The Pixel 9 is the kind of device you get after a few generations of incremental progress. 

One minor update after another doesn’t look like much year over year. A faster fingerprint sensor? Uniform bezels? Not the stuff of headlines. But eventually, the little stuff adds up to something significant. That’s the feeling I get holding the Pixel 9, and I like it a lot.

The Pixel 9 is the only non-Pro phone in the 9 series at this point, which, as best I can tell, means it has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB and doesn’t have a telephoto lens. It’s smaller than the aptly named Pixel 9 Pro XL, the same size and shape as the regular Pixel 9 Pro, and it doesn’t fold in half like the other 9 Pro.

But mainly, the Pixel 9 just works. The screen is bright and the battery goes all day. The fingerprint sensor is quick and accurate, finally. Although it’s pricier than last year’s model at $799 versus $699, that’s basically the going rate for a non-Pro flagship phone. And for the first time, the Pixel line feels like it has earned a place alongside Samsung and Apple. Google just needed a few years to get there.

Let’s get it out of the way: from the front, the Pixel 9 looks like an iPhone. The rounded screen corners, the flat sides — it’s all iPhone, and that’s fine. Compared to recent Pixel generations, it feels about 80 percent less likely to fly out of my hand when I pick it up from a table, which I appreciate way more than the distinct look the curved edges provided. The 6.3-inch screen is a little bigger than the Pixel 8’s. Its 1080p screen is on the low side, resolution-wise, but it looks sharp enough that it never bothered me. 

The Pixel 9 comes with the same main and ultrawide cameras as the Pro phones, but it doesn’t have a telephoto lens. Not all flagship phones come with a telephoto, and the Pixel 9’s lossless 2x crop zoom is fine. But you don’t get the more dramatic reach of the 9 Pro’s 5x zoom or the nice portrait framing of a 3x lens like the one on the Samsung Galaxy S24. It’s the thing I missed most when I switched from using the Pixel 9 Pro to the Pixel 9 — way more than a few extra pixels on the screen or a handful of AI-enhanced video or photo features.

Aside from that, you don’t miss out on much. The screen doesn’t get quite as bright as the Pros, but it’s still good enough to use in direct sunlight. Battery performance is on par with the rest of the Pixel 9 series. It had plenty left in the tank by the end of the day, and I never felt like I needed to give it a late-in-the-day recharge, even with heavy use. 

Tensor G4, Google’s newest chipset, is on all four Pixel 9 models. It’s a solid performer for daily tasks and doesn’t seem to heat up quite as dramatically as the previous generation, though if you spend 20 minutes running a media-heavy webpage, it will still double as a hand warmer. But it doesn’t feel like it’s going to burst into flames, you know? 

It all adds up to an experience that feels polished in a way that previous Pixels didn’t quite achieve. The chipsets ran hot, the shapes felt wonky, and the screens weren’t quite as nice. The non-Pro Pixel, in particular, has been on a journey from the upper midrange to proper flagship, mainly by improving the screen refresh rate and adding minor camera features along the way. Both models gained some quality-of-life improvements over time, too, including the ability to use face unlock for payments and — new in the 9 series — a much-improved fingerprint scanner. It’s the kind of stuff that makes me feel much more comfortable recommending it to my parents or my hair stylist. 

Google sorted the hardware out, and the software is as clean as ever. But this is a phone launched in 2024, so we have to talk about AI. There are a few features reserved for the Pro line, like Video Boost, which uses AI in the cloud to bump up the brightness in low-light video. That’s not a huge loss, and the Pixel 9 has plenty of other AI features, including Reimagine, Pixel Screenshots, and Pixel Studio, all of which you can read about in my Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL review. Some of it is so good that it’s problematic! But the TL;DR is that it feels like a real mixed bag right now, and AI features are starting to pile up in a way that’s sort of hurting my head. 

What do I do with a JPEG of a kid’s birthday party invitation? Add it to Pixel Screenshots? Ask Gemini to put it on my calendar? Or do I just find it in my messages every time I need to look up the party time or address? AI is supposed to save us from the latter scenario, and Google’s various AI tools kind of work like that sometimes. For now, it remains unproven as the next platform shift. 

The Pixel 9 also comes with something more important but much less flashy: seven years of OS updates. Sure, it ships with Android 14, which is weird since Pixels usually ship with the year’s newest OS version. But the Pixel 9 will be first in line for Android 15 when it arrives this fall, so that doesn’t feel like much more than an interesting footnote. You’ll outgrow the Pixel 9 before it stops receiving software updates, which is how things should be.

And that’s the Pixel 9’s whole deal: it’s a phone that the Android ecosystem has needed for a while now. It’s straightforward, well-made, and designed to keep up for many years to come. It doesn’t have every fancy feature or the best camera hardware, but it has enough to make it a worthy alternative to Samsung’s base-model S series, which is more or less the default Android phone.

