Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
You don’t need to pay top dollar for a three camera flagship anymore. In the standard Pixel 10, there’s reason to celebrate for less moment.
It’s 2025, and if you’re considering buying a new phone right now, there are some pretty consistent things you’re probably taking into account.
One is AI: it’s everywhere, and whether you plan to use it or not, chances are what you buy is advertising its feature set to you. You can edit photos and text, and generally just ask questions and get the answers, plus other features you didn’t really need your phone to do until someone came along and said “AI can take care of that” because, well, it can to a degree.
The other is cost, with the reason being clear: everything is going up in price, so why not phones?
Mobiles can cost as much as nearly $4000 these days, with the best of the best demanding seriously high prices.
Wouldn’t it be nice to find a handset that delivers a middle ground beautifully?
That’s what the standard model phones are supposed to do, getting you much of the best of everything without needing to resort to the higher priced “pro” models, which invariably come in two sizes: normal and very large.
In Google’s standard Pixel 10 model, however, the aim appears to be acting on that, giving you everything you need and nothing you don’t. It could just be the best Pixel 10 we’ve found yet.
Design
Sitting in a chassis not unlike the Pixel 10 Pro it shares DNA with, the standard Pixel 10 is a little nicer than you might expect.
There’s a spacecraft-grade aluminium frame, glass on the front and back, and a look that’s slick and well-balanced.
The design isn’t quite as clever as the Pixel 9a, however, a model where the cameras are basically part of the slim style and one of only a handful of phones where there’s basically no extrusion whatsoever. That’s a rare design trait these days, and while the Pixel 9a gets it, the Pixel 10 does not.
You get the camera bar on the Pixel 10 and its extrusion just like its Pro and Pro XL siblings. But it’s not a huge deal, and thanks to its stretch across most of the width of the phone, the Pixel 10 lies at an angle comfortably on a surface.
That design also gets you a slightly more durable design, with IP68 dust and water resistance and a decent heft. As such, the Pixel 10 is slightly thicker than the 8.25mm iPhone 16 Pro from last year, measuring 8.6mm thick and having a decent amount of heft at 204 grams.
But it’s a nice design all the same, and managed to feel more premium than you’d expect a standard model to sport.
Features
Beneath the surface, there’s a reasonable amount of technology here, starting with the camera bar where there are three cameras, the best of which is the standard wide camera, a 48 megapixel set to F1.7. Next is an ultra-wide 13 megapixel set to F2.2, and finally is something new, sporting a 10.8 megapixel 5X cameras using F3.1. The combination provides a rough range of 0.5X to 5X, though you’ll get different megapixels as you work through it.
Meanwhile, at the front is a 10.5 megapixel F2.2 selfie camera with autofocus.
There’s more to the Pixel 10 feature set than just cameras, though.
You’ll also find the Google Tensor G5 chip, 12GB RAM, and a choice of either 128 or 256GB storage. Google’s Android 16 arrives on the phone out of the box, as does support for seven years of operating system, security and other updates from the launch of the handset.
There’s only one physical connection, the USB-C port at the bottom, but wireless connections are well covered. You’ll find 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6E support, plus Bluetooth 6, 4G and 5G, Near-Field Communication (NFC) for Google Pay, GPS, and support for Google Cast should you choose to use it.
Other features are built in, such as satellite SOS, car crash detection, and the Android Earthquake Alerts System, plus wireless charging using Qi2 at 15W.
A 4970mAh battery is also found in the phone, able to be fast charged using a 30W USB-C charging pack that isn’t included in the box.
All of this sits under a 6.3 inch Google Actua display, running the resolution of 1080×2424, and sporting a refresh rate able to run between 60 and 120Hz. You’ll also find Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protecting this screen, which also protects the back, too.
In-use
Grab the phone and it’ll come to life in the way you expect, giving you two forms of biometric security: fingerprint and facial security. Both work well enough, tested in daylight and night, and essentially providing a little bit of extra security beyond the PIN you’ll memorise.
From there, it’s straight into stock Android, which is Android 16 out of the box.
