The best new tech heading your way
1 GOOGLE PIXEL 8 PRO
● From £999, store.google.com
It’s important, we think, to consider iteration as progress, because those complaining about the stagnation of the phone market are missing the point. Yes, everyone’s next big phone is yet another black rectangle. But iterative updates offer significant excitement, and while the market may have settled on what the phone is, it is far from finished with what the phone can do.
Case in point, as if it wasn’t obvious, the Pixel 8 Pro. Visually it is, well, a Pixel device. The back shares that classic Pixel camera bar motif, and the AMOLED screen is the same size and resolution as the Pixel 7 Pro before it. It iterates, of course, flattening off the 7 Pro’s curves, making its refresh rate adaptable from 1-120Hz, and boosting the brightness now up to a 2,400 nit peak, but this is still a Pixel.
But one small iteration in the guts of the thing, the jump from Google’s Tensor G2 to the Tensor G3 chip, adds scads of AI smarts to this latest top-end Pixel, and Google is prepared to use it in all kinds of marvellous ways. Magic Editor gets a boost, you can now break audio into stems using Audio Magic Eraser and wipe out the bits you don’t need, text to speech is better, and your phone can even answer calls from spammers to ask them exactly what they’re up to – all done on board, without resorting to the cloud. That’s progress.
SAYS
2 GOOGLE PIXEL WATCH 2
● From £349, store.google.com
Upgraded inside and out, says Google; perhaps, just perhaps, the Pixel Watch 2 is the device WearOS needs to kickstart its heart. Speaking of, its heart rate sensor is completely new, a multi-path sensor that offers ten times more channels than its prede
