Google - Pixel 11 Pro XL 256GB (Unlocked) - Canyon

I’ll start by mentioning that I’ve owned other Pixel and Google nexus phones in the past and the Google Pixel 11 Pro XL feels the most refined and polished. Build quality is excellent; on par with other flagship phones on the market. It’s glass body with aluminum sides is quite premium feeling in the hands. The camera bar on the back lost the metal frame and is covered with gorilla glass victus 2. It also lost the temperature sensor on the back and replaced with a “HiLight” something that for now I feel is a little gimmicky and un necessary. I don’t miss the temperature sensor either though. The HiLight is used to notify you of specific contacts and notifications while your phone is placed face down. Cool to have but not a must have for me personally. Perhaps with custom software the light can be used for other notifications and apps. I feel like the biggest upgrades in this years Pixel are the camera sensors and the OLED screen. The screen is now capable of 120hz and 3600 nits of brightness at max, which is crazy bright. Bright enough to allow me to see the display clearly outside at high noon when the sun is at its brightest here in a cloudless Texas day. The camera sensors are larger now, allowing for them to see more light. Making them more useful in low light scenarios. A 50mp wide, 48mp ultra wide and 48mp Telephoto which can zoom upto 120X. The telephoto zoom is difficult to use and Ai is used to create the end image and clarify the end result which sometimes creates weird artifacts. Especially if there is text or jagged lines. Still a very cool feature though that might come in handy some day. It comes equipped with Googles new Tensor G6 processor.. which might not out perform the competition but is plenty quick enough to get all your tasks done on this phone, while being very power efficient. I have not had any issues running my favorite games and apps on the pixel 11 pro so far. I think the battery got downsized a little from last year but I’ve experienced excellent battery life and sometimes can go almost 2 days before having to plug it in to charge. Standby battery life is the best I’ve seen on any Google phone I’ve owned. The default storage size is 256gb, which is what I have and consider to be the bare minimum these days. Camera files and apps can be very large, so thank you Google for not giving us anything less than 256gb. If you are looking to buy this phone, you can expect the best of google’s software. It will be a clean and fluid experience. No added bloatware or apps preinstalled other than google’s service apps. The Gemini ai assistant on this phone is by far the most helpful and useful ai on any phone. You can have a natural feeling conversation with Gemini and it will provide helpful information. Admittedly, I haven’t used it to do some of the tasks available because I still prefer to do a lot of things myself. But I could see Gemini Ai being very helpful for someone who can be overwhelmed sometimes with day to day tasks. If I had to complain about anything about the ai suite on here is that some of the features are locked behind a paywall subscription and it is not cheap. Therefore personally I feel like I don’t need it and don’t want it. But you might feel differently about it after using it for some time. For me personally the biggest reason to own a Google phone has always been their cameras. Google phones tend to produce some of the best looking photos on any smartphone, and it still holds true and Google has included more camera features this year. “Looks” they are calling them. Basically you can now choose a different color profile for your photos on the fly if you choose to. I stick to the default since I still like what Google is doing with their computational photography. The video on this camera though, still needs some work. It can be inconsistent. While testing the cameras zoom with family, I noticed that sometimes my videos looked cartoonish. People’s skin looked smeered and waxy, and the colors looked like they melted onto others. I don’t know what I did in the settings, but the next video I took looked more natural. I think filming at 60fps indoors is what created the unnatural skin tones and colors to appear. When switched back to 30fps, the indoor video looked more natural looking. So be careful and mindful with your video settings. I would just leave it set to 30fps for everyday use. At the end of the day.. I still think the camera system and software is the best on any smartphone and the reason I will carry this phone in my pocket everyday. Would I recommend this phone? Yes. Especially if you just want a clean android experience with the most helpful ai software Google has to offer. I don’t know if any of the other android phones have better cameras, but the pixel 11 pro xl has a fantastic camera on board.

