The company says it will support the series with seven years of updates

Google Pixel 8 Pro: Getting Seven Years of OS Upgrades and Security Support Compared to Apple’s iOS 7-yr OS Support

Photo editing features aside, it all feels like a hint of where Google wants to take the Pixel in the next few years as its generative AI technology matures — close, but not there yet. The Pixel 8 Pro won’t have some of the most popular photo editing features, so we’ll have to keep waiting. Pre-order the Google Pixel 8 Pro for $999 with 128GB of storage today, and it will be available later in the year.

But as Google officially announces the phone this morning, there is one major new feature that still rings as a surprise: it’s getting seven years of OS upgrades. The three years of OS upgrade and five years of security support that it promised for its previous flagships was not a huge improvement, compared to the lifespan of the Apple iPhone. If there’s one thing that makes a higher price a little easier to swallow, it’s the promise that you’ll be able to get many more years of use out of your device. It is expected that Google will make good on it.

The update for the phones should happen at a later time depending on when the update gets released. We will get into its somewhat flaky history of ongoing support for other services and initiatives when we get to seven years from now.

Thanks to using its own processor in thePixel 8 series, that gives it control over the hardware that comes into the phone compared to most of its competitors, giving it the freedom to offer this longer support period. It’s not easy to keep supporting a phone after the chip manufacturer ends support for the processor used, and that’s what Fairphone has talked about. In Google’s case with Tensor, the power is in its own hands.

Apple, another manufacturer that also produces its own processors for its phones, offers similarly lengthy support periods. Although the company doesn’t promote explicit promises about the number of years it supports its devices for, it released five major iOS version updates for the 2017 iPhone X before ending support with iOS 17 this year. Apple will sometimes release security patches for older devices.

The smaller 6.1-inch screen of the Pixel 8 is a tad larger that the larger 6.7-inch screen of the same device. The Pro model has a glossy glass back compared to the soft touch matt camera bar on thePixel 8. Both of the new models have frames crafted out of 100 percent recycled aluminum.

Both models get a screen upgrade this year, but only the 8 Pro comes with an LTPO display (Google has decided to brand this “Super Actua”) with variable refresh rates from 1Hz to 120Hz. It’s still 6.7 inches on the diagonal, but it finally ditches the curved edges for a fully flat screen. It also comes with a higher claimed peak brightness of 2,400 nits, which is — to use the technical term — hella bright. That will only kick in under very bright conditions in direct sunlight, but the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max only jump up to 2,000 nits in high brightness mode. Assuming the Pixel 8 Pro can actually keep up that level of brightness without overheating and ramping it back down, that’s impressive.

Some of the most significant camera features aren’t related to the hardware but are seen in the Google Photos app The Magic Eraser feature that was announced back at Google I/O will be available after launch for the Pixel 8 and lets you completely change an image by moving subjects around and changing backgrounds. The new Best Take feature will combine images taken from a series in order to make sure that everyone is smiling at the same time.

There is a larger main camera sensor with a slightly brighter f/ 1.7 lens attached. The Pro’s ultrawide and 5x long-lens modules have 48-, 40-, and 28-Megaflops cameras, respectively, and the ultrawide camera with higher-resolution sensor is now capable of focusing as close as 2 cm. The front facing camera has an upgrade, too. And the Pro phone gets some pro camera controls: you’ll be able to control focus, shutter speed, which lens is being used, and access 50-megapixel JPEG or RAW shooting right from the native camera app.

Looking Back at Google Photos — I. New Software Features and a New Battery Charge for the Pixel 8 Pro / Pixel 8 Plus Pixel 8

Naturally, there are lots of new software features — all housed in Google Photos. When you take a series of photos of a group of people, you’ll have the option afterward to choose the best face for your subjects and save it all in one final frame. Audio Magic Eraser is a tool that will help you to remove distracting sounds from videos.

The Magic Editor, a tool that was available at the I event, will be coming soon, along with a couple more features. Night Sight Video can be enabled by Video Boost, which takes the processing off-device and into the cloud. And Zoom Enhance — only available to the Pixel 8 Pro, interestingly — can help you zoom in on images and recreate fine detail after capture.

The assistant gets some updates though it is not a full-on Bard. According to the search giant, it’ll be able to understand speech better and recognize pauses more effectively. You can also translate web pages to read them aloud. The keyboard has an option to clean up errors with a single touch.

The phone’s design has been slightly altered to differentiate it from the other devices and that is visible in the device’s corners. The design is still immediately recognizable as a Pixel phone, with a metal frame and camera bar across the back. The phone is also ever so slightly smaller, with a 6.2-inch display instead of last year’s 6.3-inch screen. Will you notice that difference in use? At least it didn’t get bigger, I think.

That new display now refreshes at 120Hz, up from the Pixel 7’s 90Hz, but it is not LTPO and can only vary between 60 and 120Hz for battery life savings. The screen on the Pixel 8 Pro can run from 1hertz to 120hertz, but you have to pay for it. The same price as thePixel 8 is the same as the iPhone 15, which has a 60Hz screen.

The Pixel 8 will have a peak brightness of 2000 nits, and it supports always-on display features. The battery for the Pixel 8 was more than 5 percent larger than the previous one. That battery is not huge but also not small — Google claims “beyond 24 hour battery life,” but I would read that with a skeptical eye. If you want to charge the Pixel 8 up to 50 percent in 30 minutes or slower, you can use a wireless charging mat, but we don’t recommend it.

The support for secure face verification was one of the most surprising additions to the Pixel 8. If you’ve been following Pixel hardware over the years, you’ll remember that the Pixel 4 was the only one to ever support facial recognition as a secure biometric authentication method, utilizing Google’s radar technology. The Pixel 8 series doesn’t have the Soli chip that powered that function in the older handset, but these new phones have the same capabilities. It is possible to use your face to securely access any banking or payment apps that need a PIN or fingerprints. If you don’t like face recognition, both phones still have fingerprint sensors.

Google has also redesigned the Pixel camera app to separate video and shooting modes. Unfortunately for the Pixel 8, the new app doesn’t have the extended manual controls found on the Pixel 8 Pro.