Okay so I've had the Pixel 7 Pro for a little over a week now — picked it up the Thursday after launch, not on the actual release day because I was stuck in back-to-back meetings and didn't get to the Google Store on 5th Ave until closer to 6pm, by which point the guy behind the counter looked like he'd said "Tensor G2" about four hundred times already that day. Paid $899 for the 128GB Hazel one. No charger in the box, obviously, because apparently that's just how phones work now and we've all collectively decided to be fine with it.
First impression: this thing is heavy. Heavier than I expected going in, and I knew the spec sheet number (212 grams) before I bought it. It's the camera bar doing it, I think — that big black strip across the back isn't just a design flourish, there's a lot of actual hardware packed in there and you feel it the second you pick the phone up one-handed off a table. My old phone would slide around my desk when I typed on it. This one just sits there like a paperweight. I don't hate it, but my thumb has had to relearn where the power button lives about six separate times this week.
The camera is the reason I bought it, honestly. I'd been on a Pixel 6 for about a year and the jump to the 7 Pro's 48MP telephoto with the 5x optical zoom is the kind of upgrade you notice immediately, not the kind you have to squint at a spec sheet to justify. I took a shot of my kid's soccer game last Saturday from the sideline, zoomed in on a kid who was basically a dot to my eyeballs, and got a photo sharp enough that you could read the number on his jersey. That's not marketing copy, that's just what happened standing on a field in Queens at 10am.
Photo Unblur is the feature I didn't expect to care about and now use constantly. I've got a folder of old blurry photos going back to like 2015 (birthday candles, a dog mid-shake, that kind of thing) and running a few of them through it has been weirdly satisfying, in the same way cleaning out a junk drawer is satisfying. It doesn't work miracles on everything. A photo that's badly out of focus stays badly out of focus. But motion blur, the stuff you get from a kid or a dog moving too fast for the shutter, that it handles better than I thought software alone could.
Battery life is fine. Not great, not bad. I'm getting through a full day of fairly heavy use (podcasts on the subway, camera use, Slack open basically nonstop for work) and landing around 15-20% by the time I plug it in around 11pm. That's roughly the same as the 6 was for me, so if you were hoping Tensor G2 was going to be some huge efficiency leap, it isn't, at least not in my experience so far.
The thing that's actually bugging me, and this is a small complaint but it's mine: the fingerprint sensor under the screen is noticeably slower and less reliable than the one on my old phone, especially with cold hands, and it's been in the 40s here in the mornings this week. I've missed the unlock and had to try twice probably a dozen times already. It's not a dealbreaker. It's just the kind of small daily friction that makes a phone feel less finished than the rest of it suggests it should be.
A friend of mine grabbed the Pixel Watch the same day I got the phone, and watching him charge it every single night (the battery on that thing is rough, by his account) has made me feel pretty good about not being an early adopter on two fronts at once. One new gadget habit at a time is plenty.
Anyway. Nine days in, I'd buy it again, camera bar and cold-finger fingerprint sensor and all. Ask me again in a month once the novelty's worn off and see if I still feel that way.