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Google Pixel Event Recap － Will I upgrade to the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL?
After 4 years with my Google Pixel 6 Pro, is it finally time for me to upgrade to the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL? Let's discover this as I watch the Google Pixel event to decide if it's worth upgrading.
🔗 Google Pixel 10: https://geni.us/google-pixel-10
🔗.Google Pixel 10 Pro: https://geni.us/google-pixel-10-pro
🔗 Google Pixel 10 Pro XL: https://geni.us/google-pixel-10-pro-xl
🔗 Google Pixel 10 Fold: https://geni.us/google-pixel-10-fold
🔗 Google Pixel Buds 2a: https://geni.us/pixel-buds-2a
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► CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:00 Introduction
00:34 Why I want to upgrade?
03:37 Google Pixel Event 2025
14:17 Event Debrief
15:16 Comparison with my Pixel 6 Pro
18:28 Will I buy the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL?
19:06 Buying the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL!
21:22 Next videos!
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Good morning everyone! Today is a very exciting day because it's the Google Pixel 10 launch day and it's finally time for me to determine if I should upgrade from my Google Pixel 6 Pro. Now let's go watch the event to determine if that's going to be the case. For those of you who are new to the channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art. I've been a big fan of Google phones from the Nexus 5 back in the days to the Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 4a, now Pixel 6 Pro, and maybe the next one will be a Pixel 10 Pro. But I want to talk about some of the issues I have from the Google Pixel 6 Pro and why I want to upgrade. I think that these days you don't really need to upgrade that much because most phones can last years, easily four, five, maybe even ten years depending on the cases. But this specific phone has a few issues that made me think that I should upgrade for the last probably year and a half to two years. So the first one is just the battery is not that good on this phone. The battery doesn't last a full day so it's kind of an issue these days. Not that bad because if I'm at work or something like that I just put on a wireless charger and I have pretty good battery afterwards. But when I was in the wild last weekend or for other hikes, the phone will just die in the middle of the day which is really annoying. One thing I need to mention is that I'm not a typical user. I do have a bunch of apps that run in background so I'm a very intense user on the battery so I do need really good battery life. Then there's also an issue where it just randomly dies out of nowhere so sometimes it's at like 40% and I'll take a video call or something like that and then bam the battery's gone, it's just finished. I think that a lot of these issues come from the fact that it has the first generation Tensor chip. It was known to be a buggy chip that had all kinds of issues like that around the battery life so I really hope that this is now fixed in the fifth generation of the Tensor chip. Now the second issue is that the phone just dies randomly in cold or hot weather. So whether it's getting close to zero degrees Celsius or it gets a little bit hotter around probably 30 to 40 degrees Celsius, the phone will just die out of nowhere which is really annoying because for example when I was hiking this weekend, the phone would just die all the time in the middle of the day even though it was probably 5 to 10 degrees Celsius so it made the phone unusable. And as somebody that really likes winter sports, I love skiing and things like that, it's so annoying having a phone that just randomly dies out of nowhere in the middle of the day and you can't even use when you're doing outdoor sports. Now there's a few things I really want to have inside of a new Pixel phone and the first one is Qi 2 wireless charging. This is basically going to have magnets like MagSafe and allow you to have accessories in the back to align perfectly the wireless charging. You don't know how many times I put my phone on my wireless charger in the evening and then it wouldn't actually charge because it wasn't perfectly aligned. I would wake up the next morning and it wouldn't be charged at all which was really annoying especially when you'll have good battery life. This can be really really annoying so I really am looking forward to this and also to use it on accessories when I'm taking photos and videos and things like that to have a wider range of accessories that are compatible with the phone. I would love to have better cameras if they could have a zoom or something like that integrated it would be really nice. I would also like better video, this is kind of a weak point of the Pixel 6 Pro, the video looks a little bit over processed. I don't love the look of it, I would want to have more natural looking videos so hopefully they fix that one. I would also love to have some longer time lapses in the astrophotography mode, I'm pretty sure this one is not coming but I would really really like Google to fix this one. And finally I would like to have a lot of the AI features be on device instead of having to use a lot of resources to go through the data center which would just be better for the environment. So now it's time to head towards the TV and start watching this event to know if they're going to fix all of these things. Here we go, it's starting. We were talking about this at the first Pixel launch almost a decade ago. It's crazy to