Google Pixel 4a 5G Review // 1 Month Later By Grant Likes Tech

How's, everyone grants here welcome back to grant likes tech where I share with you tech that I like- and this is my one month- review of the pixel 4 a5g- it retails for 699 here in the US, but they are occasional deals as usual for most phones there's a lot to cover. So, let's just dive right in first. Let's talk about the hardware. The pixel 4 a5g has a plastic frame and back the back is a nice smooth flat black finish and feels nice to the touch. However, it does pick up its fair share of fingerprints. It also has a physical fingerprint sensor, which other high-end phones have been removing in favor of under display sensors.

I personally prefer a physical sensor, as I find them easier to locate and typically more reliable. The buttons are easy to find by feel and are nice to click, but they're, also a bit loose, there's also a headphone jack, which also has been going extinct on higher end phones and still important to a lot of people if you simply want to just plug and play and not deal with always charging Bluetooth, earbuds or headphones along with any kind of connectivity issues. Unfortunately, Google had to cut corners to hit this lower price point compared to the one thousand dollar plus competitors. So in addition to being plastic, there is also no IP rating for water and dust resistance, no wireless or reverse charging and no face unlock, which may not be as big of a deal to many people. Given the current pandemic.

Moving on to the display, it's a 6.2 inch, OLED HDR screen at 60 hertz, it's nice, but the pixel 5's 90 hertz higher refresh rate is noticeably smoother. The display has a warmer color tone and there are no detailed settings to calibrate this. Changing the colors to natural or balanced doesn't help much either compared to a much cooler lcd like this one. From the Redmi Note 9 pro 5g, you can clearly see the difference overall, it's bright enough for indoor use, but I keep mine set to around 70, so it gets difficult to view in direct sunlight, especially at tougher viewing angles which tends to happen for me, while taking photos outdoors and trying to angle the phones to get certain shots, there are other options for always on display tap to wake and raise to wake the phone. You can also have it turn on the display when new notifications come in, but I leave this off to save battery.

Overall, it's a very nice display for viewing content. Let me keep a video and play a sample, so you can see for yourself and listen to the speakers. Also note, auto rotate is a bit slow and the January feature drop. Update doesn't really seem to improve this now. As far as audio, there are no options for enhanced sound, like Dolby audio or to set equalizer settings.

However, there is an option for adaptive sound, which is meant to improve the speaker: sound quality, here's a few audio samples for you to listen. Lets to so okay now, let's talk performance. The pixel 4 a5g has a snapdragon 765 chipsets, and it feels very snappy for everyday tasks. As you can see, there's no recent apps in the menu here. So let's go ahead and fire up twitter.

You can see the load times here, loads up pretty quickly. I can scroll through it. Scrolling is pretty nice and smooth. We can go really fast, although I don't think you do that under normal use, but just basic scrolling, you can see it's very fast, fluid no problems there. Now, let's fire up, Instagram, see that load, and we'd scroll through and that's pretty smooth.

No problems launch is just fine YouTube. Same thing, launch is fine, looks pretty good, and we can go to subscriptions here and scroll through all that looks very fast, very fluid. Now, let's fire up something different, like maybe ESPN, see how this loads go browse through some recent apps develop just fine, so basic tasks are just fine. Let's check some web browsing go to GSM arena, so a page loads up quickly and scroll through that. Maybe click on an article here.

Let that load up very fast to load overall, fairly, smooth, no problem scrolling, so everyday performance using basic apps like this you're not going to have any problems. Moving on to software, it's running pure android from Google, and as of this recording, it is on android 11 with the January security patch. What's nice about pixels is that Google focuses on making new features backwards compatible with previous pixel phones as long as the hardware supports them as far as features from Google, there is the Google Assistant, which can be activated with the voice, keyword or other ways like swiping up from the bottom corners. What can you do? Personally? I rarely use it, but you may find it useful if you like hands-free operation. It also has the ability to screen calls which can be useful for unknown numbers to screen.

Robocalls marketing, cold calls, etc. Here's a demo of how this works, the person you've reached, is using a screening service from Google and will get a recording and transcript of this call go ahead and say why you're calling he owes me money. It's difficult to understand you at the moment. Did you repeat what you just said? You better put him on the line. They can't talk right now, but try calling them back later.

Thanks and goodbye. There's also the hold for me feature where the phone assistant can wait on the line for you and let you know when an actual person is ready to speak with you. Here's a brief demo T-Mobile. I'm not gonna, actually wait for a person to come online, but when it would,, they'll, let you know- and you can return to the call just like this or say I don't have one there's, also a pretty cool recorder app that is exclusive to pixels, that can transcribe speech to text, which is very useful to record a script, an interview or just dictate a document. Now, while there are several third-party apps to do this, google also added other helpful features like text correction, to change or remove one word at a time in the transcript you can even edit the voice recording by editing the transcript itself, there's also smart scrolling, which uses on-device machine learning to detect keywords and show them while scrolling to navigate the transcript easier.

