Forget Pro Max iPhones and Ultra Samsungs, the best phone I've used in years is the humble Pixel 9
A few weeks ago, I returned to my Google Pixel 9 to test Gemini's next-gen AI features. It was hard letting go of the OnePlus 13, arguably one of the most rewarding phones out there. Plus, given the 'Pixel history,' I had prepared myself for a bumpy ride, just like the Pixel 8, and the Pixel 7 before it.
To my surprise, the Pixel 9 fared a lot better. It feels snappier on Android 16, takes sharp pictures, and lasts all day easily. The only thing pulling it down? The sporadic bad apps and updates. It's not enough to consider a replacement, but it's certainly frustrating in bits and pieces.
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Overall, I think this is the most refined Pixel that Google has made to date. And with the regular discounts that often shave hundreds of dollars from its official asking price, there is little reason to look elsewhere. But ultimately, it's what you get from the phone that really made me question uber-expensive devices like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra or iPhone 16 Pro Max, which cost over 50% as much.
Feels great, fixed flaws
If I were to put a cumulative number on my usage spell for the Pixel 9, it falls close to six months. I've never put a case on the phone, and the only protection I applied on it was a thin screen guard. Yes, despite Corning's claims, the Gorilla Glass Victus 2 shield can't survive a pocket loaded with keys, coins, thumb drives, and candies. The shiny glass rear shell is no different.
On the other hand, the metallic frame with a satin finish has held up pretty well. There are no scuff marks on it, and I haven't noticed any other forms of hardware hiccups so far. This phone feels every bit as premium as your average Samsung Galaxy or iPhone, and you really need to feel it in your hands to get a grasp of the fantastic build.
Google got the ergonomics right on this one, even though it's not the lightest phone out there. It is, however, instantly recognizable and doesn't suffer from the identity crisis that you will find on Samsung and Apple devices that have looked virtually identical for the past few generations.
I've had my friends and co-working buddies repeatedly telling me that the Pixel 9 feels like the premium device Google always intended to make. The only problem? It runs hot, and in unpredictable spots. It handled games well, but got warm while using Maps for navigation.
The banking app kept crashing and working up the phone's thermal hardware, while long edits in Adobe Express and the Instagram Edits app sailed smoothly. A quick look at the Google Community forum suggests that it's due to poor app patches and optimization from developers, but it's weird to notice these stutters.
One of my biggest issues with the Pixel 9 was the slow image processing in the camera app last year. I can confirm that the woe is gone. I've extensively tested hi-res and portrait capture modes, and I could see the final image in less than a second.
There's no lag in switching from the viewfinder to the image preview, and even with images that required manual frame adjustment, there was no unwanted delay at any stage.
Aside from those sporadic jitters, everything worked flawlessly atop the stable build of Android 16. My secondary driver for personal communication is an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is expectedly fluid, but doesn't have the same snappy feel as the Pixel 9. Oh, and I absolutely love the new predictive back gesture introduced in Android 16.
Leaving a mark, where it matters
Let's address the elephant in the room. The Tensor G4 processor. For an average smartphone user who is not too deep into demanding games or obsessed with maxing out in-game graphics settings, the Pixel 9 will serve you just fine. The hiccups with a slow camera capture have been fixed, and I didn't feel the need to boot in safe mode to find bad apps.
The day-to-day activities, in a nutshell, fare smoothly. The numbers defy logic, however. Talking about benchmark comparisons, well, the Tensor G4 scores nearly half as much as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite in phones like the Galaxy S25, and even lower than Apple's A18 Pro inside the iPhone 16 series.
It's not even a substantial upgrade over the Pixel 8's Tensor G3 processor. So, is the Pixel 9 a laggard? Yes. Is the real-life experience reflective of those tests? No. Making calls, texting all day, watching social videos, letting off some steam in Diablo: Immortal, snapping pictures, and editing short clips for Instagram. All these activities are handled just fine.
