// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
Google Pixel 11 Series, Pixel Watch 5, Pixel Tag: Specs, Features, Price, Release Date
Google is dialing things up to 11 this year with its Pixel phones. Ahead of its annual Made by Google event in New York City, the company unwrapped the Pixel 11 smartphone family—which includes the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold—alongside the Pixel Watch 5 smartwatch. There's also a new hardware addition: the Pixel Tag, which seems designed to be the AirTag of the Android world.
Here's everything you need to know about the hardware changes and software upgrades on Google’s latest devices. Preorders open today, and the phones and watches go on sale August 20.
The Pixel 11 starts with 256 GB of storage and comes in an eye-popping Hibiscus color.
It was inevitable, but prices are up across the board for Google's Pixel 11 series. The Pixel 11 now starts at $899, and on the highest end of the spectrum, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold is now $1,900. This means both devices got $100 price bumps. There's some good news: Google has bumped the base storage up to 256 GB on every device, a move matching Samsung's and Apple's latest handsets.
The Pixel 11 series is powered by Google's Tensor G6 chipset, which the company says is 20 percent more power efficient, 25 percent faster for browsing, and 15 percent faster when loading apps. Many of the camera improvements in the new devices are thanks to an improved imaging signal processor on the chip and a 50 percent more powerful tensor processing unit.
One big design change across the entire Pixel 11 series is on the oval camera bar on the back—it's now an all-glass surface, as opposed to a mix of metal and glass on its predecessors. Google says the camera bar on the Pixel 11 is more than 40 percent thinner, and when you pop on Google's case, the camera bar disappears and is completely flush. The Pixel 11 has the most striking color of the lot—Hibiscus—joined by more muted Pistachio, Frost, and Obsidian.
The Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro Fold share more in common than you'd expect. They now have the same primary 48-megapixel camera, upgraded this year with a larger sensor that can capture up to 56 percent more light for brighter low-light images. The 10.8-megapixel telephoto camera, which has a 5X optical zoom, can now digitally zoom up to 30X. At these higher digital zoom levels, Google's machine learning algorithm puts in the work to clean up the digital noise and deliver an enhanced photo.
Google's folding phone is now 10 percent lighter and 1 mm thinner than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, with slimmer bezels around the screen, though the phone is still heftier and thicker than Samsung's new Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra. It maintains its IP68 dust- and water-resistance rating, but there's a new glass-fiber composite back cover that Google says is “nearly impossible to crack” and an upgraded hinge that better protects the inner display from accidental drops. All of this, Google claims, makes the device three times more durable than its predecessor. Bold words.
The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is slightly lighter and thinner and is supposedly three times more durable than its predecessor.
The Fold features HiLight, a glowing LED on the back (excluded on the Pixel 11 but available on the Pixel 11 Pro phones). It lights up when you talk to Gemini, much like the glowing lights on the new Google Home Speaker. You can set it to light up in specific colors when you receive phone calls from your favorite contacts. Google says it's exploring the same capability for text messages, but didn't comment on whether it will enable HiLight for other notifications.