The Pixel 9 has broken a pretty bad streak for Google. There are a lot of reasons why Google’s Pixel phones are a solid choice for your next smartphone. While the low pricing may no longer be a factor, you still get great camera performance, smartly-designed phones, exclusive AI features and a place at the front of the line for future Android updates.
What you normally wouldn’t buy a Pixel phone for is strong battery life. Over the years Google phones have been notorious for lagging behind the competition, especially over the past few years when Qualcomm and Apple started prioritizing power efficiency in their chipsets. Even the longest-lasting Pixel phone to date offered lackluster endurance — and that’s if you’re being generous.
But things appear to have changed with the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL. It seems as though Google may have finally broken the curse of the shoddy Pixel battery life.
Last year’s Pixel 8 didn’t have particularly impressive battery life, scoring 9 hours and 48 minutes during the Tom's Guide battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over 5G at 150 nits of screen brightness. Compared to phones on our best phone battery life page, that was positively dreadful. But believe it or not this was considered a good score for a Pixel, because the previous 2 generations were significantly lower. We saw 7:21 for the Pixel 7 and 8:13 for the Pixel 6.
The Pro models didn’t fare much better either, with the Pixel 6 Pro lasting 7:49, the Pixel 7 Pro lasting 9:21 and the 8 Pro scoring 8:42 minutes. For all the Pixel series’ successes, the battery life was pretty disastrous.
Thankfully, Google seems to have figured out a secret formula to make the Pixel 9’s battery life not blow up in its face faster than a stick of dynamite in a Road Runner cartoon. The Pixel 9 lasted 13 hours and 18 minutes during testing, which is only 10 minutes behind what the Samsung Galaxy S24 managed shortly after launch.
The Pixel 9 will not be landing a place on our best phone battery life list, nor will the Pixel 9 Pro or Pixel 9 Pro XL. But considering the lowest placed phone on that list, the Motorola Razr Plus (2024) has a battery life of 14 hours and 13 minutes — Google isn’t far off getting there.
As someone who uses the Pixel 6 Pro as their day-to-day phone, who had been planning to upgrade to the Pixel 9 Pro, I was rather apprehensive about what the phone’s battery life would be like. Almost 3 years into its life and the Pixel 6 Pro’s battery is not doing well at all, and it’s rare that the phone will last an entire day without needing to be recharged at some point.
Bottom line
I have to admit, I’m very relieved that the Pixel 9 came out of the Tom’s Guide labs with good battery life — though I didn’t expect it to be able to last quite as long as it does. Not that I’m complaining, since battery life has been my biggest gripe with Google’s phone for several years now.
It’s not the only problem Pixel phones have had, but in those cases the benefits of having a Google phone outweighs the drawbacks. Frankly, it doesn’t matter much to me if my phone is a performance powerhouse, because I don’t actually use my phone that way. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 would be absolutely wasted on me, though that isn’t the case for everyone — and some people are definitely bothered by Google falling behind because of alleged throttled Tensor G4 performance.
Regardless of how you feel about Google’s other Pixel pitfalls, we can all agree that this is a big step in the right direction. Provided Google can keep up that momentum and avoid any major drops in battery life over the next few years, it means the company can focus more attention on the other issues and help make the Pixel series the best it can be.
