Google has rolled out its latest line of Pixel phones with the Pixel 11 family. The Pixel 11 Pro sits at the middle, offering the same smaller footprint of the Pixel 11 while getting the extra features and cameras of the Pro models. Unsurprising for 2026, it comes with a price hike over last year’s model, bringing the starting price to $1,099 while coming with less memory, though it does have a higher base storage. Let’s dig into what the new Android flagship has going for it.
Pixel 11 Pro – Design and Features
The Pixel 11 Pro is a fairly standard year-on-year refresh of the Pixel 10 Pro, which was itself a pretty tame refresh of the Pixel 9 Pro. Like those models, the Pixel 11 Pro is pleasantly compact and comfortable to hold. Its physical differences from the Pixel 10 Pro are measured on the tenth-of-a-millimeter scale, and at just three grams heavier, you’d be hard-pressed to feel any difference in the hand. Its camera bar is also still a considerable protrusion (adding 4.1mm to the 8.2mm thick phone), but at least it keeps the phone from wobbling when set on a table.
There are some fresh colors. The model sent to me for testing is the Canyon colorway, a bold salmon-like orange-pink with a gorgeous copper-colored aluminum frame. There’s also a pleasant-looking Olive green colorway. The faint, minty Fog color and matte black Obsidian look quite bland, though.
The Pixel 11 Pro sticks with largely the same materials for durability, with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on both sides and an aluminum frame. It should be pretty sturdy, but I wouldn’t consider it even remotely hard to damage, having damaged plenty of phones quite easily over the years. There’s a new coating on the display to boost scratch resistance, and seeing scratches on the back from my short time testing but none of the front makes me think it might be helping. The Pixel 11 Pro still trods out the same IP68 protection against dust and water ingress, which should be plenty sufficient for most, though still lags behind the IP69 that the now-belly-up OnePlus had been offering on its even cheaper flagship.
Of the phone’s marquee features, the “new” HiLight feature is perhaps the lamest of all. It doubles as a camera flash and replaces the temperature sensor (even though that sensor happily sat alongside the flash in prior models). HiLight is also simply a case of Google digging up the dead and trodding them out in worse fashion. My first Android phone was a Sharp Aquos SH-01D in 2012, and it had a notification indicator light that I could set up to display different colors depending on the app giving me a notification. In 2012, the customization was already more granular than what Google is offering on its premium handset in 2026.
HiLight only lets you see a light while you’re talking to Gemini or when favorited contacts call you through the default phone app – tough luck if you use WhatsApp, Signal, or anything else as your default communication method, or if want HiLight to glow for texts from favorited contacts, too. With only five colors (if you count white as a color) to choose from to help identify specific contacts, you’ll run into a wall as soon as you have a lot of favorited contacts, and the purpose of HiLight could quickly be undermined.
The Nothing Phone has a similar feature with its customizable dot matrix animations that I find far more compelling. Never mind that with OLED displays, a similar feature could be made to run in Do Not Disturb mode such that small calling cards for favorite contacts or important apps could appear unobtrusively to have the same effect without needing a special piece of added hardware that will probably just get dumped two generations down the line anyway.
The display on the Pixel 11 Pro is hardly anything new, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s still a gorgeous 6.3-inch OLED capable of variable refresh rates from 1 to 120Hz and a new peak brightness up to 3,600 nits. That’s a minor improvement on last year’s model and not likely to make a meaningful difference, especially as you won’t be seeing those over-3000-nit brightness levels in day-to-day use unless you love to have the screen facing the sun.
The speakers aren’t a great match for the display. While the bottom speaker puts out a good deal of volume, the earpiece speaker is so much weaker that the stereo sound hardly feels like stereo. There’s enough volume to listen to a podcast or video while poking around a small room, but that’s about the extent of it.
The phone still offers a fingerprint sensor baked into the display as well as facial recognition. I’ve found both quick and reliable for unlocking the phone.
The Pixel 11 Pro also continues to operate using eSIM exclusively. It’s a minor bugbear, as I find eSIM a convenient option, but it becomes limiting to only have eSIM.
The phone’s connectivity is solid with the typical 5G alongside Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0, keeping up with the times. It also supports satellite connections when you’re remote and don’t have a terrestrial signal. The USB-C port handles charging, 10Gbps data, and can link out to displays to run a desktop mode. Oddly, the phone doesn’t automatically bring up a trackpad to navigate the desktop environment, leaving me to find a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to get up and running.
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Check out our guide to the Best Pixel 11 Cases.
Pixel 11 Pro – Software
The Pixel 11 Pro comes running Android 17 and will get 7 years of software and security updates. This has been Google’s promise for a few generations now, and it’s paired with assurances that the phones will get better over time thanks to special feature updates. I’ve known too many people who’ve had the power buttons fall off their Pixel phones within a couple years of ownership to think much of this promise anymore, never mind that the performance of the Pixel phones tends to lag behind flagship rivals and will be sorely wanting as time passes and the demands of modern software increase.
One of the new features of the Pixel 11 line is Google Keyboard's Rambler feature, a beefed-up version of speech-to-text that is designed to let you just kind of talk at it, tidying up the speech and letting you make revisions on the fly. One downside is that it doesn't show live output, so you have to wait until it's done processing to see what it's done, which can make checking it more of a chore. In testing it proved fairly reliable even as I stumbled over some of my speech. Unfortunately, this feature uses online processing for full functionality, which becomes a double shame when considering that Google could likely have made it an Android-wide feature instead of a Pixel 11 series exclusive.
