If you're a fan of massive, protruding camera bumps, this is the phone for you!
(Image credit: Google)
The Pixel 9 Pro is coming next month, but in a new teaser video Google has given us a sneak peak of the phone's final design, and it's not pretty. Back in January the first unofficial renders of the Pixel 9 Pro appeared, showing the phone's possible new design. Though they came from a reliable source, the new camera island was so butt-ugly that I for one assumed that the renders must have been of some sort of prototype design, such was the 'tacked-on' look of the phone's camera bump. The final retail phone would surely have this integrated more neatly into the rest of the back panel, right?
Past leaked images like this appear to have been accurate - the Pixel 9 Pro's camera island really does protrude this much (Image credit: Rozetked)
Wrong. The renders were correct, the phone featured in them wasn't a prototype, and that hideous camera wart actually got the official sign-off from management.
As for what the bump contains, well that's likely to be a triple camera array with a trio of 50MP modules. The primary, wide-angle camera looks set to be based around Samsung's 1/1.31" GNK sensor, while both the ultrawide and telephoto modules could uses a Sony IMX858 sensor measuring 1/2.51" - itself slightly larger than the 1/2.8" Sony IMX386 chip used in the Pixel 8 Pro. Judging by the slightly rectangular lens cut-out in the camera bump, the telephoto module could also use a periscope lens, potentially enabling 5x optical zoom. The Pixel 9 series is also said to be the first Pixel generation to enable 8K video recording.
We'll have to wait until Google's official Pixel 9 Pro launch on August 13 to know more.
Ben is the Imaging Labs manager, responsible for all the testing on Digital Camera World and across the entire photography portfolio at Future. Whether he's in the lab testing the sharpness of new lenses, the resolution of the latest image sensors, the zoom range of monster bridge cameras or even the latest camera phones, Ben is our go-to guy for technical insight. He's also the team's man-at-arms when it comes to camera bags, filters, memory cards, and all manner of camera accessories – his lab is a bit like the Batcave of photography! With years of experience trialling and testing kit, he's a human encyclopedia of benchmarks when it comes to recommending the best buys.
