GoKawiilis a technology reporter who has been covering the industry since 2007. He co-hosts the Waveform podcast with MKBHD. A former engineer, he now specializes in topics like computational photography and social media protocols.
Google is trying to get you off your phone. The Pixel 11 Pro is “A Phone Designed to Help You Use It Less,” the company promises. It can proactively help you book restaurant reservations, take the best frames from a video, and help you voice-text significantly faster. The pitch is that the new features bundled with the Pixel 11 series of phones can help fix your relationship with technology — one that Google knows has badly degraded in recent years.
But the hardware of the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL is very similar to last year’s models — and in at least one case, a downgrade — so those software features are pretty much the entire pitch.
Over the last week testing the 11 Pro, I’ve been trying them all to see how much they can help me put my phone down. Like many experiences with Google software, when they work, they are genuinely helpful. But getting them to work often requires a very narrow set of circumstances that some Google engineer probably dreamed up in the “society if” utopia lab.
The Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL are minor hardware updates compared to last year’s Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL. They both get brighter 3,600-nit screens. Their charging has been upgraded, with faster wired speeds and Qi2.2 for up to 25W when wireless. The 5x optical telephoto camera has a bigger sensor that Google says enables 30 percent more light intake. Storage now starts at 256GB, instead of 128GB. And there’s also a fancy new “notification light,” which I’ll get to in a bit.
Unfortunately, these upgrades come with a downgrade too, for the base model at least. The 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL now start with less RAM: 12GB compared to the 16GB that came standard last year, the same amount as the regular Pixel 11. I’m testing the 16GB / 512GB model, so unfortunately I can’t tell you if the RAM decrease is noticeable. That base model is also $100 more expensive than last year, too, at $1,099.
With such minor spec changes, Google has gone all in on software this year. And this time, that software’s primary purpose is to get you off your phone, or at least get tedious tasks done faster so you can get back to your life.
Proactive Assistance popping up inside Google Messages.
Perhaps the largest push in this direction is the Pixel 11’s new “Proactive Assistance” feature. This is a set of dynamic chips that appear when certain interactions happen on your phone, like a friend asking what your schedule looks like next week or if you booked that table at a restaurant yet.
For the most basic interactions, like checking availability or adding an event to my calendar, I found Proactive Assistance really helpful. I practically live inside my calendar, and text conversations about scheduling are common. When my friend Marc texted me asking when I was available next week, Gemini popped up and suggested checking my calendar for times. Outside of simple scenarios like that, though, Proactive Assistance gets less reliable. One of Google’s key examples is letting Gemini book a dinner reservation for you if you’re chatting about heading out to eat, but I had to receive a text with an extremely specific string of information to get it to work — and even then it only worked sometimes.
... continue reading