At this point, we also need to change the definition of 'processing power.' A healthy bunch of experiences on the Pixel 9 are now powered by AI. And more specifically, the on-device workflows running the Gemini Nano model, thanks to the on-board AI accelerator chip referred to as a TPU.
On-device AI processing now lends a hand with video rendering, translation, scam detection in calls and messages, accessibility features like talkback, Smart Reply in Gboard keyboard, audio summarization, and even media editing. Remember Magic Editor and Pixel Screenshots? Yeah, all that, and more.
How does it stand out?
You see, AI is now a transformative part of the Android experience, and the Pixels get the first (often exclusive) dibs on it. And it's not just the vanilla experience and quick access to OS upgrades that matter here, but also those exclusive Pixel Feature Drop updates that add unique features to Google's phones.
Ever since the Pixel 9 series was released, it has received features like audio noise eraser for videos, underwater photography mode, theft detection lock, private space, AI-powered call screening, live call transcripts, expressive captions, Identity Check, and more.
Android 16 — riding atop the Pixel 9 series — is the smartest mobile OS out there, at least when it comes to protecting users from scams and digital fraud. With Gemini deeply integrated everywhere and new capabilities like Project Astra changing how we interact with a phone, what you get is a one-of-a-kind experience.
Of course, all that AI chatter doesn't mean the Pixel 9 gets the basics wrong. The battery life is reliable and I never had to pull my power bank mid-way through the day. It's not the fastest charging phone out there, but the competition from Samsung or Apple isn't doing anything dramatically better despite the high asking price.
I haven't run into any glaring call or network reception issues yet, so there's that assurance. The camera experience continues its hot streak. And thanks to Android 16's optimizations, there are more granular controls to compose the frame. Portraits turn out fantastic, and night mode shots continue to wow on Google's entry-point flagship phone.
The overarching theme with the Pixel 9 is that it has matured a lot, especially after the Android 16 update. And at its current asking price of $799, it doesn't miss a beat where you can outright reject it. On the contrary, it gives pricier Androids and iPhones a run for their money. If it's reliability you seek from your phone, the Pixel 9 has truly evolved in that parameter.
And if you see a deal on this one, grab it to sweeten the experience.
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And then, coincidentally, I know Philippe Labaune, just from having been to the gallery, we have mutual friends and things, and he made the offer to show work from not only the book, [but] kind of a career retrospective. It's ballooned into something really nice. Are you somebody who thinks about the arc of their career and how it fits together, or are you mostly future-oriented? I'd say a combination of both, because — I have said this elsewhere, but I think at a certain point, an artist needs to become their own curator. Jack Kirby famously said, 'All that matters is the 10% of your best work. The rest of it gets you to the 10%.' But then in my case, I do a lot of variant covers. I've worked on many things outside of comics that are kind of hard to acquire, whether it's screen prints or fashion industry stuff. And I thought it'd be really cool if we do something that's a chronological look at the life of an artist — [something that] focuses mainly on comics, [with] a lot of stuff that people have either never seen or it's hard to find. It's the first of a number of chess moves that I've been setting up for a long time. And the gallery is — I would call it a second chess move. I have another announcement later in the summer for a new project. Making graphic novels is not like making comics. You're basically writing a novel, it can take years, and you work with a contract. No one can see the work, so it can be very frustrating. This stack here, this is my current work, and it's all stuff that basically hasn't been published yet. So I thought this was a great way to either reintroduce my work or — I hate the term 'rebrand,' but rebrand myself. In your essay 'Weapons of Choice,' you talk about all these different tools you use, the brushes and pens, the Sumi ink. Has your working style been pretty consistent, pretty analog, for your entire career? I would say mostly. I did start incorporating Photoshop for coloring and textures, kind of late to the game — I'd say it was not 'till around 2003 or so. I developed carpal tunnel around 2010, so I've tried to steer away from digital as much as I can, but I still use it. I mean, I use Photoshop every day. It's just [that] most of what I do is the comics purism of ink on a paper. Do you think of ink on paper as objectively better, or it just happens to be how you work? I don't think it's better, to be honest. I think any tool that works is good. You know, Moebius used to say that sometimes he would draw with coffee grinds, he drew with a fork. And I have some friends, in fact, a number of friends, who are doing highly popular mainstream books, who have gravitated toward digital work, or its various advantages. And I just don't like that. 