So the Pixel 7 Pro has been living in my pocket for three days now and I have Thoughts, some of which are actually about the phone and not just me complaining about my carrier's SIM transfer line (twenty-two minutes on hold Tuesday, for the record, with hold music that looped so aggressively I could hum it in my sleep now).
Google put these out on October 13th: Pixel 7 at $599, Pixel 7 Pro starting at $899, plus the Pixel Watch launched the same day at $349 for Wi-Fi and $399 if you want LTE. I'd been on an iPhone 12 mini for two years and honestly loved the size, hated the battery, and finally just gave in. Tensor G2 is the chip inside both new phones this time, same as last year's naming trick where "new chip" mostly means "slightly better version of what we already had," and I don't think anyone at Google would argue otherwise if you asked them directly.
First impression: this thing is heavier than I expected holding it in the store versus holding it now, at my kitchen table, at 11pm, still poking at settings menus instead of sleeping like a reasonable adult. The camera bar across the back is either the most confident design choice Google's made in years or the thing I'm going to complain about every single time I set the phone face-up on a table and it rocks back and forth. Currently leaning toward the second one. It rocks. Every time. I've started just flipping it face down out of spite.
The stuff that's actually good, though — Magic Eraser is legitimately fun in a way I didn't expect a photo editing tool to be. I took a picture of my neighbor's dog at the park on Thursday and there was a guy in a neon vest in the background doing something with a leaf blower, and I just circled him and he vanished. No weird smudge, no obvious patch job. That's the kind of feature that sounds like marketing copy until you actually use it and go "oh, huh, okay."
Face unlock is back after being missing since the Pixel 4, which is nice, except it only unlocks the phone and doesn't authenticate payments or apps yet, so it's sort of a half feature for now. The fingerprint reader under the screen is faster than I remember it being on the Pixel 6 I borrowed from a friend last year, though "faster than mediocre" isn't exactly a triumphant bar to clear.
I haven't touched the Pixel Watch yet and I'm not sure I will — the battery life reports floating around already sound rough, something like a day, maybe a day and a half if you're gentle with it, and I've been spoiled by a Garmin that goes two weeks between charges. Smartwatches keep almost winning me over and then I remember I don't actually want to charge a watch every night like it's a phone. That's a me problem, not necessarily a Google problem, but it's still a problem.
One thing nobody warns you about switching from iPhone to Pixel after this long: the muscle memory takes longer to unlearn than you'd think. I keep swiping up from the bottom left corner for nothing, keep reaching for a home button that isn't there and hasn't been there on either platform for years now, apparently my thumbs just didn't get the memo. Text message colors are different, obviously, RCS versus iMessage is its own whole argument I'm not getting into tonight, but my group chat with my brother and his wife has already devolved into three separate people asking why my texts look different, which, fair, they do.
Battery's held up fine so far, better than the mini ever did, though three days isn't really enough to say anything definitive about that. Ask me in three weeks. I'll probably still be annoyed about the camera bump rocking on the table, because some complaints just don't go away, they just become part of how you use a thing. My friend Dev texted me today asking if it was worth the switch and I told him ask me again once I've dropped it at least once, because that always tells you more about a phone than the spec sheet does.