I love new tech and when the Pixel 11 Pro XL was released, I was excited to try it out. While waiting for it to arrive, I wanted to learn more about it. I watched and read reviews online and started getting worried by how much bad press was out there. (Mind you none of these people had the phone yet!) So I told myself to stop and wait for it to arrive. Then it did… IGNORE all the hate and ignorant reviews! There are some not great things about this phone, (like all phones) but there are many great things as well. I’ve been having so much fun using this Pixel! I’ve loved the design of the pixel phones for a while now and this years model is very similar but elevated. The curved edges, the camera bar that goes all the way across, (No wobble!!) the matte glass on the back. The screen bezels are larger than some other phones but I dont mind as it helps with swiping when you have a case on. I do wish the side rails were color matched Matte as well instead of chromed metal shades. The colors this year are nice but muted, I prefer punchier tones. Although mine always lives in a case, so it doesn’t really matter. I got the canyon color and can only describe it as pale peach with light rose gold sides. I don’t understand how soo many photos online can get it to look so much bolder. The pixel operating system is clean and easy to use. Very smooth and responsive. This phone can't be customized as heavily out of the box as other brands but you can still make it yours. There are great upgrades such as “Rambler”. I have been using voice typing more and more, and now with rambler its amazing. It really helps you organize your thoughts and get a polished message out. Watch some videos of it in action, it’s quite amazing! Live translate now does sign language! This needs to be pushed to every phone in the world. “HiLite” as of now is a stupid gimmick. I never put my phone face down. Google really needs to step that up. It feels very much under-baked. I would have rather seen a D shaped mini screen in that spot. Soo many more possabilities. The Display on this Pixel is beautiful. Sharp, colorful and vibrant. It gets bright enough to easily read the screen in full sun and super dim at night. Very easy on the eyes. The speakers are impressive! I thought my Z Fold 7 speakers sounded good but this Pixel blows it out of the water. They get loud and give you a very full rich sound. I am able to skip a bluetooth speaker some of the time. The Cameras are still some of the best. Beautiful photos and more ways of taking shots now with “Looks”. Magic capture helps you stay more present in the moment. The 120 zoom is hit or miss. Mostly AI generated at that range but I’d rather have it than not. And the Night sight takes great dark shots soo much quicker now. Battery life has been fine. I get over a full day of use. Its really the same as my Z Fold 7. I charge it every morning at 30-40%. The charging rate isn’t super fast but not slow. 30% to 100% takes 50 minutes. The wireless charging takes about an hour and a half. You must make sure your power brick is a PD PPS capable of 21 volts. Its very picky. Other chargers will work but much more slowly. If Google is going to make their phones so complicated to charge, the specific charger needs to be included in the box! The RAM has been decreased which is a poor decision but i havent noticed any performance issues yet. Google gives 7 years of updates so you can keep the phone current for a long time. I think this would be a great phone to try out if you are switching from a different brand or a much older Pixel device. I thought when I got my folding phone I would never go back, and while i still love it, This Pixel 11 Pro XL is making me rethink that. I’m just having soo much fun with this phone!