realize that Google has been working on AI features inside of the Pixel phones for the last 10 years. You get a full year of Google AI Pro on us. Not sure if I'm going to use this at all but it is cool that we're getting Gemini Pro for free for a year if you get the Pro phones. Open platform that's built for true freedom of choice. It's pretty cool to hear that they're talking about not being a walled garden. This is really something I do like with Android phones and the Pixel in particular. So I'm really excited to see how they're going to integrate that in their ecosystem because they've been in the past trying to do a little bit more like Apple and close off their stuff so if they're going to be opening it up again that's a big plus for the Pixel. And the colors we think, look at this palette, we think these colors are sexy as hell. I really like the new colors. I'm really sad that the blue version is not available for the Pro phones. I don't know why all phones got so boring in the last few years. So at Pixel we believe your phone should reflect your personality. So unlike other devices you can customize your Pixel as little or as much as you want. I'm really excited to test the new material, you expressive because I always liked the fact on the Android phones you could customize things and make it look exactly as you want. I do change the look of my phone quite often. I know not everybody cares about this but I personally really care about it. So I'm really excited about this update because this is going to be a pretty big one. Let's go to the Pixel 10 Pro. Okay this is the part I want to hear about. For people who want more. It features premium materials, premium performance and it comes in two sizes so you could pick the one that works best for you. And on top of that it has the best display of any flagship phone and it has the best Pixel camera ever. Very cool to see that they're talking about the best cameras out there. So not only do we have ProRes Zoom and everything else we talked about, the Pixel 10 Pro is extremely fast. Now that's credit to our Google Tensor G5 chip. On top of that you get something that we call Pixel Drops. Okay this is really cool that they're talking about even better performance. The last Pixel was already pretty performant but they have even more RAM in the new ones which is really nice. I also want to say that I do really like the fact that on Pixel you get Pixel Drops. So every few months they send new features with software updates and now they have software updates for seven years. You can keep the phone for very long and hopefully all the power inside of this phone will allow me to keep it for quite a long time in the future. We've got inside this phone IP68 water and dust protection. Okay that's actually really impressive that the new Pixel Fold has IP68 which means it's water and dust resistant. It's always been an issue with folding phones that dust could get inside of it. I would really want to get a folding phone. The only issue is that the cameras usually are not as good on the folding phone than the main phone and because I take so many pictures with my phone I do prioritize having really good cameras inside of it. We've got the Pixel Snap and this is pretty simple. The Pixel Snap just allows you to snap your phone on chargers, on wallets, on stands, on anything you need and on top of that just a little secret that this works perfectly fine with your Apple MagSafe accessories. Finally they're adding Chi2 to the phone so they have a Pixel Snap so it's kind of a little stand inside of it but they also specifically mentioned that it works with any MagSafe compatible things from Apple so this is amazing. It's going to unlock so many possibilities with my phone and being easily mounted to wireless chargers or different types of accessories so I'm really excited about this and I'm really happy I waited from the Pixel 9 to Pixel 10 to get this new feature. So let's move on to the Pixel Watch 4. I would also really like to get a Pixel watch but I'm a big Garmin fan so I have Garmin watches because I do a lot of running so they're just better watches than usually do these types of smart watches that are more meant for everyday life. It's got excellent battery life so just 15 minutes in this charger gets you up to 15 hours. Okay that's actually really cool that 15 minutes of charging on the watch gives you 15 hours. Now let's talk about the new new and that is the Pixel Buds 2A. You get active noise cancellation, crystal clear audio, all-day battery life and they're smaller, lighter and super comfortable. Okay they really didn't say much about the buds so I'll have to go look on the website to see if I'm interested to get them. One thing I would really love having inside of them is being able to connect to multiple devices and have them switch automatically because that's one of the annoyance I have right now with my Pixel Buds is that I always have to go into Bluetooth settings and switch them around. Not the biggest worry but it is something that would be really nice if they could fix it. And I want to hit one more topic that's a little bit touchier right? So we realize the idea of switching your phone brand can seem scary. Okay it's actually pretty cool that they address one of the biggest issues and it's passing from an iPhone device or other devices to a Pixel. So now you can simply plug in both devices and it will automatically transfer all your data to the new phone. But they also brought up the fact that there's now RCS on iPhones so pretty much anybody can communicate using iMessage or messages on Android