We’re fans of this version, which looks clean, functions well, and offers your typical assortment of widgetised home screens with a left-most Google Discover screen, plus an app shortcut bar that adapts to your usage throughout the day. That’s a little bit of AI we can use.
You’ll also find other AI features found on the rest of the Pixel 10 range, such as the AI-infused journalling app, talking to Google Gemini (if you want), NotebookLM built in, the screenshots app from last year’s models, and Magic Cue if you can even trigger it.
Performance
Armed with the same processor from the Pixel 10 Pro XL, the Google Tensor G5, you won’t be surprised to learn that the hardware in the 2025 phone is good, but not an amazing leap over rivals, or even the phone’s predecessor for that matter.
By the time we ended up reviewing the standard Pixel 10, Google had decided to let Geekbench 6 install from the Play Store, distinct from how we sideloaded it on the Pixel 10 Pro XL for the review. However, the Tensor G5’s performance has largely stayed the same.
While synthetic benchmarks don’t always make sense for every aspect, here the results are the same: the multi-core CPU performance is a little better, while the graphical performance from the GPU is markedly lower, even when compared with other Pixel models over the years.
Comparing the Pixel 10 to other Android phones in the past year, the Tensor G5 is fine, but could be better.
On the synthetic tests, it doesn’t quite have the edge other models have, though it may not matter at all. Simply put, the good news is that these speed issues may not affect your overall use of the phone itself.
Playing with the Pixel 10 over several days, we couldn’t spot a whole heap of lag or slow downs, even if this model had a little less RAM compared to its Pro siblings.
When it came time to test 5G on the mobile side of things, there was practically no difference, with the Pixel 10 offering solid speeds across the board. Provided you’re within reach of a decent tower and the network is clear, you should see decent results.
Tested on the Telstra Wholesale 5G network by way of Mate, our speeds hit maximums of 760Mbps, before the 250Mbps handicap kicked in on our plan. That’s not too shabby.
Camera
Also not too shabby is the camera, which sees an upgrade from last year’s standard Pixel 9, and from most other standard model flagships, the iPhone 17 included.
While Apple opts for two cameras on its standard models — wide and ultra-wide — Google is going for three in the Pixel 10 standard, providing a 5X telephoto in the package, no less. That’ll give you a little more in the tank to work with, covering 0.5 to 1X to 5X in a phone that isn’t technically a “pro” model.
What that means for most people is ultra-wide to a little close, with some other features thrown in for good measure, such as solid close-up macros and a great portrait camera, the latter of which is one of Google’s constantly great camera features.
Testing the camera, images look pretty great in daylight, and handle their own at night, too. Crisp and detailed imagery is what you can expect when the lights are on, though, with the three camera system on the Pixel 10 one of the better camera sets for a phone of this price range.
Even selfies look lovely, as portraits use Google’s algorithm expertise to make the background go creamy and the foreground sharp and clear.
It’s difficult to be dissatisfied with the camera on offer in the Pixel 10, that’s for sure.
Battery
Like the Pixel 10 Pro XL we reviewed recently, the battery isn’t staggeringly impressive, delivering a little over a day of life, but not much more. The Pixel 10 standard is a phone you’ll likely want to charge nightly, with roughly four hours of screen time in our tests.
For our usage, that meant the phone lasted the full day down to around the 30 percent mark with nearly three hours of usage, and was closer to the 20 percent mark by the time we woke up. Four hours of active screen time seems to be the maximum you’ll get with the phone, though watching video on the handset primarily will get you more.
Tested with Pickr’s BatteryBench app, we clocked a runtime of 21 hours 40 minutes (21:40:27) for the Pixel 10 standard, marginally better than the Pixel 10 Pro XL’s 20 hours 51 (20:51:53).
In short, if all you plan to do is watch videos on the Pixel 10 during a flight, it will go the distance. But for regular use, it’ll need a nightly charge.
Google has made that a little easier, though, thanks to its inclusion of Pixelsnap, what is ostensibly Qi2 with a bit of Google tweaking. You can use a case to improve the magnet, or you can just snap it to a stand the way we did.
Think of Pixelsnap as MagSafe for Pixel, because that’s really what it is.
Value
The price is the one area where we think Google has managed to get it right, achieving a $1349 starting price for a small-ish normal-sized mobile with three cameras. Not one, not two, but three.
