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It’s not surprising that the most exciting parts of thePixel 9are the phone’s newexclusive AI features, but there are more than a few quality of life tweaks Google made to its new smartphones that are worth mentioning too. One of the most helpful is Adaptive Touch, asspotted by Android Authority, which makes your phone more useful if you’re using it with wet hands or while it’s raining.
Touchscreens make smartphones incredibly versatile, but also more vulnerable to damage and the outside elements. You wouldn’t have to worry about pushing any buttons when your phone was mostly just physical buttons, but when everything is software, suddenly the touches your phone is able to detect really matter. Adaptive Touch is a small tweak that should make your inputs register more often.
Intelligent touch sensitivity adjustments don’t quite make a headline pop likeAI, so I understand why Google didn’t lead with it, but that doesn’t mean Adaptive Touch isn’t worth exploring. It’s useful enough that Google has it enabled by default on all new Pixel 9 phones, so it’s got to be worth something. And as someone who, whether for work or travel, has tried and failed to use a touchscreen with hands of varying degrees of wetness and stickiness in a variety of different settings, I was eager to see how Adaptive Touch fared compared toGoogle’s older phones.
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The new Google Pixel 9 phones have some exclusive AI features.
Adaptive Touch makes using your phone with wet hands possible
Google somehow makes things work smoothly
References to Adaptive Touchappeared in earlier Android 14 releases and the feature as presented on the Pixel 9 is relatively unchanged.
You’ll find it toggled on if you head into the touch sensitivity section of your Pixel 9’s display settings. In Google’s simple description, when Adaptive Touch is enabled, “touch sensitivity will automatically adjust to your environment, activities, and screen protector.”
To enable or disable Adaptive Touch on your new Pixel 9:
Android has let you adjust the sensitivity of your touchscreen for a while now, and there’s even a feature called “screen protector mode” which just boosts touch sensitivity for phones with a screen protector applied, so the premise of Google’s new feature is familiar. Adaptive Touch is different because its apparently adjusting sensitivity on the fly based on what it determines is necessary. It’s unclear how many of the Pixel 9’s existing sensors are pulled in to make these determinations versus the phone just observing you’re having a harder time tapping and scrolling through Android, but it’s a clever little feature all the same.
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Google’s new Pixel 9 flagship starts at $799, and is available now for pre-order.
Adaptive Touch works surprisingly well
I wanted to get a clear illustration of how a Pixel 9 handles being wet versus Google’s older phones, so I filled up a bowl of water and splashed some on my hands before using a Pixel 9 and a Pixel 7. Google’s olderPixel 7had the same kind of struggles I’d seen on other phones. It could detect my taps sometimes, but movements were jittery and phantom taps were common. Worse, the more I inadvertently spread water around the screen by trying to use the phone, the worse it generally got.
Even though the Pixel 9 is rated IP68, you should still be careful getting it wet. It’s not meant to be submerged for more than 30 minutes!
The Pixel 9 fared much better and felt a lot more like using my phone with dry hands. Taps registered correctly, swipes were possible, and in general the phone felt like I wasn’t having to fight with it. Longer movements, like swiping from the bottom of a long list to the top, felt a little more rigid, but they also happened without issues, unlike when I was using the Pixel 7. That feels like a win for Adaptive Touch.
To get ahead of any potential issues, Google did change displays between the Pixel 7 and Pixel 8, the true predecessor to the Pixel 9. The Pixel 7 uses 6.3-inch OLED with a resolution of 1,080 x 2,400. The Pixel 8 uses Google’s Actua display, which is also an FHD+ OLED, but 6.2-inches in size and with a faster, up to 120Hz refresh rate. The differences between the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 9 are even slimmer, with the Pixel 9’s display mainly being brighter than the Pixel 8.
Taps registered correctly, swipes were possible, and in general the phone felt like I wasn’t having to fight with it.
It’s not clear whether any of these hardware differences contribute to where Adaptive Touch is available and how well it works. Google doesn’t publish information about the touch sensors it uses in its phones, but if there was something hardware-related making this feature possible, it would be in the touch layer rather than the display. More than likely, this software toggle is a software feature at its core and Google has just gotten much better at predicting the conditions of your touchscreen over the last few years of making phones.
Touchscreens are finicky, but Adaptive Touch helps
If you’ve ever reached out of the shower to answer a call or switch the song playing on a Bluetooth speaker, you know using your phone with wet hands sucks. The capacitive touchscreens most modern electronics use rely on your finger completing an electric circuit to detect your touch, something the natural conductivity of water easily confuses. If you’ve seen your phone freak out or detect phantom taps when you accidentally get it wet, that’s usually why.
Pixel 9 features a 6.3-inch display and a familiar design. It supports the addition of a 48-megapixel ultrawide lens to its rear camera array alongside Google Gemini and AI features.
Removing or at least alleviating that behavior is a small thing, but it could go a long way to making Pixel 9 phones helpful where other phones aren’t. Further testing in rain and snow is necessary, but for now it seems like new Pixel 9 owners should be glad Adaptive Touch is toggled on. The Pixel 9 mightput other AI-enabled phones to shame, but it’s also just a nice phone too, thanks to features like this.