and get a very similar experience where you can have group chats at work, you can have emojis, you can have all kinds of things like that that work cross-platform because Google has been pushing for this new standard for so long. So it's really exciting that moving between phones is getting a little bit more easier. Time for me to take a deeper dive into all these new products. Okay let's get some more details because up to now it's been pretty much surface level so we haven't learned that much and I haven't been able to decide if I really want to get this new phone or not. So hopefully they'll give a lot more answers now. Reality you can really create so much with just your phone and it looks just as good if not sometimes better. This is really exciting they're talking about that anybody can become a creator so I'm really excited to see if this is actually going to translate into some better video features inside of the phone. Okay so for this photo when I'm looking at it my personal preference would be I want to fix the lighting and I'm going to fix the framing. Okay so this is actually really cool you can now just ask your phone in plain English how to fix it. I don't think it's something I would personally use on my phone but I understand for so many people they know what they want to get out of a photo but they don't actually know how to fix it using the slides and everything instead of the apps. So being able to just write a few words and get the phone to do it for you is an amazing feature for so many people. Created a bunch of different steps for us to get that perfect photo so go ahead Alex. So it says zoom in to his chest and go up. Well this is actually a really cool one it's actually something I tried building in the past probably 10 years ago something like that where I created an app that would teach people how to take different photos based on different scenarios but now with AI it actually breaks down different steps and tells you exactly how to get a better shot of somebody. Again this is a feature I can see so many people enjoying a lot because sometimes you know how you want to take a picture but now they give you different options you choose one of them and then it's going to tell you step by step how to get there and get the perfect shot. What if you do know some stuff about photography? Okay now they're talking to me they're talking to people that know about photography. And the thing that we've really worked on this year with our camera is to make sure all the colors are true to life. It's really nice they just mentioned that they actually worked on making the colors look better in the photos so instead of having this pixel look to the photos they're trying to be more natural and really represent what the eye would see. Based on the example they gave right here there's a lot more contrast in the photos the colors look a little bit more natural. So overall I'm really excited to see how photos are going to turn out with this phone because that's one thing that I like a little bit less these days is sometimes the photos look a little bit too processed so if they can have more natural colors this would be really nice. So two things one Pixel 10 Pro is the only device that supports up to 50 megapixels of resolution in portrait mode. Oh this is actually really cool I didn't know that they would support 50 megapixel inside of portrait mode. As you've seen there's so much to love about the upgraded Pixel camera including its amazing video capability which still holds its place as the best video on a smartphone for the second year in a row by the way. They just said that the Pixel phones maintain the best video for the last two years I'm not 100% about that but I really really want to test it out and see if it's as good as they're saying. I also noticed there's a redesigned camera app they haven't talked about it up to now but it looks a lot simpler I hope they didn't make the more advanced features hard to find but if they just made the camera app a little bit simpler to use I'm not against that. Call is translated by Google AI in each speaker's voice audio is not saved Hi Karen can you hear me does this work? Okay this is also another pretty cool feature not sure you use it that much but the live translate of the voice instead of voice calls but they're also doing it in a way where it reproduces your voice it's a bit more natural and less of a robotic voice. Even if you forget to start a workout your watch will automatically send you a recap so you never miss out on your steps. Okay this is another pretty cool feature and they automatically detect all kinds of activities so if you forget to track them it's just not going to show up as a correct activity this is definitely something that I would love if Garmin could do on my watch but I'm happy to see that Google is leading the way a little bit here and adding features that other people don't necessarily have yet. And for the first time ever on a smartwatch you can use on-device satellite communications to contact emergency services even when you're off the grid. Okay this also is pretty cool they just added satellite communication if something goes wrong as somebody that uses a Garmin inReach to be able to communicate when I'm in heights and things like that. I'm very too curious to see how it's going to work based on previous tests of these types of devices that have flown it wasn't always as good so I'm really curious to see if it's going to work well on such a watch or not. Starting in October in the US Fitbit premium users will be able to preview the coach. This is actually another