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Okay, watch this. Now I'm Lionus. Now I'm Lionus Pro. Can't tell the difference. Neither could anyone who watched Google's made by Google 2026 event, where the Pixel 11 Pro somehow managed to be one of the least exciting parts of the whole thing thanks to its negligible upgrades over the regular Pixel 11. The good news though is there was some cool stuff including some legitimately useful AI features. I know, right? Like this incredible new text to speech model, some awesome accessibility stuff, and new ways to capture photos without focusing on your phone so you can really stay in the moment. The new phones these features will first roll out to feature new tensor processors and upgraded image processing for faster
night shots and some other cool gimmicks. And naturally, of course, they've got more RAM than last year's models. What? They don't? No, they don't. The base model Pixel 11 Pro actually gets a downgrade compared to last year. And if you want more, you're going to have to pay more. That is the price of all the fun new AI features. Money. Money is the price. What a time to be alive. And what a time to tell you about our sponsor, Squarespace. It's an easytouse all-in-one website platform. You'll have a professionallook website up and running for your business in no time.
Save 10% today by going to squarespace.com/ltt. Let's kick things off with an all new product for Google. The Pixel Tab is a compact little tracker that's coming out later this year. it. Okay, it's an Air Tag, but instead of interfacing with Apple's Find My Network, it interfaces with Google's Find Hub network. So, totally different. It's got an IP67 water and dust resistance rating, a built-in speaker, and a replaceable battery that should last for around a year. Okay, nothing groundbreaking, but hey, it's nice to have more options, I guess. The bigger story, as usual, is of course the phones. There is some good news here. The Pixel 11 NonP Pro now comes with a marginally thinner camera bump and 256 gigs of storage to start, but it got a price hike.
I know. And as I mentioned before, the base models of both the Pro and the Pro XL have been ratcheted down to just 12 gigs of RAM. So, you'll need to shell out an extra $120 if you want the 16 gigs that came standard last year. and that's on top of the extra $100 you're already spending across the board. The other, albeit small, silver lining, is that you don't really need to buy a Pro. The most notable feature, elevating it over the nonpro, is Google's new highlight notification/gemini LED array that's embedded in the camera bar. It replaces the temperature sensor that everyone who owns a Pixel forgot about 5 minutes after buying it. And
unlike the temperature sensor, it will appear on the Pros, including the 11 Pro Fold, which we'll talk about a little bit more later. At launch, Highlight displays five colors and can be bound to incoming calls from the Google phone app or from WhatsApp. And Big G says that notification lights for text messages are coming later on this year. No word so far on third party app support. So, basically, it's a worse version of what I had on my Note 9. Cool. You can use it when you talk to Gemini, though. My Note 9 didn't have that. So, if your phone is face down because you just love micro scratches and you hate seeing confirmation of what you're dictating, then it'll light up
like a little rainbow to show you that it's thinking or listening. Moving a little to the left in the camera bar is where the other major differences between the Pixel 11 and the 11 Pro lie. The Pro features higher resolution cameras, better zoom, and larger sensors, which will give mobile photographers the most flexibility. Not to mention that, of course, it's available with a larger screen size so you can better see what you're doing. With all of that said, the Pixel 11 cameras are no slouches either. And I feel like we're getting to the point where if you're a huge mobile photography buff, you're probably kind of over the whole phone thing. And if you're not a huge buff, the nonpro is
probably good enough for you. And I got to say, I feel much the same way about the rest of the big differences. The Pro has a slightly higher resolution screen and its adaptive refresh rate will go down to just one hertz to save more power versus going down to 60 Hz, but both of them can go up to 120 Hz, so they're both going to feel super smooth. The Pro has an anti-scratch coating on its screen, but like how much does a Dbrand Prism cost anyway? And then that's it. I mean, even just looking at the spec sheet, battery life is the same, charging spec is the same, even the size and weight are basically the same. Uh oh. But the Pro does go up to 1 TBTE if you want to shell out some
serious moola. On that subject, let's move on to the Fold. I haven't really fallen in love with Google's first couple of forays into the space, but there are some nice improvements this year that have got my attention. The most notable is a new hinge that gets rid of the gears and adds some extra layers of anti-impact film that Google says make the phone three times stronger than the last gen model. The company has also introduced a new glass fiber composite back material that they say should be nearly impossible to crack. I'm sure JerryRig Everything will have something to say about that. The outer screen also gets a toughness upgrade using a ceramic cover glass that's similar to the Moto Razer, Samsung's latest foldables, and the last
few generations of iPhones. Naturally, you can expect a nice clean operating system thanks to Pixel OS. That is assuming you can afford it because it starts at a blushinducing $1,900. To round out the new hardware, there's an upgraded Pixel Watch as well that is pretty much exactly the same as last year's model, but with an accelerated version of last year's processor. I don't know about you guys, but I always wanted an accelerated CPU on my wrist. The software updates coming out alongside it look cool, though, adding features like the ability to monitor blood pressure trends, insulin resistance trends, and to detect breathing emergencies.
