Google Pixel 8 Long-term Review: A likeable compact flagship phone that needs a price cut

Pros:
- Premium build and finish
- Compact design with IP68 ingress protection
- Excellent main camera, improved ultra-wide camera
- Sharp and vibrant 120Hz OLED display
- Smooth and clean Android 14 experience
- 7 years of software updates promised
- Good overall performance after a few updates

Cons:
- Slow charging; no charger in the box
- Tensor G3 throttles quite a bit under load
- No telephoto camera yet
- Expensive

Rating: 3.75/5
Price: Rs 75,999 to Rs 82,999

We have been using the Google Pixel 8 for a few months now. In fact, we had seen enough of it by the end of last year to place it in our list of best smartphones of 2023. But there are certain premium phones that actually get better and more stable over time after they are graced with a handful of updates that fix a few quirks present at launch. Google Pixel phones are a prime example of that. So we thought of using the Pixel 8 for a bit more, and now is the time to tell you everything you need to know about it.

Google Pixel 8 Design: Compact and sturdy build, premium finish and feel
Google has done only a few subtle changes to the Pixel 8 design and they work just right. The phone still speaks the trademark Pixel design language and feels great in hand due to its compact size. The weight has been kept under 190 grams. The build is rugged with a premium finish thanks to an aluminium frame and glass back. The IP68 rating for dust and fluid resistance has been retained. The screen is still flat but the edges are slightly rounded, which adds to the aesthetics and feel.

The bezels are noticeably narrower, especially the bottom bezel, which helps in trimming a few millimetres from the phone’s height. The display and the back are protected against scratches by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus. Fingerprints and smudge marks are barely visible on its Rose (more like Rose Gold) variant that we got for review. The metallic borders complement the back perfectly. The metallic finish extends to the distinct camera band at the back that has been present in the past three generations of the phone, if not more.

The volume rocker as well as the power button are placed along the right edge. Their placement as well as that of the in-display fingerprint scanner are perfect, and one can access them without stretching the fingers much. The scanner, though not the best around, is a definite improvement over the one in the Pixel 7 series. The SIM tray is located along the left edge of the phone, while a USB-C port and a speaker are present on the bottom edge. A memory card slot and 3.5 mm headphone jack remain absent.

Google Pixel 8 Display: Sharp and vibrant display, finally with 120Hz refresh rate
Google has reduced the size of the display just a little but not the resolution, which improves the pixel density. The Pixel 8 has a compact 6.2-inch Full HD+ OLED display with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 pixels and a peak brightness of 2000 nits. The refresh rate has finally reached 120Hz on a Pixel non-Pro device. The HDR10+ compliant screen is bright and sharp with excellent colour reproduction and contrast out of the box.

It’s good that they have tuned it well as you hardly get any colour adjustments here. You just get two modes - Adaptive and Natural. The former makes the colours look slightly more vivid, while the latter keeps things natural. Try both and choose one that suits your taste. Always-on display is also available if you prefer it. The display leaves hardly any room for complaint, and in many ways, it is one of the stand out features of this phone.

Google Pixel 8 Hardware and performance: Good but not exactly flagship grade
The Pixel 8 is powered by Google’s third-generation Tensor G3 processor that powers the Pixel 8 Pro too. While it’s reasonably powerful, it is no match for the past two generations of Qualcomm flagship chips like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Gen 3 in terms of raw processing power. But one mustn’t forget the AI crunching capabilities of the Tenson G3 that may not reflect clearly in popular synthetic benchmark scores.

You get 8GB RAM here along with either 128GB or 256GB UFS 3.1 storage; some competing phones have been offering the faster UFS 4.0 storage since early 2023. Moving on to the performance, the Tensor G3 breezes through day to day tasks like accessing social media or chat apps, watching videos, browsing the internet, opening multiple tabs on a browser and switching between them. The phone used to heat up a bit during the early phase of our testing, but now runs relatively cooler for longer.

The phone generally stays cool but does get a little warm after 30 minutes of gaming or if you click dozens of photos back to back. Though the heat doesn’t reach alarming levels, the performance throttles quite a bit as the temperature rises. In certain cases, it even drops to 50 per cent as you can see from the 3D Mark stress test image below. Speaking of synthetic benchmarks, we ran a few to gauge its performance and also to compare it with that of its predecessor, the Tensor G2 that powers the Pixel 7 series.