thing that's pretty interesting they just announced and it's a if the health coach based on AI it's definitely something that's interesting because sometimes following a rigid plan is not the best thing for your health and there's so many variables injuries that happen. I'm really curious to see how it's going to be they didn't say much about it so no idea if it's going to be good or not another thing Garmin could definitely improve on their watch. Okay so they just ended the event with the Jonas Brothers video it looked pretty cool one thing I noticed is that the camera moves were so smooth if they haven't used a gimbal to do those it's actually really impressive how good it looked. Okay so now let's do a quick debrief about this event and talk about if I'm actually going to get this device in the end. I will say it was not a typical Google event there was a lot of celebrities inside of there so it's Jimmy Kimmel, Ice Cooper, Lando Norris and a bunch of other people and it didn't really go into too much detail about the different phones and about the different features that it would have so on that side I was a little bit disappointed because I would have liked to have a little bit more information about what was new inside of the devices to make my choice. But one thing I'm going to say is actually that they didn't talk that much about AI I was expecting this to be all about Gemini and how Gemini is making the phone better but overall they didn't mention it that much yes all of the features they were announcing had some sort of AI inside of it but they weren't focusing on that fact too much they were really talking about how all of these features are going to make the phone better and add new useful features so I really enjoyed that from this event. Now let's open the computer and go on the website to compare to my Google Pixel 6 Pro and see how it improved and if I should buy it in the end. Okay so now I have the Pixel 6 Pro, the Pixel 10 and the Pixel 10 Pro XL to be able to compare all of them and see what has been improved. So first of all if we look I'm probably going to get the Pixel 10 Pro because the size of the screen is actually very similar to the one from the Pixel 6 Pro that I already have so I enjoyed that. They say that it's 24 hour plus battery life I do hope this is going to be okay and they say we're up to 100 hours of battery life with extreme battery saver so does seem to be improved compared to the 48 hours from before. I'm a little disappointed to see that actually the battery is not that much bigger at 2,500 mAh but still pretty big battery and if they improve the chip efficiency it should actually be a lot better. What is actually really nice to see here is that it's a full Qi 2 certified charger up to 25 watts the old one was only 15 watt while it's charging so I'm really happy to see this here that they're getting full support for the Qi 2 then they have better glass all of this is not that different. The RAM was simply an upgrade from 12 to 16 not as much as what they alluded but yes 16 gigabyte is actually pretty much standard on laptops these days. If we scroll through the camera there's actually a few things they haven't mentioned here which is interesting so first of all the main camera seems to be pretty much the same thing for that with a slightly lower aperture for the main camera which is nice to see feel the view is still exactly the same in both cases but now we have a 48 megapixel or ultra wide camera instead of having the 12 megapixel on my phone so this should actually be a nice upgrade. I don't think this is new to this device but for me that's going to be a nice upgrade. It's also slightly wider field of view so that's also nice to see but also a nice update is that the telephoto now has the f/2.8 aperture again it might have been the case before but it's nice to see it right here. Now if we look at the video the video is also much upgraded we don't have the stats for the Pixel 6 Pro but 4k is up to 60 frames per second I hope there's not the limitations like they had in the past where sometimes you would go to 60 frames per second and then a bunch of the options would be disabled but considering they have up to 8k resolution I'm sure that should be fine. Now the front camera actually has a huge upgrade didn't talk about it at all I don't know if that's new on the Pixel 10 but definitely a huge upgrade it's 42 megapixels compared to the old one same aperture slightly wider field of view so this is actually really nice to see that it actually upgraded some parts of the camera. I'm really excited to see the pro control compared to my phone I want to be able to have more control inside my camera app without having to use a separate one also being able to use the 50 megapixel mode is going to be really nice for me. What is really interesting here is the edit with ask photos you can just ask something about the photo and it's going to edit it for you so I'm really excited to test this out and see if it works as well. I'm also excited to see that they have 10-bit HDR videos you can get more dynamic range inside my video and in a good format so this can make better looking videos in the end so that's also very nice to see and I see actually something right here they have an astrophotography time-lapse mode does that mean that you're finally have astrophotography time lapses unclear what this is again I'll have to test it out and see with what we get outside of it so they pretty much fixed everything I was asking for so first of all they have QiTo wireless charging which was very important for me the battery life