Pixel reviewer roundtable

0:02Victoria Song:Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of wearing foldable phones on your head like a hat, which is what I'm currently doing right now. Anywho, I'm senior wearables reviewer Victoria Song, and the new Pixel devices are out tomorrow. And that's the Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and the Pixel Watch 5. Woo! If we have a general thesis about these devices, it would be that it's all about the software baby. In any case, today joining me are going to be my colleagues and editors, Dom Preston and Cameron Flockner. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. I'm Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 19th, 2026.

0:44Last year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said last generation GPUs were basically worthless. This year, he says they're a new asset class. Liz Lopato has a report on the site today on the finance industry's latest innovation, which looks a lot like NVIDIA trying to find more people to lend money to its customers to pay for more NVIDIA hardware instead of just handing the customers the money to buy the stuff themselves. Fascinating. Amazon's drone delivery service is expanding to Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Boise, and Syracuse, New York with more to come by the end of the year. Amazon aims to deliver packages under five pounds in less than an hour and each airbase has a delivery area of about 175 square miles according to the company.

1:24So if you're within seven and a half miles of an Amazon warehouse, watch your head. Framework is upgrading its 12-inch convertible laptop with Intel's latest budget processors. The pre-built version of the repairable, upgradable laptop 12 starts at$699 and ships with Fedora Linux. Framework apparently found out that 80 % of its laptop 12 customers were already running Linux, and this just helped save some money. That's compared to 5 % of the overall PC market. I love this. It's the year of Linux. Everyone should run Linux. And finally today, on the site, Jennifer Toohey tested a robot mop with a robot arm that can scrub areas of the mop as too tall to fit under or too wide to fit into, like around chair legs and under bar stools.

2:04If you have a dog, they will do the same work for less money. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 19th, 2026.

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2:48Victoria Song:credit scores we love them because they can qualify us to buy a house or get an apartment and we hate them because they can seem irrational and confusing i'm vivian too your rich bff and on this episode of net worth and chill we're looking into where these scores came from how to get and maintain a good one and how to make them work for you ready to impress some lenders and make your credit score work hard listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash your rich bff all right dom cam thank you for joining me on this beautiful morning let's talk pixels cam you reviewed the standard pixel 11 before we get into the specs and the specifics what are your overall impressions my overall impressions are that it's it's a good phone i mean it seems like the culmination of the past few generations of hardware improvements bundled into one kind of like and i was going to say entry level but like it's not an a series phone those are much cheaper it's it's the entry level of the flagship line um it starts at 899 and you get 256 gigs of storage which is double from last year but yeah i switched uh from my pixel 9 pro which i use as a daily driver to this and it was very simple for me because it's the same size the performance feels just as snappy.

4:05The camera app boots and shoots really quickly. And it has some new features that I can't access on my old phone, which I'm a bit sad about. But yeah, the new features, I'm a little mixed on some of them. The proactive assistance AI feature with Gemini, David and Mel and I kind of had some mixed experience getting that to work as intended. so the whole point of proactive assistance is to be able to do more for you on your phone so that you don't have to do like the really difficult work of tapping tapping your phone screen and navigating your apps it's so difficult um i i kind of kid but um yeah it it kind of falls a little short at launch of doing everything that we thought it would be able to um with enough tinkering it was able to do most of the things that google advertised that it could like david and i spent quite a bit of time going back and forth in text trying to use like natural language to trigger the gemini chip to let us book a table at a restaurant that we knew was on open table like we we confirmed that the restaurants were bookable through open table um but there were times that gemini would be like it's not bookable through open table uh here's all the information we can provide you though um so we would go back and forth refining the text using the full restaurant name instead of kind of like a shorthand using the day of the week using the specific time um eventually we got there um we worked with google a bit to troubleshoot this and um they didn't seem to uh think that we needed to be so precise but that's not how it worked in real world usage at least with this pre-launch software so with reservations we eventually got there it does quickly move through the process like the flow like a lot of it becomes invisible to the user which is cool it just you know if there's a reservation it will pull up all of the screens that kind of drill down into the process where it's like okay now you can enter your email address to confirm it's very cool um there was another instance where we we were successful but only after we kind of like followed some rules that were invisible to us like in order to get proactive assistance proactive um you have to connect apps to it so it's like a manual opt-in process which is good you know it's it doesn't just have access to everything right off the bat so um for example i wanted to do the thing that dieter did in the hands-on video with all the pixels which is like i'm texting with my friend and i need groceries let me hop over to google keep and da da da da and all of a sudden my groceries are ordered um we weren't experiencing that being as easy as um they made it look and i know that there's a lot of um magic added to those videos just to like make it seem very easy but we um we figured out that um in my case i had a grocery list it was called grocery list as one might call their grocery list um and in it you know just i had a couple items they were all like burgers different kinds of burgers um and i was told from someone who worked at google that the grocery list needed to have the name of the app that you would like proactive assistance to connect you to in the title so instead of grocery list it was called instacart and that's not something that i would call my grocery list maybe it would work if i said instacart grocery list but that's just kind of like a strange way of having to alter my behavior in order for the thing to work for me but again just like the reservation system once I followed its rules, it was fast.

