Pixel 10 Pro XL users facing audio recording issues, here's the reason

The Pixel 10 series was unveiled on August 20 and from an overall design perspective, it seems not much has changed compared to the Pixel 9 series. The base Pixel 10 does get an additional camera at the back but that’s about it. That being said, some users of the Pixel 10 Pro XL (buy on Amazon) were noticing audio recording issues while making videos. Turns out, Google did make a small design change with the Pixel 10 Pro XL that ended up causing the issue.

As noted by Android Police’s Artem Russakovskii, their Pixel 10 Pro XL showed some audio irregularities when recording videos. Upong speaking with some Google employees, they found that the speaker and mic at the bottom of the Pixel 10 Pro XL were swapped, compared to the Pixel 9 Pro XL. Google did this to ensure that sound wasn’t blocked or muffled when gaming in landscape mode. However, this led to the mic being blocked or partially covered when recording videos in landscape, hence the audio issues.

A simple fix would be to just be more careful about hand positioning while recording videos in landscape. Another fix would be rotating the phone 180 degrees so that the mic isn’t covered by the palm. However, as pointed out by Artem, this would be quite awkward for right-handed users.

The speaker and mic swap is not a big deal, and not at all significant enough to sway customers away from the Pixel 10 Pro XL. That’s not the only issue with the phone though, as the Tensor G5 powering the entire lineup has shown underwhelming performance, especially on the GPU end. That being said, it was recently reported that there could be a simple fix with a driver update that may unlock the full potential of the chip. Additionally, this year, the phones are much easier to disassemble and repair, so that's definitely a plus.