should be better they mentioned that they improved it quite a lot so I hope that's actually true then there's doesn't seem to be really new cameras except the front-facing camera but overall they did do improvements on the processing of the images and also added this new super zoom feature I don't love AI zoom like they use for super zoom but it is a nice feature to have if you have to zoom a little bit more and they keep talking about how video is better so I actually can't believe them that the video is better so now we only have one thing left because I'm pretty convinced that this is the phone I need to upgrade to so now let's go buy it okay so there's now only one step left and it's purchasing this phone they did convince me they pretty much fixed everything so now if we have a look here I'm going on the website we're going to select the Pixel Pro we're going to go on a pre-order page here I want the Excel version because I do like having a little bit bigger screen I like smaller phones in general but sometimes just over productivity and having more real estate when I'm taking photos and videos it's nice to having a bigger screen the color I want is this Moonstone I think it looks really good I don't really like the green version or the porcelain or obsidian obsidian could be nice it's a pure black but I think this Moonstone looks pretty good I really set it between 256 and 512 gigs I don't really need 512 gigs because most of the time 256 is good enough for me but if I want to keep it for another like 5-20 years I want to make sure I have the best options possible to keep it for as long as possible then if we look here at the true choice for carriers I actually think for most people getting the $800 off the phone if you go with Google Fi would be a really good option but I don't want to do that so I'm just going to choose to use my own carrier I do not want to trade my phone in because I want to be able to use my Google Pixel 6 Pro to make some videos and compare the two phones and finally I do always get the Pixel Care here just because I tend to drop my phone all the time I've broken phones in the past so just having the peace of mind of not having to think about it too much is nice I will take here the coverage and now I don't really need the 12-month trial of this so don't really care about this AI stuff so it does come out pretty expensive at a $1,600 for all of this but I actually have some store credits so I'm going to have $100 off and they also have an offer right now where if you order the Pixel 6 Pro in pre-orders you actually can get $200 off so I'll come back later and then order some more accessories and things like that for free afterwards so in total I'm gonna have about $300 off this phone so it's expensive yet it's not that bad for a flagship phone all phones cost so much anyways these days so here you have it I'm finally getting a new Pixel phone the Pixel 10 Pro this is so exciting in about a week I'll be getting the Google 10 Pro XL I'm really excited to make a bunch of videos about it including some in-depth reviews I really did like my Google 6 Pro but there's just a bunch of issues that happened recently that made me want to upgrade to a new phone and Google seemed to have had everything I wanted instead of the new one so there's no reason for me to wait anymore if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like button below and definitely subscribe for more videos on the Google 10 Pro XL whenever I receive it see you in the next one
What is this video about?
After four years with my Pixel 6 Pro, I've been dealing with real issues: battery that dies mid-day, unexpected shutdowns in cold weather, and video processing that feels over-done. So when Google announced the Pixel 10 Pro XL, I decided to watch the launch event to see if this phone finally addresses everything I've been wanting.
The event was more celebrity-focused than typical—Jimmy Kimmel, Ice Cube, Lando Norris—which meant less technical depth than I'd hoped for. But what actually impressed me was how they didn't oversell the AI angle. Instead, they showed practical features that genuinely make the phone better. The whole tone felt less "look at our AI" and more "here's what you can actually do."
What really caught my attention: the Pixel 10 Pro finally supports Qi 2 wireless charging with magnets, which means no more misaligned charging frustrations. The battery jumped from 48 to 100 hours with extreme battery saver, and they claim 24+ hours in regular use. The 16GB RAM is a solid upgrade from 12GB. But the camera improvements are what sold me—the ultra-wide jumped to 48 megapixels, the telephoto has f/2.8 aperture, and the front camera is now 42MP. They also mentioned more natural color processing, which addresses one of my main gripes with the 6 Pro's look.
I spent time comparing specs on the website, and honestly, Google delivered on what I was asking for. The new 10-bit HDR video support, better video processing overall, and this new astrophotography time-lapse mode (still figuring out exactly what that means) all suggest real camera improvements. The photo editing with "ask photos"—where you just describe what you want fixed—seems like a feature I might actually use.
So yes, I ordered the Pixel 10 Pro XL in Moonstone with 512GB storage. With some store credits and pre-order discounts, I brought the price down from $1,600 to around $1,300. The decision came down to this: my current phone has real limitations that affect how I work as a photographer and filmmaker, and Google actually fixed them rather than just adding flashy features I don't need.