7:57It pulled up, you know, the Gemini chip. It said that it was going to connect to the Instacart app. And the next screen that I saw showed a list of retailers that I could purchase all of those things from. So it was elegant once I allowed it to be, basically.

8:13Victoria Song:I'm curious whether how both of you feel about the lack of temperature sensors because when we did the live stream with Neelai and David, Neelai was like, no, my temperature sensor. I can't tell if he was trolling me or not. I think it was great that we got rid of the temperature sensor. I don't think it's a particularly useful thing on a phone, but I'm curious whether you guys, how you feel about it and whether you think Highlight was a worthy successor to this particular useless feature.

8:45Dominic Preston:I agree that getting rid of the temperature sensor made sense. I don't remember ever using that on the Pixel 10s I've used or like any of the recent Pixel. I half get why it's there, but it feels like it adds cost to the build for this incredibly niche feature that most people will just simply forget their phone has. I regularly forget that those Pixel phones had a temperature sensor and people mention it and I go, oh yeah, Google did a weird temperature sensor. That's like the odd thing they baked into that. That's fine. I'm glad it's gone because I don't think it makes sense. I don't see why it was there to begin with.

9:19Dominic Preston:So Highlight takes over the camera flash on the back of the phone, which instead of just being a white LED flash is now a multicolored LED flash. So for camera flash, it works exactly the same. It's just the camera flash. It's white. It's normal. But this can be a colorful notification light, or at least it looks like a notification light. It doesn't really act like a notification light, which I think is the disappointing thing about Highlight. So it actually only does two things, which is it displays a kind of multicolored Gemini glow when you're talking to the AI assistant, but it only does this if you have the phone face down on a table or another surface.

10:00Dominic Preston:So if you're holding the phone or you've got the screen activated, the light won't activate. So it's not like other people will see it. Google's logic here was like, if you're using Gemini with the phone face down and you're just talking to it, then you'll be able to tell when it's thinking and ready to reply to you. I should say thinking with the big quote marks around that. I have never intuitively used an AI assistant on my phone with it face down. I mean, I guess if you've got your phone face down and then you do the voice activation and talk to it, you want to know it's heard you. So I can half see what they're getting at here, but it just feels like they've replaced that one niche temperature sensor with this other really niche activation of a light.

10:42Dominic Preston:And they obviously recognize this and they've got this light and they should do more with it. But instead of just making it a full customizable notification LED, they allowed it to turn on when you receive phone calls from favorite contacts. Again, only if the phone is face down and the screen is off, it won't light up otherwise. It's only for your favorite contacts. And you can customize the color per contact, but you get a choice of five colors to pick from. You have no big color wheel, no huge set to select from. There's just five colors. I have more than five people who regularly ring me. So that just immediately breaks how useful this might be.

11:21Dominic Preston:You can't use it for any other notifications. Google has said message alerts are coming down the line. Knowing Google, I assume that just means its own messages app rather than other apps you receive messages on, which for me means WhatsApp is the only way I receive texts that really matter to me. So that will be useless. Maybe at some point, eventually, this will just be a general notification light where you can set the color and have it flash for different things coming in. It currently isn't that. It's just this really weirdly artificially limited feature, which it feels like basically this was a Gemini light and maybe really late in the process, someone at Google said, oh, it has to do something more than Gemini.

12:02And so they threw this like basic ass version

12:06Dominic Preston:of call lights in and said, and we'll do more down the line. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. But come on, this is a notification LED. This is worse than notification LEDs were 10, 15 years ago. Why bring it back if you're just gonna do such a weird, bad version of it?

12:20Victoria Song:Yeah, I just like, kind of like how Cam's experience with the proactive Gemini suggestions, you kind of had to be proactive about getting it to actually work. I found that like organically, it just never happened for me. And I'm someone who keeps my phone face down all the time. So I thought it would be useful for me, but it ended up being a thing that was just like, oh, it never ended up happening at all. Like at least not organically, if I was forcing it, sure.

