AI News Feed
Market watch
LG UltraFine Evo 32U990A-S Hits Record-Low $1,099 on Amazon, TechRadar ReportsNewegg Labor Day Deal: 32GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR4-3200 Kit Nearly Half Price at $179.99 with CodeGalaxy Z Fold 8 inner screen corners reported with excessive giveHuawei unveils Mate XT 2 tri-fold with privacy-screen edition as Apple prepares folding iPhoneWall Street Analysts Recommend Nvidia, Uber and Marvell for Long-Term GrowthLenovo, AMD and Huawei Put Local Large-Model AI at Center of New Devices
LG UltraFine Evo 32U990A-S Hits Record-Low $1,099 on Amazon, TechRadar ReportsNewegg Labor Day Deal: 32GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR4-3200 Kit Nearly Half Price at $179.99 with CodeGalaxy Z Fold 8 inner screen corners reported with excessive giveHuawei unveils Mate XT 2 tri-fold with privacy-screen edition as Apple prepares folding iPhoneWall Street Analysts Recommend Nvidia, Uber and Marvell for Long-Term GrowthLenovo, AMD and Huawei Put Local Large-Model AI at Center of New Devices
Products & Applications

Android Authority: Pixel 11 Pro XL's HiLight feature is a promising idea ruined by confusing setup and glitches

Android Authority reports Google's Pixel 11 Pro XL HiLight feature is frustrating to set up and unreliable, despite a promising concept.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-26 19:50

The reviewer said they had only used the Pixel 11 Pro XL for a few days, and HiLight was already enabled by default. Expecting to spend a couple of minutes assigning different colors to friends and family, they instead found the customization process to be a confusing mess. To change a contact's HiLight color, a user must leave the Settings app, open the Contacts app, find the person, and make the change there. The reviewer questioned why they had to bounce between two apps for such a simple task and noted they had to look up instructions before getting it working.

The same difficulty was confirmed by a second user: the reviewer handed the phone to their father, who is comfortable with technology, and asked him to set a custom color for one contact. He could not figure it out either. "If both of us had to hunt for instructions, I'd say Google has made this harder than it needs to be," the review said.

More seriously, the Gemini-related part of HiLight stopped working on the reviewer's unit. A colleague encountered the same issue and fixed it by toggling the Gemini option off and back on, then restarting the phone. The same fix did not work on the reviewer's Pixel 11 Pro XL, which still refused to respond. Other colleagues using the Pixel 11 Pro were not having the issue at all.

The reviewer found a Reddit user with a Pixel 11 Pro XL describing nearly the same problem: HiLight still worked for favorite callers, but Gemini no longer triggered it when the phone was face down. The user also tried toggling the setting and restarting, with no luck. According to that poster, Google Support said it could be a server-side sync issue. Another person in the same thread said neither Gemini nor HiLight for favorite callers was working on their device.

Despite the complaints, the reviewer said they do not hate HiLight. They called it a genuinely great idea to bring back something like the notification LED, especially for people who keep their phones face down most of the time. The reviewer added that they want HiLight to do more, and that is why its current limitations and unreliability bother them so much.