TLDR Summary: It’s a good daily driver phone. But it has less memory and slightly smaller battery capacity than the previous generation. It’s also more expensive than the previous generation. 3D performance is lackluster. You’re better off getting the previous generation while you can while using trade-in programs for bigger discounts. I’ve been a Pixel fan since the beginning. The line has always been the go-to phone for when you want an Android phone with none of the 3rd-party bloat. This is especially true when you compare it to the ones from a certain South Korean company. So each time a new Pixel phone is released, it intrigues me on what possible new features as well as any potential performance improvement over the previous generation. The color I am reviewing is for “Canyon,” which has a red sand color with a gold-like frame. Its base model comes with 256GB of internal storage and 12GB of memory. The latter part is, sadly, less than its previous generation which came with 16GB of memory. And with the price increase, the state of hardware and tech is depressing and real. Call it how you want to: RAM-pocalypse or RAM-mageddon. It is here and it is ruining tech and products everywhere. And there is one market segment (and company) that we can primarily blame it all on. But that’s a different matter altogether. The point is that we’re paying more for less than what the previous generation offered. Setting up the Pixel 11 Pro XL was easy and straightforward. I have opted to transfer data to the new phone but excluded photos and videos along with one or two things. It was also a good opportunity to see if transferring eSIM works with what I have (Mint Mobile): it worked. After the phone’s onboarding process finishes and all apps are reinstalled, the real fun begins. Using the Pixel 10 Pro XL to compare, I started Geekbench to see how it fares vs itself and the competition. Google has intentionally designed their phones to not be top performers. And it shows with the benchmark scores. In single core and mult-core, it scores between the competitor’s model from last year and two years ago. In a way, this is okay. But the bigger mystery (and disappointment) is its GPU benchmark score. While the improvement compared to the Pixel 10 Pro XL is good and welcomed, it still pales in comparison to the competitor. The score it gave is so bad that it could not reach one-third from a competitor model from last year. But benchmark numbers only tell part of the story. It’s using the phone in day-to-day usage that makes the phone shine. One of the interesting new features is “Magic Capture,” which lets your camera not only take a video but also will make an attempt to save a photo of a person shown in that video. Another interesting thing is the “HiLight” which is the RGB LED that is located to the right of the cameras. At first, it seems interesting to have. That is until I get into the settings and all I see are two options: Gemini and phone call from favorite contacts. That’s it? Lastly, taking photos with a Pixel is still as good as before. Nothing much has really changed since the previous generation. But there is one thing to note about taking photos. Having tried the extreme zooms (50x and 120x), there is no reason to go this far for a photo. Anything beyond 20-30x zoom is unnecessary. It’s just physically not a viable option seeing that the telephoto camera provides 5x optical zoom and anything beyond that is digital processing that can backfire. Battery capacity is slightly smaller. Again, this is another disappointing thing for this generation. Qi2 wireless charging remains along with the magnets. Those seeking accessories and wireless chargers should have no problem thanks to a fruity competitor. So, one of the primary reasons to get a Pixel phone are the software features exclusive to those phones, such as Call Screening or Magic Capture. But looking at the Pixel as a whole and viewing it with each generation in mind, I am finding it harder and harder to truly recommend a Pixel. In the photo department, the competition has really caught up and started competing. So the notion that Google has the upper hand on picture quality isn’t such an easy slam dunk any more. And then there are the hardware design choices Google makes each time. Some are weird and some are down right incomprehensive. The HiLight is one such oddball design choice that Google makes. The main chip, called SoC and short for “System on Chip,” considered the brain of the phone, continues the trend of being not a big performer. Even the GPU 3D performance is very lacking in many ways. Genshin Impact, a game I often play on mobile at times, would barely perform on the lowest profile settings. And that does not include the visual/rendering problem I am currently experiencing. It is quite unfortunate that I am leaning more on not recommending a Pixel 11 Pro XL, which is a surprise since I’m quite fond of it. The increase in price along with less memory than before. The disastrous lackluster 3D performance and modest system performance gain over the previous generation only makes it worse. If, however, you’re in the market and can no longer find the previous generation, a trade-in is an absolute must to shave off as much as possible from the up front cost. It is also advisable to bump up to 512GB/16GB storage model to not lose out on memory. The Good: pure Android experience, 7 years update (since release) The Bad: less RAM than before, slightly smaller battery, lackluster 3D performance, HiLight is almost useless, poor quality photos beyond 30x zoom The Ugly: AI leading us to dystopia Verdict: Pass, but use trade-in program if purchasing and bump up to 512GB/16GB model

I’ve been using the Pixel 11 Pro XL in Canyon since I picked it up yesterday, and it’s easily the best phone Google has put out. The color is stunning—it’s a really unique, earthy tone that stands out without being flashy. Performance-wise, the 256GB storage is plenty for my photos and apps, and everything feels incredibly snappy. The camera is as good as you’d expect, handling tricky lighting perfectly, and the battery life easily gets me through a full day of heavy use. It’s a solid, reliable device that feels premium in the hand. If you’re on the fence, I’d definitely recommend it.

design, and the battery lasts a long time. I’m very happy with the performance and would definitely recommend it.