With the Pixel 7 Pro greedily snaffling all the major upgrades, it’s no surprise that this is the phone Google wants you to buy in 2022. Like a regular Pixel 7, but better in a number of ways, the Pro model is pretty much everything you can expect from a flagship Pixel – and it’ll be in UK shops very soon.

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Announced alongside the Pixel Watch during Google’s annual unveiling event, the Pixel 7 Pro contains a number of exclusive features, including a larger, higher resolution screen, an extra rear camera and a bigger battery. These upgrades will cost you, however, with the Pixel 7 Pro costing £150 more than the regular model.

But what do you get for your £849? The headline addition this year is the introduction of Google’s second-generation Tensor G2 chipset – the successor to the first Google-made CPU found inside last year’s Pixel 6 Pro. It promises a handful of performance and efficiency improvements, thanks to a boosted maximum clock speed and more efficient 4nm fabrication process. The on-chip AI and machine learning algorithms are said to be much better, too.

The Titan M2 security chip returns and you can finally unlock the phone using facial biometrics. This was a feature that was absent on previous Pixel phones, and Google is also throwing in free VPN access via Google One (after launch) as well as promising at least five years of monthly security updates.

Google has tweaked the overall design of the Pixel 7 Pro, although the controversial chunky horizontal camera bar on the rear has returned for a second year. It looks a smidge different with its pill-shaped camera enclosure, but it’s much the same as before. The 100% recycled “zirconia-blasted aluminium finish” is new for this year, but outside of Google’s press images there’s not a whole lot that suggests this looks and feels any different to previous models.

There are a selection of new colours to choose from including ‘Obsidian’ and ‘Snow’, with the gold-tinted ‘Hazel’ model being exclusive to the ‘Pro’ version. The phone can be picked up with either 128GB, 256GB or 512GB of internal storage, but these aren’t expandable. You’ll get 12GB of RAM no matter which model you choose – the regular Pixel 7 has 8GB.

Predictably, the Pixel 7 Pro is the bigger phone of the two, with a 6.7in OLED display. The panel is also higher resolution than the normal Pixel 7 – QHD+ compared to FHD+ – and has a smoother refresh rate at 120Hz. At the event, Google said that both displays are 25% brighter than last year’s versions.

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The Pixel 7 Pro’s camera setup is slightly different, too. The 50MP main and 12MP ultrawide are the same as those found on the regular Pixel 7, but the Pro model has an additional 48MP 5x telephoto sensor. The biggest zoom on a Pixel yet, the 7 Pro is capable of hybrid zooming all the way up to 30x, with some rather interesting camera trickery filling in the gaps.

According to Google, anything captured between 1x and 5x zoom uses combined images taken on both the main and telephoto lens. Pictures taken above 10x use the same technique while also cropping into the centre of the optical zoom camera. This is thanks to new upscaling models courtesy of the Tensor G2, which Google says now rivals the quality of a dedicated 10x optical zoom lens.

Google’s video stabilisation tech is now also employed for photos, supposedly providing superior subject tracking at these higher zoom levels. The Pixel’s Photo Unblur feature has been expanded, too, allowing you to de-smudge faces in images you’ve taken on previous phones in the Google Photos app. The phone’s Real Tone facial filters are also more accurate.

The Pixel 7 Pro’s low-light shooting has seen a major improvement, with reduced visual noise and motion blur courtesy of a two times’ faster image capture via Night Sight. Video-wise, all cameras (including the selfie) can record at up to 4K resolution at 60fps, and you can record footage on both the front and rear cameras simultaneously.

Recording via the rear camera now gives you the option to apply a shallow depth of field courtesy of a new ‘Cinematic Blur’ feature, which also records at a movie-like frame rate of 24fps. 10-bit HDR is also available, with image stability improvements, and enhanced speech pickup prioritises subject audio over background noise.

The Pixel 7 Pro is available to preorder right now from £849, arriving in the UK on 13 October.

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