Last year’s Pixel 9 offered similar hardware with two cameras for around the same price, so this year’s Pixel 10 just screams a better deal altogether. It’s not quite the deal that the Samsung S24 FE was, so doesn’t win the same value marks, but for Google, it’s a big deal.
It’s even a solid deal when you compare it to Apple’s iPhone 17, which continues the regular approach we’ve seen with two cameras this year.
Google has joined the likes of Samsung in offering three cameras for its main “phone for everyone”, and that improves the value considerably. The simple fact is you don’t need to spend closer to the $2K mark to get a zoom camera system anymore with the pro models, and that’s a win for customers.
What needs work?
But like its sibling in the “Pro” range, the biggest problem Google has with its Pixel 10 range is the AI doesn’t really live up to the promise Google talks about.
Journaling is a little weird with an AI there to provide critiques, and Magic Cue hasn’t changed in the short time it’s been out to become useful, triggering unrelated information in some instances, if you can even get it to appear at all.
For folks who say that maybe these things just need time, that is entirely true. But a particularly telling note could be that one of the Pixel 10 range’s features has already been pulled down, with Google pausing the Daily Hub briefing feature. That didn’t take long.
You have to wonder if Magic Cue is far behind, given it not only misses the mark most of the time, but even manages to make stuff up at times.
In our own Pixel 10 Pro XL review, we struggled to get Magic Cue to a place where it could be useful, and spending time with the standard Pixel 10, the same thing applied. Magic Cue just didn’t find its way in our life, and quickly became another meh AI feature we didn’t really need.
We can live without the meh AI features in our lives. Even the screenshots app from last year’s phones didn’t do much more than log the occasional songs we wanted to save from Sonos and other services. It wasn’t as helpful as Google probably expected.
Everyone is struggle to integrate AI in a phone in a wholly useful way, and Google isn’t there yet, either.
What we love
But what we love is that the Pixel 10 is a regular sized phone with an excellent feature set and price, something that often feels like an underrepresented aspect when shopping for a phone.
You expect big phones these days, and they’re everywhere. Manufacturers go bigger because it means the battery life will be better, which also means less complaints.
But the Pixel 10 is different. It’s one of the smaller phones on the market, and that’s saying something.
At 6.3 inches, the Pixel 10 is more of a “regular” sized phone, feeling like the smaller 6.1 inch models that you can find from Apple. And yet for that size, Google is also throwing in three cameras rather than two.
The 6.3 inch Pixel 10 standard is literally the exact size of the Pixel 10 Pro, its more expensive sibling, and the main differences are the screen quality, build, and camera spec, but otherwise the phones are quite close.
The Pixel 10 is just a little different, giving you a great quality option if you want something just a bit better than the Pixel 9a. Basically, you’d pick the Pixel 10 if you wanted more camera versatility than the Pixel 9a, which only offers two cameras.
A regular-sized phone with three cameras is something we can get behind.
Final thoughts (TLDR)
It’s 2025, and if it seems like every company is trying to show how AI can impact our lives through our phones, that’s because every company is.
AI is in every phone, and while it’s typically an optional extra, manufacturers are trying to do their best to weave it into our lives. Whether it’s making a wallpaper, critiquing your thoughts, analysing a screenshot, and doing a search, AI is in our phones for good and, well, for not.
That’s great, but what we’d really love is a phone that stands out for the right reasons. A phone that lets you use AI, but is something to look forward to and upgrade your mobile for the right reasons, not just because there’s a spot of AI you might use.
We didn’t get that vibe with the Pixel 10 Pro XL, a handset that was largely last year’s phone with some extra AI inside.
But this year’s standard Pixel, the Pixel 10, that’s a little different.
Better in just about every way, it sets a new standard for “standard” phones.
And yes, it comes with all the same AI Google wants you to try using knowing full well that you don’t have to. You can use the Pixel 10 however you want to, and rest assured knowing that it’s a great phone even when you don’t touch the AI.
That’s what we wanted, and that’s what this is. For $1349, it may well be this year’s most intriguing new Pixel, saving money and delivering solid value.