12:47Dominic Preston:I had to get my partner's phone, make a phone call to myself from that just to confirm this does work, right?

12:53Victoria Song:Yeah, no, I had the same experience, But like, Cam, do you feel like you missed out on a highlight? Because it's not on the standard Pixel 11. Or listening to this, are you just like, cool, cool, bro? I mean, I'll never turn away more features, you know, in the base model. It, you know, as personally for my desires, it's nice to know that I'm not missing out on anything, especially like as someone who owns an older phone. but um but yeah the the lack of highlight while like not a huge deal to me personally um it really like calls into question the way that like google is um is building the tiers of its phones like it is viewing highlight as a premium feature um so to not really have anything interesting to show for what it does is kind of concerning at launch and um what these phones can do at launches is really important and like i know that um google promises seven years of os updates for these newer phones um dating back a couple generations too and that's great and they continue to get better over time which is great we don't know the ways in which they will get better but But going back to your point on Highlight, you know, only working when the phone is face down, I would kind of love if the Gemini light would show while someone is using it.

14:21So you could be like that person is talking to an AI while they're out and about. That's pretty funny.

14:26Victoria Song:Yeah, I would love that too. But kind of to your point about like a little bit of confusion among the tiers. I mean, Dave Amell, he reviewed the pros for us. He can't be here today. But what do you guys feel about the differences between the standard, the pro, and then also like the Fold. I'm just, to your point, Cam, I'm just kind of sitting here thinking about the differences between them. Also the fact that a lot of the updates across the entire Pixel lineup this year are very software-based. So it's sort of just like, I think a lot of people will be wondering if upgrades are worth it, if we feel the changes between both the tiers and the previous versions make sense.

15:05Victoria Song:Like, less RAM this year, right, on the Base Pro. compared to the Pro 10 and the 9 Pro. But at the same time, more storage, that's good. How do we feel about the way Google's navigating Ramageddon? Because it comes for us all. Yeah, it's tricky because I feel like we're in the midst of the changes and it's tough to see what's going to come next. But the Pixel 11 series is certainly an interesting first step through Ramageddon, I suppose, if you're not counting the XA being very, very iterative of the phone that it succeeded. Yeah, it really just seems like for the Pro, it's the slightly updated camera specs, none of which are really all that new compared to the generation that came before.

15:55It's just slightly better camera specs layered on top of some exclusive features that for now are exclusive to the Pixel 11 line. So, you know, I feel pretty mixed about it. Like as a Pixel 9 Pro owner, I'm feeling, features aside, pretty content with my phone.

16:14Dominic Preston:Yeah, I agree. Like looking at the pros, it's really just how much do you care about the improved camera specs? If you aren't willing to pay, you know, a couple hundred extra or whatever it is for better sensors, I can't see much reason you'd go for it. I mean, if Highlight was more compelling, I think that probably would sway a bunch of people, at least in a sort of among a diehard Android kind of crowd. I think some people would jump a big fancy new notification light. I think other is just, are you willing to pay a bit more for slightly better cameras? But I think the cameras, I mean, the Fold has a pretty similar set of cameras to the 11 and I've been pretty happy with them.

16:55Dominic Preston:So I don't know how compelling that sales pitch of pay more for better cameras will be for most people. I think you've really got to deeply, deeply care about the camera in your phone to see that as a compelling jump from what they've managed to put in the 11. On the RAM side, coming from reviewing the Fold, it's a slightly different perspective with the Fold, because it's gotten the same$100 price bump as the other phones, but it's got the same RAM and storage as last year. So it hasn't had the RAM drop, but also it's not had that storage bump. It's still at a 2.56 gig starting point. And that's what it was last year as well.

17:33Dominic Preston:So you can kind of justify that price bump on some of the other pixels by saying, well, look, you're getting more storage. It's kind of a price hike. It's kind of not a price hike. The folder really is just, yeah, it's a price hike. It's$100 more than last year's for not that many big changes in terms of the improvements, which makes it a harder pitch, I think, in that Ramageddon context. You're listening to DeepGram Flux TTS. Different voices. Same model, all ready to speak. Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents.

