The Pixel 9 Pro XL, or the newest face of “What is a photo?” | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
I played a new kind of AR Pac-Man game yesterday, guiding a circle on a phone screen toward a series of little dots that seemed to hover around a conference room. In this version, you don’t level up when you finish; instead, you get a panoramic photo.
I got to spend a couple of hours using the Pixel 9 Pro XL on the eve of Google’s annual hardware event. Becca got to play with the new phones, too, and you can check out her impressions in the video below. And while my time was focused on the 9 Pro XL, it shares all of its camera features and hardware with the smaller Pixel 9 Pro. The standard Pixel 9 comes with a lot of the same capabilities — including the new panorama mode — though not all of them.
The updated panorama interface I played…
