Google Pixel 4a Review By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review and this is the Google Pixel 4a and for those who don't know the always comes after the not a model, and it's the more affordable one. So we had the 3a and the 3axl last year. This time we don't get an xl option. We just have the 5.8 inch small fella here, and it's 349 dollars, which is pretty mad for what you get we're gonna, look at it now. So what do I mean by that? Well for 349 dollars, you get a phone that works with most all carriers, 4g LTE you're not going to get 5g for this price, and I don't think a lot of people are going to be heartbroken about that just yet either 5g is by far from not ubiquitous yet, but you get an OLED display on this and a reasonably high pixel density to 443 PPI nice looking display. My only complaint is that the auto brightness on is very twitchy.

You can be sitting seemingly almost still in a room, and it just will change itself. Probably they'll fix that with an update, and it's pretty bright, I mean like Dallas Texas, go outdoors in the sunshine. You can still see it bright. You have to enable auto brightness to get the max brightness, which is typical of a lot of phones, but still it's as bright as the iPhone SE that it competes with so good there, and we have a headphone jack yeah that okay, that's not to do with price, but it's just nice to have. But one thing that is nice when you get a pixel you're guaranteed three years of OS updates.

Typically, when you buy an extreme budget phone you might not get any OS updates or at best a year, but probably don't count on anything except for maybe some security updates. So that is nice now looks wise. It's a pixel- and I know, looks- are in the eye of the beholder, but pixels are never really gorgeous. Looking phones, the panda pixel two-tone was one of the exceptions kind of cute. So this is the basic brown paper bag of phones.

Only it's black and that's your only choice, black just black and in fact they call it just black, and it's a plastic back phone and hey for the price. That's fair, and you know what anybody who's dropped. One of the expensive slippery bar of soap. Glass phones might say that this is actually a little more relaxing. You might feel like okay, not using with the case or something like that.

That's fine. It runs android 10 and soon to be android 11 on the snapdragon 730 mid-range CPU. So that's perfectly fine! It's nothing like! It was flagship in terms of speed, but honestly, using this and switching between it and the regular pixel 4, which, with a much faster snapdragon, 855 CPU yeah. I really couldn't tell the difference. It's fast.

It's fluid! That's part of what you get with pixels. You get a nice clean, operating system, thoughtful little customizations here and there and that's about it. So I know, you're not going to regret it in terms of speed unless you're a real 3d game player, if you're into Call of Duty, mobile and all that sort of thing those occasional frame drops might get to you. But I think the smaller screen would probably be an even bigger drawback and that's one thing about this phone. You have to like a small screen to use it and there are people who have small pockets, small hands, small budgets, and they all go together in this phone.

If you're looking to spend around this price in android land in the United States, the OnePlus word's not out, yet it's actually more expensive than this is too, but the Samsung, 851 and a71 will be its closest competitors, the 51 being a little smaller, but both of those are bigger, screen, affordable phones. So worth a look. If you want something with a bigger screen later on in the fall, there will be a 5g version of the pixel for a physical size. Difference, I don't know we'll have a bigger screen probably will run the snapdragon 765g, just like the OnePlus word and of course this ball will also see the pixel 5 models which, hopefully again will come in two sizes. For those like me, who prefer a bigger screen phone, you do get a fingerprint scanner on the back.

I know a lot of people like that. I used to love that instead of some of the more fiddly in-display fingerprint scanners but um, you know I've discovered that I've grown away from it now that I'm going back to it after not using it for a while. But if you like it, it's there, it's a capacitive kind. So it's very fast, it's not being as super secure as the ultrasonic one, but good enough for most people there is no facial recognition scanning login, let alone the very fancy, 3d kind that the regular pixel 4 uses. It's not water resistant, no IP rating on this phone and there's no wireless charging which, for the price, is absolutely fair.

Other creature comforts you might not expect on a phone in this price range or stereo speakers, the earpiece and the bottom firing speaker work together, and you have an always on display and lift to wake for the display too. You've got your usual dual-band: Wi-Fi onboard ac, Bluetooth, 5, l e and NFC for Google Pay and all that sort of thing. But what you really want to know about probably is the cameras, a lot of people who buy pixel phones. Well, they buy them for the cameras. So we have a single shooter on the rear, 12.2 megapixel fairly fast for 1.7 lens on it, and so you're not going to get you've got portrait mode. But you get the old-fashioned kind from a couple of years ago, when we had single lens camera phones right, so you'll see in some portrait mode pictures that it creates artifacts around the edges of things or notches out part of the flower and all that sort of thing compared to the pixel 4, not a which does have the dual lens system for figuring out portrait mode and its head and shoulders better there.

But other than that this takes very competent photos. Then the night mode photos are perfect. As you can see, I'm pretty pleased with those not a lot of noise, but not strangely sharpened or watercolor colorful. The proper amount of illumination to make things look good, but not too artificially over illuminated regular photos, so you're just taking you know the main lens picture, very competent you're not going to get the amount of crystal clarity, maybe that you would get on the pixel force and the sharpness and the dynamic range is a little less, which you can see again on that flower. Comparison set of photos that I provided where the bright spots on the purple flower are a little more vibrant on the pixel 4 versus the fort a bit still for a phone.

That's 349 dollars very good. Now the iPhone SE would be its competitor again in the not just the price range here, but in the Swedish range and also in the camera quality range and the SC is no slouch. It also takes very good photos for its 399 dollar price tag between the SC, and this really, I think, it's mostly which operating system you prefer, with the SC you're, going to get a much faster processor with the apple processor. That's on board, and you'll get a prettier phone, but a more dated looking phone, the Pixel 4a has almost no no bezel, so it looks more modern from the front and since it doesn't have the pixel for its fancy Nancy facial recognition system, it doesn't need that little forehead up top that the pixel 4 has the camera can shoot 4k video, and it's actually pretty good in part because they have both electronic and optical image stabilization. You don't usually see optical image.

Stabilization of this price, so you've got smooth footage relatively good detail again for a phone in this price range fairly. Well done, especially considering pixels really focus on photo quality more than video quality. It's perfectly acceptable. The front camera is an 8 megapixel, there's a little hole, punch cut out for it, and it's f 2.0 lens. It's okay! You know it's adequate.

So how about battery life? That was the Achilles heel of the pixel 4, particularly the 4, and not the 4xl, which had a smaller battery than this one. So here you've got a not very demanding display in terms of resolution and a mid-range CPU and a 3140 William battery. So the recipe is there for pretty good battery life and in fact it is it's not exceptional, like nothing I've ever seen before, but it's quite good. It's certainly iPhone SE territory, and it will match some flagships even because of the less demanding internals. It supports 18 watt fast charging, and you do get the 18 watt fast charger in the box.

So that's the Pixel 4a for 349 dollars, man, it's really hard to do better unless you're an iPhone person, and you want the iPhone SE and as long as you're, okay with a small phone, because these days this size phone seems downright tiny well other than that great for the price, and it should work with any carrier. I'm Lisa from mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tech, videos and thumbs up. If you like this vid.

Source : MobileTechReview