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But it also means the drawing never ends. One thing I really like about analog art is, it's punishing. [One] piece of advice I got early on was, your first 1,000 ink drawings with a brush are going to be terrible, and you just have to get through those first 1,000. And it was true, it was humiliating — every time I sat down and tried to draw with the brushes, a lot of the work is going to be in your your fingers or your wrists, and it's easy to make mistakes, but gradually you get an authority over the tool, and then you can draw what it is you really see in your mind. Before we started recording, we were also talking about AI, and it sounds like it's something you've been aware of and thinking about. Yeah, sure, I use it all the time. I don't use it for anything creative outside of research. For example, I just wrote an essay on one of my favorite cartoonists, Attilio Micheluzzi. His library is being published by Fantagraphics right now, and I did the intro for the second book. It's amazing, because there's a lot of personal detail about the man that was really, really hard to find, unless you could literally go to — he died in Naples, but he spent a lot of his time in North Africa and Rome. This guy's a man of mystery. But you now can get the dates of his birth and his death, what caused his death, what did he do? And AI helps with that. Or sometimes, I work on story structure. But I don't use it directly to create anything. I use it more like, let's say it's a consultant. My nephew writes [code] and he describes AI as a sociopath personal assistant that doesn't mind lying to you. I've asked AI at times like, 'What books has Paul Pope published?' It's kind of strange, because maybe 80% of it will be correct, and 20% will be completely hallucinated books I've never done. So I tend to take my nephew's point of view on it. You have this skepticism, but you don't want to rule out using it where it's useful. No, absolutely not. It's a tool. It's a very contentious point with cartoonists, and there are important questions about authorship, copyright protection. In fact, I just had dinner with Frank Miller last night, we were talking about this. If [I ask AI to] give me 'Lady Godiva, naked on the horse, as drawn by Frank Miller,' I can spit that out in 30 seconds. Some people might say, 'Oh, this is my art.' But AI doesn't generate the art from the same kind of place that humans would, where it's based on identity and personal history and emotional inflection. It can recombine everything that's been known and programmed into the database. And you could do with my stuff, too. It never looks like my drawings, but it's getting better and better. But I think really, speaking as a futurist, the real question is killer robots and surveillance and a lot of technology being developed very, very quickly, without a lot of public consideration about the implications. Here in New York, at the moment, there's a really great gallery on 23rd Street called Poster House. It's pretty much the history of 20th-century poster design, which is right up my alley. So I went there with my girlfriend last week, and they currently have an exhibit on the atom bomb and how it was portrayed in different contexts through poster art. There was this movement 'Atoms for Peace,' where people were pro-atomic energy [but] were against war, and I kind of liked that, because that's how I feel about AI. I would say, 'AI for peace.' I'm less concerned about having some random person create some image based on one of my drawings, than I am about killer robots and surveillance and drones. I think that's a much more serious question, because at some point, we're going to pass a tipping point, because there's a lot of bad actors in the world that are developing AI, and I don't know if some of the developers themselves are concerned about the implications. They just want to be the first person to do it — and of course, they're going to make a lot of money. You mentioned this idea of somebody typing, 'Give me a drawing in the style of Paul Pope.' And I think the argument that some people would make is that you shouldn't be able to do that — or at least Paul should be getting paid, since your art was presumably used to train the model, and that's your name being used. It's a good question. In fact, I was asking AI before our talk today — I think the best thing is to go to the source — 'compare unlicensed art usage [for] AI-generated imagery with torrenting of MP3s in the '90s.' And AI said that there's definitely some similarities, because you're using work that's already been produced and created without compensating the artist. But in the case of AI, you can add elements to it that make it different. It's not like [when] somebody stole Guns N' Roses' record, 