Another feature Google has implemented is its Camera Looks feature. These let you snap photos with several different preset looks that handle photo processing differently, and you can make fine-tuned adjustments to each of the looks. Having an option like this certainly seems like a fine addition, though at a certain point simply shooting RAW and having the option to make whatever adjustments you want afterward might be the most sensible thing. And for casual photographers, this feature will probably feel like nothing more than simple filters.
The final big feature is Magic Capture, which basically lets you record a video carelessly and then will automatically scan through it and pull out photos (the idea being that you can then pay more attention to the real world and less to the phone). It appeared to do what it promised and served as a good way of grabbing a selfie with the rear sensor, too.
Pixel 11 Pro – Gaming and Performance
Google isn’t out here making a name for itself where raw performance is concerned. Its Tensor chips are not in that game, and the Tensor G6 is no exception. For raw speed and gaming performance, it’s much better to turn to something like the OnePlus 15 or RedMagic 11 Pro. The Pixel 11 Pro has plenty of muscle for day-to-day operation and doesn’t feel slow in general use. Gaming is another matter.
The Pixel 11 Pro got pretty toasty compiling shaders for Neverness to Everness over the course of about 10 minutes. From there, running the game at Balanced settings, it managed generally smooth visuals but had frequent hitches, especially in combat when using special moves or switching characters. With the game's Cinematic settings, hitches were even more frequent while simply wandering the game world. From a cold start, the game still hitched a bit while playing, and after 10 minutes, the phone had gotten a bit hot to hold and was hitching even more in gameplay.
Frankly, I was surprised it ran the game at Cinematic settings at all. The phone is still using a PowerVR GPU, which in last year’s model was a huge step backward for the phone’s performance. This go-around, it’s still certainly not a great gaming phone, but it’s passable.
Google finally bumped up the base storage of the phone to 256GB, though where all of the Pixel 10 Pro models had 16GB of memory, the Pixel 11 Pro starts out with just 12GB. It’s a shortcoming you probably won’t feel in practice, but it may start to hurt down the line.
The Pixel 11 Pro wields an unimpressive 4850mAh battery, which is a hair smaller than the prior phone’s 4870mAh. It’s still good for all-day use, but two full days may be a stretch depending on how heavy a user you are. The phone tops up at 30W over a wired connection, but can also use Wireless Qi2 charging at 25W, which is a solid step up over the 15W of the Pixel 10 Pro.
Unfortunately, during the initial testing period, my usual suite of benchmarks was unavailable for the phone, so I’ll have to circle back with results. That said, based on the gaming performance and history of Tensor chips, it's a safe bet that results will fall well behind phones running the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
Pixel 11 Pro – Cameras
The Pixel 11 Pro made a few tweaks to the Pixel 10 Pro’s camera system, opting for slightly larger sensors in a few cases but sticking to the same resolutions and apertures all around. The biggest change was in the telephoto sensor, which got a much bigger sensor that’s a boon for shooting in darker conditions and contending with its already narrow aperture. Here’s what the Pixel 11 Pro packs:
- 50MP Wide, 1/1.3" sensor, f/1.68, Laser AF, OIS, EIS
- 48MP ultrawide, 1/2.51" sensor, f/1.7, 123-degree FOV
- 48MP telephoto, 1/1.95" sensor, f/2.8, 5x optical, OIS, EIS
- 42MP Selfie, f/2.2, 103-degree FOV
Unsurprisingly, the camera system is an all around potent mix. Up close, the main sensor is happy to capture a ton of detail with natural colors and a satisfying background blur. The tele sensor can step in for close ups as well and makes for some crisp details on subjects that might not usually make it easy to get so close.
For larger subjects, the main and ultra-wide work well together. Colors are consistent between the two, making different shots of the same subject appear like a cohesive set. The wide aperture of the ultra-wide also helps avoid running into too much noise when shooting in darker environments.
The telephoto sensor proves a fairly powerful tool, but not nearly as capable as the marketing claims. Out to 10x, the zoom still looks great and gets in pretty close on far off subjects. After that, it starts to show softness and heavy digital correction, so 30x starts to look flat and beyond that becomes simply artificial. This is made perfectly apparent by zooming into far off signage. Looking at a parking sign far enough to require the max zoom level showed me reimagined visuals and an alien script. The phone saves both the original snap and the enhanced versions at this distance, and though the originals can be quite blurry, they can still have better detail than what the enhancement invents. One car license plate in my shot clearly had a “9” showing in the original photo, but the enhanced version obliterated it.
Selfies look decent, but I found them a little bit softer than I would have expected from a 42MP sensor. The focus seemed soft, and the fine detail of my facial hair was simply blurred together rather than standing out.
Purchasing Guide
The Pixel 11 Pro is available in four colors and three storage capacities. It starts at $1,099 for a 256GB model with 12GB of memory. That bumps to $1,219 for 512GB of storage and a step up to 16GB of memory, which in 2026 feels like a fair price jump for those extras, even if it still leaves the phone feeling a bit expensive for what’s on offer. The 1TB model also includes 16GB of memory and raises the price to $1,449. Google has trade-in incentives, and it’s offering $250 off a Pixel Watch 5 or $200 in Google Store credit on orders placed before August 27.
Mark Knapp is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything electronics and gaming hardware. He has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry with bylines at PCMag, Reviewed, CNET, and more. Find Mark on Twitter @Techn0Mark or BlueSky at @Techn0Mark.
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