You can check the benchmark scores in the image below, but I will let you know how its performance compares with its predecessor and also the OnePlus 11 5G that is powered by Qualcomm’s previous generation flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip. Interestingly, the Geekbench 6 single-core score of the Tensor G3 is a good 50 per cent higher than that of the other two chips, courtesy of its 3 GHz Cortex-X3 core that helms the nona-core chipset. However its multi-core score sits right between the two, with a 15 per cent increment over the G2 and 10 per cent below the Qualcomm chip.

In the 3D Mark Wild Life gaming benchmarks, we observed a 33 per cent jump in performance as compared to the Tensor G2. However, it is still a far cry from what the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can achieve, with the Tensor G3 trailing by a good 30 per cent. Having said that, the real world gaming performance of the Pixel 8 is pretty decent, and you can play most of the games out there on it. You may have to lower the graphics setting in some cases for decent frame rates.

This phone has two speakers, one behind the earpiece and the other at the base of the phone. Collectively they produce a fairly loud and punchy sound output with good stereo separation. The phone is Bluetooth 5.3 compliant and has tri-band WiFi with support for a/b/g/n/ac/6e/7 standards. The call quality and reception were perfectly fine during our testing over a period of time. And of course, it’s 5G compliant.

Google Pixel 8 Battery backup: Decent battery life with no real fast charging
The battery backup on the Pixel 8 is decent. The battery capacity has increased from 4355 mAh on the Pixel 7 to 4575 mAh here, but the actual battery life is quite similar. In fact, it was worse than the 7 when we first started testing this device. But after a few updates and optimisations, the battery does last comfortably beyond a day of moderate use, and closer to 28 to 30 hours, which is acceptable for a compact phone.

The charging times see a marginal improvement as compared to its predecessor, yet remain poor in comparison to the modern standards; actually not even close to the standards set by several Chinese manufacturers half a decade ago. The Pixel supports 27W fast charging using USB-PD 3.0 chargers; a jump of 7W from what the Pixel 7 would max out at. So using a 30W charger over a 20W option does improve the charging speed here (though not drastically) unlike on the 7.

Google still does not include a charger in the bundle; just a USB-C cable. We tried a bunch of third-party 20W, 25W, 30W and higher-powered USB-PD chargers. The fastest time we clocked for charging the Pixel 8 from 1 per cent to 100 per cent was 88 minutes - 7 minutes less than the Pixel 7’s top speed. Among the current crop of flagship devices, I believe only the ones from Apple charge slower than this. The OnePlus 12 and Xiaomi 14 get the job done in well under 40 minutes. If not that quick, I hope Google strives for less than an hour at least with the Pixel 9.

Google Pixel 8 Camera performance: Excellent main camera, improved ultra-wide camera
You still get two cameras at the back that may look similar to the Pixel 7’s on paper but are better. There’s a 50MP primary camera with Laser auto-focus, optical image stabilisation (OIS) and a wider f/1.7 aperture. The 12MP ultra-wide camera here has a broader 126-degree FOV, but more importantly, also has auto-focus which helps it double up as a quality macro camera; a key element missing on the Pixel 7. A dedicated telephoto camera present on the Pro models continues to be absent.

The main camera captures some excellent shots in bright as well as low light conditions. The colours are fairly accurate and the dynamic range is excellent. The contrast has always been great on Pixel phones over the years, and it is no different on the Pixel 8. The captured images exhibit great detail as you can see that in the camera samples at the end of this section. The performance is among the best in low light too.

The phone automatically switches to Night Sight mode when the light is low and that brightens up the image just enough without going overboard or compromising on the detail. The captured detail is often comparable to images captured in good light. Pixel phones and portrait photography have been the best of friends for a long time now, and the friendship remains strong on the Pixel 8. In portrait shots, the edge detection is spot on with a near perfect background separation. It works well on human subjects and other objects too; check the camera samples.