'Chinese Democracy,' and put it online. That's different from sitting down with an emulator for music with AI [and saying,] 'I want to write a song in the style of Guns N' Roses, and I want the guitar solo to sound like Slash.' Obviously, if somebody publishes a comic book and it looks just like one of mine, that might be a problem. There's class action lawsuits on the behalf of some of the artists, so I think this is a legal issue that is going to be hammered out, probably. But it gets more complicated, because it's very hard to regulate AI development or distribution in places like Afghanistan or Iran or China. They're not going to follow American legal code. And then on the killer robot side, you've written a lot and drawn a lot of dystopian fiction yourself, like in 'Batman: Year 100.' How close do you feel we are to that future right now? I think we're probably, honestly, about two years away. I mean, robots are already being used on the battlefield. Drones are used in lethal warfare. I wouldn't be too surprised, within two or three years, if we start seeing robot automation on a regular basis. In fact, where my girlfriend lives in Brooklyn, there's a fully robot-serviced coffee shop, no one works there. And the scary thing is, I think people become normalized to this, so the technology is implemented before there's the social contract, where people are able to ask whether or not this is a good [thing]. My lawyer, for example, he thinks within two or three years, Marvel Comics will replace artists with AI. You won't even have to pay any artists. And I think that's completely conceivable. I think storyboarding for film can easily be replaced with AI. Animatics, which you need to do for a lot of films, can be replaced. Eventually, comic book artists can be replaced. Almost every job can be replaced. How do you feel about that? Are you worried about your own career? I don't worry about my career because I believe in human innovation. Call me an optimist. And the one distinct advantage we have over machine intelligence is — until we actually take the bridle off and machines are fully autonomous and have a conscience and a memory and emotional reflections, which are the things that are required in order to become an artist, or, for that matter, a human — they can't replace what humans do. They can replicate what humans do. If you're trying to get into the business of, let's say comics, and you're trying to draw like Jim Lee, there's a chance you might get replaced, because AI has already imprinted every single Jim Lee image in its memory. So that would be easy to replace, but what is harder to replace is the human invention of something like whatever Miles Davis introduced into jazz, or Picasso introduced, along with Juan Gris, when they invented Cubism. I don't see machines being able to do that. You were talking about the discipline needed to draw with a brush, and one of the things I worry about is, if we increasingly devalue the time and the money and everything it takes for somebody to get good at that, you can't decouple the inventiveness of the Paul Pope who comes up with these cool stories with the Paul Pope who spent all his time making drawing after drawing with brushes and ink. If we think we can just focus on coming up with cool ideas, it's not going to work like that. I do think about this. I think it would be very challenging to be 18, 19, having grown up with a screen in front of you, you can upload an app to do anything, within seconds, and that's just not the way most of human history has worked. I mean, I don't think we're at that term 'singularity' yet, but we're getting really close to it. And that's the one thing that worries me is whether we talk about killer machines or machine consciousness overtaking human ingenuity, it would almost be a forfeit on the part of the people to stop having a sense of ethics, a sense of curiosity, determination — all these old school, bootstrap concepts that some people think are old-fashioned now, but I think that's how we preserve our humanity and our sense of soul. The first big collection of your 'THB' comics is coming this fall, and it sounds like that's also a big part of the Paul Pope rebrand or relaunch, the next chess move. Is it safe to assume that one of the other next chess moves is 'Battling Boy 2'? Yes. It's funny, because for a long time, we had it scheduled — 'Battling Boy 2' has to come out before 'THB' comes out. But there was some restructuring with [my publisher's] parent company, Macmillan, and my new art director came on in 2023 and he said, 'You know what, let's just move this around. We're going to start putting 'THB' out. It's already there.' And I was so relieved because, again, 'Battling Boy' is 500-plus pages, and I'd work on it, then I'd stop working to do commercial work. I work on it. I stop. I work on the movie. It's like I'm driving this high performance car, but it doesn't have enough gas in it, so I have to keep stopping and putting gasoline [in it]. So it's been reinvigorating [to have a new book coming out], because it kick-started everything.
