I've owned my Pixel 8 Pro for almost a year and a half now and I definitely have some mixed thoughts about it it, but it has been mostly a positive experience, here's my takes below:

Positive:

• Google's software experience is pretty great. The UI works well for me and looks refined, and I'm actually quite excited about Material 3 Expressive. There are lots of useful features like Now Playing, Call Screening, Hold For Me, Recorder labels, Quick phrases, Assistant typing and copying text from the recent apps screen are my most used features and work very well.

• Software support is good, but not great. We're already seeing a pretty segmentation between the 8 and 9 series with the 8s not getting the improved battery health feature, but updates are quick, usually free from new bugs and don't break the phone. Hopefully Google can manage 7 years of updates, but I doubt I'll have this phone that long.

• The build quality is again, good but not great. I've used one of the Google cases for the entire time I've had the phone so it isn't exposed aside from the camera bar. The camera bar picks up scratches and nicks here and there, but it is what it is. The phone feels good in hand with the matte glass back and I love how it feels when I take it out of the case to clean it.

• The phone is very quick and smooth in day to day processes and it's very rare for it to slow down or get bogged down. It occasionally reloads apps that should be in memory, but nothing terrible.

• The camera is extremely good, the high point really. I've seen some complaints about the Pixel processing, but I quite like the look and the color theory Google uses for their processing. Video doesn't stabilize super well, and anything more than 20x zoom doesn't look amazing, but it's passable. Either way, it takes very good shots with little motion blur or other issues, and it's quite reliable.

Neutral:

• The modem certainly had it's issues. My wife and I used the same carrier and she routinely had service when I don't with her iPhone 13, but I've also had service a few times when she doesn't. Kind of a wash I guess, but this phone gets really hot when connected to 5G. If I worked outside and my phone was constantly connected to data, this would likely be more of a problem, but it isn't a deal breaker.

• Certain apps certainly don't seem to be well optimized such as Reddit, Firefox and some other apps seem to stutter a bit more and are just less polished than they were on my old S21+ but I may be misremembering. Not sure if this is an app issue, but I never really noticed any janky scrolling or performance on that phone.

• Bugs have been rampant. The phone occasionally has a moment where it seems like it reboots the system without rebooting the phone, something like that? Adaptive brightness sometimes sets the brightness super low in bright environments and super high in dim environments. Sometimes the phone dies at any percentage under 10%. Back gesture sometimes just doesn't work for a minute or so and I have to go to the home screen and close the app, is usually starts working again. Annoying stuff, but nothing terribly deal breaking.

Negative:

• Battery life started out really good, but it has really tanked in recent months. For my usage (lots of YouTube, Spotify, very light gaming, browsing, Reddit and other social media), I could consistently manage to get to the middle of a 2nd day with around 8 hours of screen time on Wi-Fi. Nowadays, it needs to be charged after a day of use and 4-6 hours of screen time. Runtime on Data is pretty short.

• This phone can get toasty. Especially on 5G, it gets quite warm to the point where it's hard to hold. Sometimes it gets really warm on Wi-Fi if I've been scrolling in Chrome for a while. Trying to play games is difficult as it heats up quick.

• The price was too high. With almost high mid-range specs and processors, the P8P would be a more reasonable buy at $700-800 brand new, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I spend $1100-1200 on a Pixel with mid specs.

Overall, this has been a good phone with some notable issues. Nothing is perfect, and I don't expect it to be, but I'm certainly considering another brand for my next phone, maybe OnePlus or Samsung? I don't know yet, but I'm also not in a rush to get rid of my P8P. It's a perfectly reasonable, mid phone with a fantastic camera.