As I mentioned, there is no dedicated telephoto camera here but the camera app does give you a 2X zoom toggle, which can be termed as hybrid or digital. While I wouldn’t term them as lossless, the 2X zoomed shots come out pretty good, almost what one would expect from an optical zoom. You can keep zooming in till 8X, but anything beyond 5X is noticeably soft with a sharp drop in details. The AI does work its magic to an extent till 5X.

Moving on to the 12MP ultra-wide camera, the output is quite good in proper lighting, and the colours and dynamic range are comparable to that of the main camera. The colours feel slightly saturated at times, but not many would complain about that. It performs reasonably well in low light too, but the colours feel a tad muted and the details are certainly not in the league of the main camera. The ultra-wide camera on the Pixel 8 has auto-focus, and as a result, it can capture some pretty good macro shots from up close.

You get a 10.5MP selfie camera, a slight drop in megapixels from the 10.8MP unit on the Pixel 7, but the performance is as good. The front camera captures some nice selfies with natural skin tones. It has a fairly broad FOV and can click more than decent portrait selfies too. All the cameras can record 4K videos at 24, 30 and 60 fps, and the rear cameras can record slow-mo 1080p videos up to 240 fps. OIS and gyro-EIS lend stability to the captured footage. A 10-bit HDR option is also available. The recorded videos from the rear cameras are sharp and stabilised and pretty good for this segment.

Click here for unedited camera samples shot on the Google Pixel 8.

Google Pixel 8 OS and user interface: As good as it gets on Android
Given that it’s a Pixel phone, you get the cleanest and the best Android 14 experience at the moment. You get the pure Android experience without any bloatware and with the Material You design language. The user interface is fluid, totally lag-free and now void of any major bugs. Some of the minor issues present in the phone soon after its launch have been addressed by now.

The Pixel 8 runs the latest iteration of Android 14 with the March 2024 security patch, and one can expect several periodic updates going ahead. In fact, Google has promised 7 years of software updates for the Pixel 8 series, and that is saying something. You get a bunch of useful tools on this phone to play around with, along with the popular Google apps that are seamlessly integrated.

Be it object recognition using Google Lens or speech recognition or translation, things work well. Add to that some software tricks for the camera like Magic Eraser and Camouflage to edit or enhance your images. From time to time, Google has been adding new features to this device, now with improved Google AI-powered options. Check Pixel Tips periodically to explore the new or enhanced features of the Pixel 8.

Google Pixel 8: Price, alternatives and verdict
The Google Pixel 8 is priced at Rs 75,999 for the 128GB internal storage variant and Rs 82,999 for the 256GB variant in India with a one-year warranty, which is a good Rs 16,000 higher than the launch price of the Pixel 7. Another reason we waited this long to publish this review is because we were expecting, or rather hoping a price drop, but that hasn’t happened. Yes, with the right credit card, you can get an instant discount of Rs 10,000 on the Pixel 8, but even after that, the price seems a little higher than ideal. Let me explain why.

The Pixel 7 Pro with generally superior specifications, barring the processor, is currently selling for Rs 66,999 for the 128GB variant. Yes, it is powered by a generation-old Tensor G2 chip, which is still fairly powerful for most tasks, but it has a higher resolution display and a superior camera setup with that fantastic telephoto camera which is missing on the Pixel 8.

The Pixel 7, which isn’t drastically different from the 8, is available for as low as 45K. For such a massive price difference, it is hard to recommend the Pixel 8 at its current price. Despite being incrementally superior on most counts than the Pixel 7, it cannot justify such a large premium. And it’s not just the last-gen Google phones that are looking to compete with the Pixel 8, you also have some more powerful current flagship devices like the OnePlus 12 and Xiaomi 14 selling for a lot less. You can even add the Apple iPhone 15 to that list.

The Google Pixel 8 is not a bad phone at all. In fact, it was one of the best phones of 2023, and we still like it. Just that 2024 has thrown some new challenges at it in terms of competition, and it needs to respond appropriately to provide the user with better value for money. As of now, Google seems to have adopted Apple’s pricing strategy when their new phones are worth buying a year later after a price drop around the festive season. If and when that happens, the Pixel 8 would be a good buy, or if you can spot it under 60K in the coming weeks or months.