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19:00Victoria Song:Now, Dom, this is kind of like a natural segue to talk about the Fold and the fact that I've had Fold envy as a whole because, you know, as a wearables reviewer, I don't get priority to touching the one Foldy phones. So I actually got to play around with one and I legitimately was just like, I don't know what I'm doing. So I need your fold expert insights onto this thing. How does this compare to the Wide Boy Galaxy Z Fold? Also, when I was at the Made by Google event, I was talking with, I was like, hi, foldable friends who are experts. How should I feel about this gigantic crease right here?

19:41Victoria Song:And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on all of that. Yeah, the Fold is in a really funny position because the foldable market has changed a lot in the last year or two, and we're expecting it to change a whole lot more in a month from now.

19:57Dominic Preston:The Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels a little dated to me. I'm coming from the context I have reviewed both of Samsung's new big folds, the Z Fold 8 and the Z Fold 8 Ultra this year. But I've also been reviewing things like Honor and Oppo's foldables this year. So these are the kind of China and Europe only flagship foldables, which have been pushing the hardware side of this for a while. Compared to those, the 11 Pro Fold is thick and it is heavy. It is thinner and lighter than the 10 Pro Fold, but they haven't done enough to get it into the same ballpark as what Samsung, Oppo and Honor are doing. So if you pick this up and compare it to any others, you will basically be like, oh, this is hefty.

20:37Dominic Preston:It's still got that problem foldables had a few years ago in general, where everyone will pick the one. be like, oh, that's such a bulky, heavy phone. I'm not happy with that. The latest foldable Samsung's ones this year, you know, they are basically the same weight as a big iPhone or, you know, Pixel Pro XL. There's not much of a weight difference. There's not much of a size difference. That's not true here. If you're going to go for the foldable, you are getting a bigger, heavier phone and you've got to make your peace with that. You've got the crease. We have seen, particularly from Oppo and also kind of from Samsung, they did really well this year.

21:07Dominic Preston:People been working so hard to get rid of the creases. Oppo had this fun technique where they 3D printed to fill the gaps in the hinge. Samsung basically rebuilt its display stack with all these titanium layers. Both had the same effect, which is that the crease is much less visible than before. Head on, you just don't see it. You can't really feel it. Particularly in the Oppo, you've really got to hold it round at weird angles to try and catch the light just right to be like, oh yeah, there's the crease. I can kind of see it if I really go hunting for it. it's very visible on this phone. It is there.

21:39Dominic Preston:It is head on. You can feel it. If you run your finger over the gap, there is a very noticeable dent where your finger goes over and that's fresh out of the box. It will only get worse from here because that's how these foldables work. Over time, the creases deepen and become more pronounced. I have generally been of view with foldables that the creases aren't that big a deal. And that once you use one for a week or two, you kind of stop noticing it. Once it's just your phone, you get used to that being how your screen fills. But if the crease bothers you, I would not buy this foldable in particular.

22:09Dominic Preston:And if you're in the US where basically your option is this or Samsung, or maybe whatever Apple might do soon, then go for the Samsung because the crease there has made a lot better and a lot subtler than on the Pixel. Then there's a size thing because Samsung has just rejigged its size. As you said, we now have a wide boy. We think Apple might do a wide boy, though we're not sure. We're going to find out. This is a slightly funny one because the Pixel has always sat a bit wider than Samsung's regular fold line. Well, Samsung's folds have always been these really tall and thin ones. And Google's have always been a little wider and often a little shorter.

22:45So in a funny way,

22:48Dominic Preston:this actually sits neatly in between Samsung's two sizes that could well do it a favor. Because I think some people might go and be like, wow, Samsung's are these two extremes. And I can buy this really short and wide phone, or I can buy this really tall and thin phone. And if that's your reaction to Samsung's options, then this might feel a bit like the Goldilocks foldable from a form factor perspective, because it is not quite as skinny as a Z Fold 8 Ultra. It's taller and slightly slimmer than the regular Z Fold 8. That said, you open it up, it's still basically squarish it feels closer in size to samsung's ultra than it does to its z fold 8 despite being a price match for the regular the wide z fold 8 um i really like the z fold 8 form factor i really enjoyed it i found it suited how i use these foldables which is as like content devices i i open that screen up basically when i want to watch something or when i want to read something.

23:48Dominic Preston:And that four by three form factor on the inside really suited me. I find these squarer ones. It feels like it's more designed for multitasking. It's that split screen. I'm working on my phone. I need my emails and my stocks and all these things going on all at once. And I need to multitask and tap between five different apps on the fly. And I have never used a phone like that. I've tried, you know, I've tried for reviews to be like, let me simulate this version of myself. And I find it very unnatural. So there's an audience for that. And if so, this still fits squarely in that audience.