is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Last year, Google proved it could make a phone that looks and feels like a true flagship, despite the software feeling like an AI jumble. This year, the Pixel 10 Pro starts to put AI features together in a way that actually makes sense — and it manages to upgrade the hardware a bit, too.
Google has finally locked in a high-end finish and feature set for this phone, and it feels more polished than ever. There’s Android’s version of MagSafe, a flagship-worthy processor, and an excellent camera. All the stuff you’d want from a phone that starts at $999.
The 10 Pro also represents a baby step from AI’s party trick era to becoming genuinely useful on a mobile device. Magic Cue, which aims to surface information from your email and calendar contextually, lives up to its name for the most part — like the time it offered to put a coffee meetup with a friend on my calendar as we were hashing out the details over text. But alongside great features like Magic Cue, you’ll still find some that feel more like they’re there to satisfy an internal mandate to put AI into every available nook and cranny.
Between the hardware upgrades and a slightly more cohesive software experience, there’s something pretty special here. The Pixel 10 Pro is a phone with solid upgrades, though it doesn’t quite feel like a must-upgrade as long as your current device is working fine. It’s a glimpse of the future, with all the messiness of now mixed in there, too.
AI gets more useful on the Pixel 10.
From the outside, the Pixel 10 Pro is very hard to tell apart from its predecessor. That’s just fine; this is a good template to keep working from. Inside is another story, and that story begins with Tensor G5.
I get the sense that Google’s fifth custom chipset is the one that the company has been waiting on. Tensor G5 is the first made by TSMC, and it seems to be the key to unlocking a lot of on-device AI. Magic Cue, for example, runs in the background on device. A camera feature we’ll get to later runs a diffusion model on device. Same with the phone call translator that mimics the sound of your voice. It’s more than just an impressive list; running these entirely on the phone means your data is much more private than if it had taken a trip to the cloud.
Running these features entirely on the phone means your data is much more private than if it had taken a trip to the cloud
Just like last year, the Pro variant of the Pixel 10 comes in two sizes. Both the Pro and Pro XL come with 16GB of RAM, and variants with 256GB or more storage use faster UFS 4.0 memory. They all have the new chip, and while I can’t say I found previous Pixels to be laggy, this one seems snappy. It stutters a bit with dense, media-heavy web pages like character builds on Icy Veins. Android Authority has a good rundown on the nuts and bolts of Tensor G5, and confirms that there’s no ray tracing support. For what it’s worth, Diablo Immortal runs just fine on the 10 Pro. The phone also doesn’t seem to heat up quite as much or as quickly as previous Tensor-powered Pixels either, which have a reputation for running hot. I used the 10 Pro as a hotspot outside on a warm morning without a problem — something I’ve had less success with on previous Pixel phones.
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