Like when you look at the pricing of all this stuff. [panting] Yeah, my watch doesn't do that. Let's talk software. One of the most exciting features that Gemini enables on Pixels now is called Rambler. It's a textto-spech model that can take a long convoluted sentence and use AI to summarize it while it's typing. In a demo on Google's site, someone vomits out this barely coherent bowl of word salad. The AI takes that and pairs it down to, "Hey, do you want to grab lunch on Sunday?" and then throws in a few fun emojis in case anyone couldn't tell that you were a millennial. Personally, I use voice dictation for reminders and for notes a lot. So, I'm cautiously optimistic that this will improve
reliability, even if so far Gemini seems to be slower for me than the old Google Assistant recognition. To go alongside Rambler, Gboard is getting updated to work with sign language of all things. So, if you don't want to type, you can sign to like, I don't know, a sign for phone, so I'm just going to go with this. And it'll transcribe what you're saying. Um, we'll see if that uh works out for them. Google's also cramming more AI into your day-to-day interactions. For instance, if you're texting about booking a table at a restaurant, Gemini might pop up a notification asking, "Hey, would you like to make a reservation?" If you say yes, it will go through the steps in the background to make all that happen. So,
all you need to do is click confirm once it presents you with a final summary. This will also work for flight information, calendar events, locations, or even membership cards for certain shopping locations. In theory, as usual, I'm going to believe it when any of this stuff actually works. As it is now, I can barely get Gmail search to bring up my most recent hotel reservations. So, color me skeptical. Another feature that's launching in the preview stage is location-based insights. In a demo on the Google blog, your AI knows what restaurant you're at and can surface top menu items to help you choose your dinner. Can you smell that, guys?
It's location-based ad potential. Wow. I could get this that's on promotion today. Of course, Pixel's bread and butter, until they lost the image quality crown a few years ago, has always been the camera. So, why don't we talk about that? Magic camera is a new mode that lets you record a video, and the Magic Camera Assistant will pull the best looking photos and clips out of that longer video. You're going to be limited to just 12 megapixel stills, but still, this could be a pretty cool way to get a bunch of shots without having to shoot a burst. What I think looks more fun will be the new Google camera looks. These are similar in concept to Apple's photographic styles, but the image pipeline acts a little bit differently. Notably, Google will be
stacking fewer frames, which will hopefully help get more natural looking images that avoid that over smoothed, shadowless HDR look that has become pretty much the standard for mobile phones. At launch, there are three new default looks that you can pick from. There are a few more styles, but they can't be set as a default. So basically, they're just filters. Google also added a new camera feature that creators like us might get a fair bit of use out of. Now you can shoot video in a new section of the camera called Creator Suite that adds options to have a teleprompter on screen. They can also enhance your vocals and even show external mic levels if you have one linked to your phone. That'll be great
for vloggers. Using the power of the new Tensor G6 chip, Google has improved the image signal processing. So now it can take lowlight sight photos around four times faster than previous models. That might not sound like it matters that much, but it should really help to reduce blur when taking pictures of things that are moving. So, not only will your night photos be lit, but they should also be sharper. That said, this is likely to work best on the 11 Pro with its larger sensor. The 11 Pro Fold and the regular 11 should perform better than their predecessors, but not as well thanks to their smaller sensors. Now, I'm going to perform the segue to our sponsor, Squarespace. It's an all-in-one website
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building your website today and receive 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com/ltt. If you enjoyed this video and you're looking for something else to watch, we dived a little deeper into some of Google's new AI features during our couple of videos covering Google IO this year.
