Google Pixel 10 Pro review

6.3-inch OLED display is probably the brightest we've seen

The Pixel 10 Pro is equipped with what's essentially the same display as the previous generation. It's a 6.3-inch LTPO OLED panel with a somewhat wonky 1,280x2,856px resolution in a 20:9 aspect ratio (495ppi density). The refresh rate is adaptive in the 1-120Hz range, there's HDR10+ support, and an impressively high maximum brightness capability.

Google says the Pixel 10 Pro should be good for up to 2,200nits in high-brightness mode (with the whole display lit up), which is a mostly irrelevant 200-nit upgrade over the 2,000nits on the Pixel 9 Pro (the Pixel 10 non-Pro is also rated for 2,000nits). For a 5% patch of white, the 10 Pro should be able to go as bright as 3,300nits (3,000 on the 9 Pro and the 10).

In our testing (on a 75% lit-up area), the Pixel 10 Pro was good for 2,351nits with adaptive brightness enabled - virtually the same result as the Pixel 9 Pro. It's comfortably brighter than anything that's not a Pixel - the iPhone 16 Pro is some 600nits behind.

When setting the brightness manually, we did measure a 100-nit increase over the Pixel 9 Pro's number, and the 1,399nits we got is properly bright - that's 500nits more than what the iPhone 16 Pro will allow - that's bordering on too much, really. Seriously though, a truly impressive showing from the Pixel 10 Pro here.

The minimum brightness is also predictably great, at 2.0nits.

Refresh rate

Pixels don't do refresh rate modes strictly speaking, so all you get is the Smooth display toggle to enable the 120Hz maximum - otherwise the ceiling will be 60Hz. Regardless of whether you opt for the 120Hz maximum or limit things to 60Hz, the phone will do its adaptive magic all the way down to 1Hz.

As expected, if you're not interacting with the phone and there's nothing moving on it, the display will rapidly drop down to 1Hz. It will tend to match the frame rate of whatever you are viewing, so if it's a 24fps video, the display will maintain 24Hz, and if it's a 90Hz game, the display will maintain 90Hz. If the game were to, say, drop to 47fps or 53fps, then the display will change its refresh rate to match those figures. This ensures correct frame pacing while conserving battery (well, to some extent, at least).

Streaming and HDR

There's no development on the Dolby Vision front - the Pixel 10 Pro still omits that HDR standard support. It does have checkmarks for HDR10 and HDR10+ video and with the latter now supported by Netflix, the lack of DV is less of a sore point.

Sure enough, there's trouble-free support for Ultra HDR-compliant images - whether it's this Pixel's own photos or shots from other compatible devices, you can count on dramatic highlights in Google Photos, browsers, and socials alike.

Google Pixel 10 Pro battery life

The small Pro has gotten a battery capacity upgrade to 4,870mAh - it's not by much - it's just 170mAh on top of the Pixel 9 Pro's 4,700mAh. On the 10 non-Pro they managed to fit an extra 270mAh compared to its predecessor, but the 10 Pro couldn't squeeze in quite as much. Either way, it's not a particularly remarkable capacity, especially given the 10 Pro's relative heft.

Google isn't advertising the chemistry in the Pixel 10s' batteries and that (in addition to the capacity and overall weight) leads us to believe they're not using silicon-carbon anodes, but conventional graphite ones. Not very in keeping with the times, is it?

Updated, 28 Oct: We've updated all battery tests after discovering the original lower-than-usual results were caused by excessive location polling by our test automation software. We retested the Pixel 10 Pro with the fix applied and we saw improvements in battery life across the board. The chart below reflects our latest test findings.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

Google rates the Pixel 10 Pro for 30W of charging - or rather, the company states that you'd get up to 55% of charge in 30 minutes when using a 30W charger or higher. Testing with the 30W Google adapter, we got a momentary peak at just under 23W and about 15 minutes in the low 20s in the early stages of the charging process. We were not able to get the promised 55% of charge at the 30th minute.

Updated, 28 Oct: While we used Google's 30W charger for our initial charging tests, we later obtained the recently released 67W dual-port Google charger (Amazon link), which still provided the same peak of 23W as the 30W charger, but for longer. Essentially, with it, the Pixel 10 Pro had a different charging curve than with the 30W Pixel charger, which brought some improvements in charging speed at the 15-minute and 30-minute marks and it allowed us to get pretty close to the promised 55%. We were also able to shave off a few minutes from the time it takes to charge the phone to full (now sitting at 1:28h), but bear in mind it actually took another extra 20+ minutes after that, before the phone's power draw drops below 1W. The chart below reflects our latest test findings.

All in all, the Pixel 10 Pro's charging speed can be best described as quite slow, but at least we were able to match most of Google's charging speed claims.

Qi2 wireless charging

A minor positive point in this section is that there's a new addition to the Pixel featureset with this generation - Qi2 wireless charging with full support for magnetic attachment, which Google has branded Pixelsnap. However, only the 10 Pro XL gets the maximum 25W max Qi2 power rating, while the 10 Pro and the plain 10 are spec'd to support 15W. That said, if watts mean little in wired charging, they sure don't mean much in wireless charging, particularly with Google's approach to charging curves.

We had an aftermarket Qi2 charger at the office, and we'd say that the snap part of Pixelsnap does work great. The speeds we got out of it were predictably not great, but we tend not to be too fixated on wireless charging speeds - it's good enough.

It's worth mentioning that Pixelsnap is compatible with Apple's MagSafe chargers. According to Google's support pages, if you use one of the original MagSafe pucks released in 2020, the maximum power you can expect on any of the Pixel 10s is 5W, but if you have the updated Qi2-compliant 2024 version of Apple's charger, you can reach 15W (with the Pixel 10 Pro XL too). That's provided that you have a powerful enough AC adapter on the other end of the MagSafe puck, of course.

Reverse wireless charging appears to be gone, however - whether it's temporary and will be brought back in with a subsequent update, or that's the way going forward, we're not sure. Charging other devices via cable still works, for what it's worth.

A less-than-positive development that's gotten plenty of ongoing chatter on the internet is the Pixel 10 Series pre-enabled Battery Health assistance feature, which you now can't disable, in contrast to the 9 Pro XL, where you could. Apparently, that started on the Pixel 9a, and Google has turned it into default behavior going forward. The feature should adjust your battery's maximum voltage (read 'capacity'), as well as charging speed, starting after 200 discharge cycles, to prolong the battery's long-term health, supposedly. We don't really like features that you can't turn off, especially ones related to battery performance.

Speaker test

The Pixel 10 Pro uses a stereo speaker arrangement you'd be familiar with from previous generations. There's one bottom-firing unit and another one up top that's facing forward and doubles as an earpiece. The phone will assign the channels dynamically depending on its orientation in space and each speaker will also output the other channel's track as well, at a lower volume.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker/Earpiece

In our testing, the Pixel 10 Pro's numerical integrated loudness result was a little lower than on the previous generation, but it still made it into the 'Very good' category - the iPhone 16 Pro and the Galaxy S25 are in the lower, 'Good' tier.

The Pixel 10 Pro does sound a little different than the Pixel 9 Pro and closer to last year's XL, though it's got its own tuning, after all (very similar to the regular 10, in fact). The 10 Pro does have a stronger low-end presence compared to the 9 Pro while maintaining good vocals reproduction. Not bad overall, though at high levels the iPhone remains more composed and better-sounding to our ears.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.