Hey,
It’s Pete Matheson with a new issue of Experiments in Progress.
New Pixel's out. Should you upgrade?
So I sat down with this year's launch and asked the only thing that matters: is there anything here that would actually make you switch?
The New Pixel: What's Actually Worth Caring About
Here's my honest breakdown of what stood out, what didn't, and whether any of it should move you.
💡 Pixel Glow (aka HiLight): the light on the back
It's a little glowing light strip on the back of the phone.
It lights up when you're talking to Gemini. And if you've assigned a colour to one of your contacts, it'll glow that colour when they ring so you can tell who's calling without even flipping the phone over.
Source: 9to5Google
🎙️ Rambler: the feature I'm genuinely excited about
Rambler is a new Android 17 feature that lets you just… talk.
You ramble into your phone — "I need to do a food shop, get bananas, apples, cherries… actually forget the bananas" — and it writes out a clean, formatted note. No bananas. It understood the correction mid-sentence.
Here's why it matters:
It works across messages, emails, WhatsApps — anywhere you type
It strips out the "ums", the "ahs", and the stuff you change your mind on
It formats and styles everything for you automatically
If you've used Whisperflow, this will feel very familiar.
One catch: this is an Android 17 feature, not a Pixel-exclusive one. I'd expect it to roll out to Samsung's One UI and other Android phones before long. So it's not really a reason to buy a Pixel specifically but it's a brilliant reason to be on Android.
Source: Android Police
📱 The hardware: a minor spec bump
The hardware barely moved this year.
Here's the honest state of it:
The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is roughly a millimetre thinner. That's about it on the design front.
Brighter displays — genuinely nice outdoors, up to 3,600 nits on the Pro models.
Slightly better battery life (though the Fold's actual capacity dipped a touch — efficiency's doing the heavy lifting).
A new Tensor G6 chip. It's on a fancier 2nm process and ever so slightly faster… but let's be honest, Pixels have never been about raw power.
A price increase — around $100 more across the range. Because everything's going up, as it does.
And you now get 6 months of Google AI Pro thrown in, rather than the full year you used to get.
⌚ Watches, earbuds, and a fun little AI trick
The rest of the ecosystem got some love:
Pixel Watch 5 looks great. If you're already in the Pixel Watch world, it's a solid iteration.
New Pixel Buds colours are coming too.
And a genuinely fun one: you can now AI vibe-code your own watch face. Say "make me a watch face with fluffy clouds and pink elephants" and it'll build it. Or, more usefully — "give me a face packed with complications: steps, VO2 max, heart rate" — and let it do the work.
Worth noting for anyone waiting on the rest of the lineup:
No new Pixel Tablet. Not a word.
No Pixelbook / Googlebook news either.
It's phones and watches this year.
Are you upgrading to the Pixel 11?
📱 Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with a friend who’s as obsessed with tech as you are:
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