'll worry over. Oh, okay. We need to get out of here. Basically, the shots fired is that they said that the GPS, which has historically been shitty on these watches, is now two times improved and will be better than the Garmin Phoenix 8 and the Apple Watch Ultra 3.

And I was like, wow, you guys are, that's shots fired because you do know. You're going to have to go on a long bike right now. You do. But also, we're going to need to come back and do a whole thing about the GPS wars here because it turns out there is a whole. like years-long GPS battle among wearables that I was completely unaware of that everybody has incredibly strong feelings about. And we're going to have to get into that. But I think weirdly, that is the piece of this review that I'm most excited to hear about from you is like, does it know where I am? Important question. So we do need to get out of here. But I'm curious before we go,

whether obviously all of this stuff is pending reviews. We need to test the cameras on the phones. we need to test the GPS. We need to see if the insulin resistance stuff works. Is there anything here that sort of screams huge immediate upgrade people should run to buy this phone? Absolutely not. A lot of these health features are coming to the Pixel Watch three and four. We've gotten a bunch of questions in the chat about like why wouldn't I go by last year's model or the year before? And I don't, I think the answer to that is go by last year's model of the year before for most of these things.

What about you? Is there a shot that some of this stuff is meaningful? I mean, it's Android and the pixel. Like, will this version of the pixel camera come be brought to the previous versions of the pixel? I don't. Who's to say, David? But that's why I would buy the new one. I would just maybe wait one turn to see what the community brings to you.

I would say several years running last year's pixel has been one of the best Android phones on the market. And that may well still be the case. Especially when this year's pixel is the same hardware. That's true. Judging by the fact that V is holding one of these, I suspect reviews of these are going to come soon. We'll be back on the show talking about all of these. When the reviews drop, V has Trevor Noah to go hang out with.

Nilai has to, I don't know, go be fancy somewhere with fancy people. I have to go pick up my kid at preschool. So we all got to go get out of here. Thank you to Travis, our producer. Thank you to Eric and Denise for getting all this done. Thank you to everybody who made all this happen, including fixing our audio problems. Thanks to all of you for watching and listening,

hanging in here with us this long. We will see you back on the show regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Nealai, take this out. Rock and roll. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old.

You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.