There’s a reason so many people choose a Samsung phone: they’re really good. But they also come with a whole lot of stuff that most people don’t need, bordering on bloated. They’re powerful tools if you know how to tweak them to your liking, but I suspect a lot of people buy them for the nice hardware and just put up with the software quirks. I’ve generally preferred the simpler out-of-box experience of using a Pixel phone, but the hardware never really felt like it was on Samsung’s level. 

That changes with the Pixel 9. It’s finally a phone for someone who just wants a really good phone — someone who doesn’t care about the difference between optical and digital zoom, doesn’t want to fiddle with a lot of customization options, and wants to avoid thinking about buying a new phone for as long as they can. The Android ecosystem has that option now, and it’s a damn good one.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

You probably don’t need the Remarkable Paper Pro. It’s too luxury. You know those sports cars that look like spaceships but will drive into a streetlamp if you sneeze? That’s the kind of luxury I’m talking about. This is the hypercar of E Ink note-taking devices.

It’s got a front light! It’s got color! It’s got an 11.8-inch display! It’s got the very best keyboard case available today! And it’s got a totally audacious choice of a display. It’s not a device for consuming books or comics (though you can sideload them if you want), but it is for marking up documents and taking notes really, really well. (The operating system is identical to the one for the Remarkable 2.) Starting at $579 (available directly from Remarkable and Best Buy), the Paper Pro is not a practical device for most people, but Remarkable has pushed E Ink displays to their limits here, and by God do I love it for that.

I need to take a minute here to geek the hell out over the display. The company didn’t go with the faded colors of the Kaleido display found in devices from Kobo and Boox. No, Remarkable decided to use the way-less-popular Gallery display technology and then put their own spin on it. (They call it the Canvas Color display.) Gallery is lauded because the color is richer and clearer than Kaleido. Where Kaleido achieves color by applying black and white pigments to a filter, Gallery skips the filter and moves actual color pigment. But moving all that color comes at a cost: Gallery displays have a much, much, much slower refresh rate.

I’m talking unpleasantly slow. The kind of slow that will make you pull your hair out in frustration writing anything. Except on the Remarkable Paper Pro. Writing on this thing is smooth like butter. The experience is just as pleasant as writing on the Remarkable 2. It’s just a hair better than the experience found on the Kindle Scribe or any number of Kobo and Boox devices I’ve tried over the years. Writing in black ink, I am constantly amazed at how perfectly everything seems to work — the knowledge of the Gallery display’s limitations always at war with the impressive reality Remarkable has created.

And then I switch to writing in color ink. There are six colors to choose from: blue, red, green, yellow, cyan, and magenta. Choose any of them and get to doodling. Writing in color is as smooth as writing in black. Pen strokes begin rendering in black, with the chosen color chasing the black away over the course of the stroke. Then, when you stop writing, there’s a pause, and the entire screen refreshes, the new colors now in place. It’s one way Remarkable is getting around Gallery’s atrocious refresh rate.

But is it obnoxious in practice? It kind of is! Especially at first. Yet you pick up the rhythm quickly and the annoyance fades away. I found myself being less bothered in only a couple of minutes. And I also kept asking myself, “Does this really matter?”

The Remarkable Paper Pro isn’t a tool for artists (though it does support layers and shading). You’re not supposed to unlock creativity. You’re using these colors so slide decks and PDFs of business reports look nice as you circle the changes you want made in red. You’re using these colors to faithfully render a book’s art or to add pizzazz to a header you’ve written in a brainstorming notebook. You’re using them to highlight all the numbers you have to remember for that Q4 presentation of profitability. In those cases, a little flash is annoying but not the end times.

And for me, the knowledge of how faithful this whole thing is at rendering color has me forgiving the flash — because hot damn, they put Gallery in a Remarkable and pushed it to the limits! That’s some concept car wildness from a note-taking device company.

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But I am surprised that the boldness that inspired the display choice didn’t carry over to the front light. It’s… fine. It’s dimmer than what others offer, and you can’t control the color temperature of the light, which is annoying in 2024. Remarkable ostensibly went with a less powerful and flexible front light because of the demands of the Paper Pro’s design. The front light has to be extraordinarily thin so there’s no distracting gap between the glass you’re writing on and the E Ink display beneath. And there isn’t! But I also haven’t found that gap as distracting as one would expect in a Boox or the Kindle Scribe. So while I respect Remarkable’s commitment to minding the gap, I would prefer a better front light.

Thankfully, Remarkable’s panache for design reveals one other winner: this company now makes the absolute best keyboard case you can get. The $229 Type Folio puts every other keyboard case I’ve ever used, for tablets and computers alike, to shame. It’s so thin and light, I keep finding myself surprised at the exceptional keyboard packed inside. It’s also got great stability when open on your knees and a clever way of keeping the pen out of your way. More than even the bold colors of the Remarkable Paper Pro, it’s the keyboard case that grabs people’s eyes. This is what every keyboard case should be like. It’s really that good.

Like the rest of the Remarkable Paper Pro, the Type Folio feels like the company showing off at the expense of price. Like a hypercar, it doesn’t feel necessary for most people to own, and it’s probably too expensive, but it’s showing off the future, and that future is a lot faster and more colorful than you’d think.