I'm happy to say the Tensor chip's day-to-day performance is excellent. As on most of today's high-end phones, there's no headphone jack, MicroSD card slot, or charging adapter in the box, but there's wireless charging, fast wired charging, 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, and water resistance.
Stereo speakers flank the screen, and while they don't sound as rich as the drivers on the iPhone 13 Pro, they're still pretty darn good and loud. Actually, they're so efficient, they lose far less power when sitting idly on standby than their predecessor. I was usually left with less than 40 percent in the tank before bed (around five hours of screen-on time).
Both phones comfortably lasted me a full day on a single charge. The OLED screens are sharp and vivid, with respective 90- and 120-Hz screen refresh rates that are wonderfully smooth. Well, you can find all the nitty-gritty technical details right here, including their differences, but the two pretty much have every feature you'd want in a high-end smartphone. You might be wondering how the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro fare with the standard phone stuff.
The Pixel 6 is undeniably the best top-end Android phone for most people. Flaws are few here, and Google's respectable prices-$599 for the Pixel 6 and $899 for the Pixel 6 Pro-make for a wonderful combo. Tensor is the glue that helps create some rather magical experiences on Google's new phones, and it's aided by the best hardware in a Pixel ever. You can read more about it in our story from August, but to put it briefly, nearly every existing feature on a Pixel, from the night mode in the camera to voice dictation, runs markedly better thanks to this chip. Instead of using a Qualcomm chip like nearly every other Android phone, these phones run on a Tensor chip, which has been custom-built by Google to efficiently run sophisticated machine-learning models without needing to rely on a cloud server. This all stems from a new processor powering the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. The phone can differentiate between when I want to include those words in a sentence and when I mean them as commands. When I want to send a message I can say “Send,” and I can say “Next” when I want to go to another paragraph. Voice typing is not perfect-I've had to quickly clarify to a colleague why I said “sex” when I meant “six”-but the Pixel can understand context to a certain degree.
For example, it didn’t understand when I spoke out my Korean friend’s last name, but after typing it out twice, the phone now spells the name correctly every time. It’s also surprisingly accurate, and it can adapt to your speech as you use it. It might sound like an ordinary voice dictation feature, but it's incredibly fast on the Pixel. In any text field, you can say the magic command above and start talking. That’s thanks to Assistant voice typing, one of many new software features in Google’s new Pixel 6 smartphone. I've composed much of this review with my voice.