Lastly, if you have a long transcript, you can easily convert a recorded clip into a video file to quickly share on social media. There are also notable safety features on the pixels to detect a car crash and automatically notify your emergency contacts, along with periodic safety check-ins, which is useful if you feel like you're in an unsafe location as well, auto notify your emergency contacts. If you fail to respond to any of the check-ins one software feature, I'm hoping eventually makes it to pure stock android is scrolling. Screenshots having to take multiple screenshots can be a pain now onto my favorite feature, which are the cameras. The 485g has a 12.2 megapixel main wide camera, with an aperture of f over 1.7 and produces 1.4 micron size pixels, the larger the pixels, the more light generally resulting in better photos.1.4 microns are standard on the lens the size and something around 1.6.1.7 microns is large, there's also dual pixel autofocus and optical image. Stabilization.

It shoots up to 4k 60 frames per second video as well. There's also a 16 megapixel ultra-wide angle, camera with an aperture of f over 2.2 with a 107 degree field of view, which is fairly narrow for such an ultra-wide angle, camera the ultra-wide can shoot 4k 30 frames per second, but unfortunately not 4k 60. Sadly, the 4a5 g doesn't have a telephoto lens either the front camera is 8 megapixels with an aperture of f over 2.0, but is 24 millimeters wide, which is just wide enough, but does not have an ultra-wide angle lens, like previous pixel 3 and 3 XL phones. Let's take a look at the camera app which has a new interface. You can see the quick access to switching from the main lens to the ultra-wide and two times zoom.

It also has multiple stabilization modes, notably active mode for supper, steady, video and cinematic pan. To get those nice steady, sweeping cinematic shots night sight also works on all lenses now and even in portrait mode. Unfortunately, the exposure length isn't adjustable in case. You want to dial that back just a bit. There are some nice enhancements to the photosap for editing.

There is a new portrait light feature where you can move around the lighting effect and adjust the intensity. Also, the pixel no longer takes two separate images in portrait mode, one width and one without the portrait effect it now just takes one portrait shot. This is where the other change helps, which is the ability to adjust the amount of background blur. So you can completely remove that blur. If you want pixel cameras are widely known as some of the best smartphone cameras for good reason.

Google's computational photography is pretty much unmatched and can give you very good and consistent point and shoot photos. Also. The video quality is noticeably improved here. The colors used to be washed out and that's no longer the case. I have photoed and video samples in my camera comparison video, which I'll link in the description.

Should you choose to watch that? But here are a few samples for you to check out yeah, so the cameras are great, but what about the battery life? The pixel has its adaptive battery feature to help you maximize the battery based on your usage over time. It also has adaptive charging to help prolong the battery health by not constantly charging overnight and charging the last few percent before you wake up. As for the battery life, based on my usage, I'm getting about six to seven hours of screen on time with, over a day off the charger with heavy camera use, I typically get about eight to nine hours of screen on time with over two to three days off the charger, with normal use, doing things like checking, email browsing, the web, using social media like Twitter and Instagram and watching YouTube. I got up to 10 hours of screen on time with heavy YouTube viewing. This has pretty much been my experience and yours could be a little different based on your personal usage.

Lastly, basic connectivity has been good phone calls are just fine. The pixel has Wi-Fi calling and voice over LTE and text. Messaging has been just fine as well. It also has NFC for contactless payments, it supports dual-band Wi-Fi and, of course, 5g now.5G in the US hasn't reached nearly its full potential and coverage heavily varies by wireless carrier and where you're located, but this has been my 5g spirits here in the San Francisco Bay Area with Google phi everyone. So, let's wrap up this review of the pixel 4 a5g.

Let's start off with the pros number one: it's got a physical fingerprint sensor, which I personally prefer. I find it to be more reliable and just easier to use and feel for than an under display. One number two: it's got a headphone jack which gives you much more flexibility in your audio listening needs. It also runs stock android for much cleaner and smoother software experience, and you get regular updates. There's also some good camera improvements here, like additional stabilization modes for active and cinematic pen, there is also automatic night mode on all camera lenses and even in portrait mode, and lastly, it has great battery life, I'm personally getting anywhere between eight and ten hours of screen on time with about two to three days off the charger which I think is really great.

Of course, your mileage may vary here. Of course, no phone is perfect, so let's go through some cons number one. There is no high refresh rate display. There were a lot of inexpensive phones in 2020 that came out with high refresh rate displays. There is no face unlock and the screen gets a little dim in direct sunlight.

They also remove the telephoto lens here, and you cannot shoot in 4k in the front-facing camera and, lastly, night mode is not adjustable meaning you cannot adjust the exposure length, so you're just going to have to take whatever google's algorithm decides. So that's been my review of the pixel 4 a5g after about a month. Let me know in the comments, if you have any other questions, also, if you have a pixel, 4 a5g, let me know what your experience has been. I'm always interested to hear and as always thanks for watching you.

Source : Grant Likes Tech