Allison Johnson has our first impressions of Google’s new flagships, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, with their new Tensor G3 chipsets, Android 14, seven years of updates, and, as we heard during the Made by Google event on Wednesday, all of the AI you can fit in a phone.
Pixel 8 starts at $699, and Pixel 8 Pro is $999. They’re available for preorder today and on shelves next week.
Yep, there’s a new feature called Zoom Enhance on the Pixel 8 Pro. It uses on-device processing to let you zoom in on parts of your photos and recreates fine detail. Like in the movies! It’s available in December via Feature Drop.
The phone can run up to 150x more computations than the largest model on Pixel 7. Magic Eraser looks like it gets a big improvement from this on-device processing, too. It’s available right away, says Rick.
It’s coming to select testers first, then they’ll be expanding availability in the next few months. Also, it wrote a social caption for a cute puppy photo.
Google is shouting out its AI chatbot while we’re talking about Google Assistant. Sissie Hsiao is introducing Assistant with Bard, which will offer more generative capabilities. It can find your important emails and pull together information from different apps.
Video Boost will offload some complex video AI processing to the cloud so it can edit every frame. That’s a whole lot of data to handle from a 4K video clip. It enables more robust HDR for video as well as Night Sight Video. It’s coming via a feature drop in December.
There’s a new main 50-megapixel main camera sensor, an upgraded telephoto camera, and autofocus on the selfie camera. You’ll also get access to manual camera settings in the native camera app. You hear that, Apple?
It was announced at I/O. It’s Google Photos’ new generative AI photo editor. We saw a demo showing object removal and fully moving one element in the scene and putting it somewhere else. Oh, and you can mess with the lighting and sky. It looks intense.
