Google Pixel 10 Pro XL review: Everything right, but fails to delight

In a time when flagship smartphones seem to be increasingly incremental with each passing year, Google's latest flagship goes well beyond being a minimum viable upgrade. More than just an updated processor, the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL comes with a reworked speaker system, improved image stabilisation, support for faster wireless charging, and a handful of additional AI-powered apps and features. It's a recipe that should work.

At the same time, though, what's here doesn't feel like much of a grand finale or a worthy celebration for a decade of Pixel phones as it does a victim of diminishing returns.  All too often, the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL feels like more of the same. It reprises a successful formula, but rarely adds up to more than the sum of its parts. 

At a glance, the Pixel 10 Pro XL doesn't look like much more than a light revision on last year's Pixel 9 Pro XL. Feel free to judge this particular smartphone by its cover, as though, for the most part, that's exactly what it is. 

To kick things off, you've got a 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 3300 nits. More than just leaving a strong first impression, this glitzy hardware is built to last. The screen comes covered in Gorilla Glass Victus 2 and complemented by a set of shiny and smooth aluminium edges. These give the device a premium feel that lines right up with the price tag in the way you'd expect.

Like its siblings, the Pixel 10 Pro XL also comes with an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, plus 7 years of operating system upgrades and security updates. All the other nice-to-haves are accounted for here, from an in-display fingerprint sensor to more obscure inclusions like the temperature sensor introduced by the Pixel 8 Pro.

There aren't any major additions to the formula, though there are a few key improvements. Some of these are a little easier to feel than they are to see, though. For instance, the upgraded stereo speakers sound a little louder and a little clearer than the ones found on last year's Pixel 9 Pro XL.

It's a similar story when it comes to the support for Qi 2 wireless charging. If you've been keeping score, you probably already know that the Pixel 10 Pro XL is the first major Android device to adopt the standard since it was introduced back in 2023. For everyone else, the main thing to know here is that Google's latest flagship offers faster wireless charging of up to 25W and is compatible with both Apple's MagSafe accessories and Google's own Pixelsnap peripherals. For comparison, the other Pixel devices cap out at 15W wireless charging.

Aside from that added functionality, the back of the Pixel 10 Pro XL is a dead ringer for its predecessor. There's a 50MP wide lens, a 48MP telephoto lens and a 48MP ultrawide lens. Although that setup is identical to the one found on last year's Pixel 9 Pro XL, the new device does offer some improvements like better image stabilisation and new features like Pro Res Zoom and Camera Coach.

The former comes courtesy of the new lens on the back of the device. Meanwhile, the latter additions use generative AI to offer something vaguely resembling 100x optical zoom and real-time advice for budding photographers, respectively.

As is often the case for any AI-powered tech nowadays, the execution here can sometimes feel out of alignment with the intentions behind the feature. For instance, Camera Coach is a great idea on paper, but the reality that it isn't as conversational as something like Gemini Live makes it feel a lot less engaging than I'd hoped it would be. The potential utility of this feature does feel a lot more tangible than most other AI-powered phone features, which is something, but the final result doesn't always do that much more. 

It's a similar story when it comes to Pro Res Zoom. If you felt like Best Take introduced some existential questions about how much you can trust photos taken using the Pixel, you're going to want to sit down for this one. This feature essentially uses generative AI to fill in the details that the camera sensor can't pick up. While the results it delivers can be surprisingly impressive at a glance, you usually don't have to look very hard to spot the seams.

For better and worse, the interior of the Pixel 10 Pro XL is as much of a milestone as the exterior. On the inside, the device is powered by Google's fifth-generation Tensor silicon, a generous 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of on-board storage.

According to Google, the Tensor G5 offers 34% faster performance over the Tensor G4. In practice, I can't say that the difference was all that easy to feel. Don't get me wrong, the Pixel 10 Pro XL felt snappy in the way that most flagships do nowadays, but I can't say I was blown away by the difference in everyday performance here - even as someone who has been using the Pixel 9 Pro XL as my daily driver for the better part of the last year.

Still, the Pixel 10 Pro XL didn't break a sweat when it came to multitasking, nor did it have any issues with more graphically-intensive games like League of Legends: Wild Rift, Diablo Immortal and Zenless Zone Zero. It did encounter some issues with Destiny: Rising, but at this stag,e I suspect that might be more to do with the game itself than the Tensor G5.

Of course, a big part of the draw for the Pixel 10 Pro XL, as much as any other Pixel phone, is the opportunity to make use of Google's various AI-powered apps and features well before they trickle down to the wider Android ecosystem.

The most ambitious addition to the package here is the new Magic Cue feature. The idea behind this inclusion is that you'll get AI-generated suggestions that nudge or remind about relevant information built into Gboard. For example, if you get a text from a friend asking about an event that's recorded in your calendar, Magic Cue might surface that information within the reply window and save you the trouble of swiping between apps.

Unfortunately, my experiences with this feature so far have been scattershot to say the least. If I didn't know another reviewer who has encountered Magic Cue in action, I'd almost assume that the feature wasn't live yet. The few suggestions it offered were usually either inaccurate or comically obvious.

Given how rare its appearance was, I struggle with the idea that I've even seen enough of the feature in action to render a proper verdict on it. Honestly, I wish Google (and other Android manufacturers) gave me a bit more control over how much I want to see AI features like Magic Cue. It would be much easier to make up my mind about how much value these things do or don't add if I could crank up the frequency with which I ran into them as desired. 

As for battery life, the Pixel 10 Pro XL boasts a slightly larger battery than the one found in its 2024 counterpart. In practice, I found myself regularly getting about a full two days off a single charge with as much as eight or even nine hours of screentime, though your mileage may vary depending on your own usage patterns.

Burned down via streaming video from YouTube over Wi-Fi, the device took 19 hours minutes to go from a full charge to zero. That's a decent result, but short of where some of the competition tends to sit. For instance, the Galaxy S25 Edge lasted 25 hours and 2 minutes in the same conditions.