Google Pixel 5A impressions - best mid-range phone? By Tech with Andrei

Hello, everyone, I'm sure we're all familiar with the saying if something's not broke, don't fix it or don't mess with the winning formula, because it sure appears that, though Google is they've, just released their new 585g smartphone, and even if I don't have it, I actually have the next best thing. Last year's 4a5g. Why is this next best thing, because this is basically being carried over this year as the 5a, with some improvements and a price reduction? So let's talk about the pixel 5 a5g, Google's a series of phone have been a tremendous hit with fans over the past few years, with the free, a and 4a carrying the bulk of sales in the pixel lineup, and for good reasons. These phones were always built to the same formula, a minimalist, exterior design coupled with decent internals that give pretty good performance. Great software, coupled with fantastic software support and the best cameras available at that price range, and I have to say I'm glad that google is keeping this line going forward with the pixel 5a being another solid entry into the lineup. Now it effectively replaces both of last year's phones, the 4a and the 485g, with the price traveling the middle between those phones, so the 4a was 350 dollars.

The 45g was 500 the 5a slots almost in the middle at 450 dollars, and I'm saying that it's carrying over a lot of the stuff from the 485d of last year. So, let's check out what the similarities are and also take a look at the improvements that the 5a brings forward. First up in the list of what you're getting is something that you're actually not getting it, which is variety basically, there's going to be one single offering in the entire lineup the 5a in just one configuration and that's as follows: it will carry over the snapdragon 765g from last year, coupled with the same six gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of storage. Google is keeping it fresh with an abundance of colors. Just like the original ford model t over 100 years ago, it's being offered in every single color.

You want as long as that, color is called mostly black. You get the same rear mounted fingerprint sensor, which has been extraordinarily snappy. In my experience, you retain the headphone jack the same speakers of last year. You also retain the same camera setup as last year's 485 g. So basically you get a 16 megapixel ultra-wide and 12 megapixel wide camera setup with an 8 megapixel front-facing camera, which is actually no bad thing just watch my review of the pixel 4 a5g here in 2021.

The camera was, and still is, the main draw of this phone and making it absolutely superb at the price. What where the improvements? Well, you get a slightly larger but vastly same display as before. So it's a 6.34 inch OLED display opposed to last year's 6.2 inch OLED, but retaining the same specs as last year, so basically you're, looking at a 60hz refresh rate and 413 pixels per inch density. Judging by the display quality of the pixel 4a5g, this is going to be an absolutely fine display for most users. Big news is you're getting ip67 water and dust resistance, which granted is not the strongest like the ip68 ratings of most flagship phones these days, but should give you extra peace of mind as the phone will be able to take a splash or two without any sort of issues.

The big news is in the battery department, which is a whopping 20 larger at nearly 4 700 Williams. The battery in the 485g of last year was already decent enough, and this massive jump will make it even more of a battery champion day-to-day usage. So basically, this phone should be able to get you throughout the day without actually breaking a sweat, so you won't actually have to reach for that power. Brick anytime soon and yes, you're going to have to reach for the power brick because there's no wireless charging just like last year, but just like last year, you still get an 18 watt charger in the box, which should be more than enough for everyone. I've seen in various reviews that it should be enough to top up the phone in about two hours time, which is decent clearly, not the fastest fast charging tech out there.

But more than enough for the usage, oh and that power brick, it seems it's actually only going to be coming to the pixel 5 a5g, because google themselves have announced that the pixel 6 won't actually be getting a power brick in the box, which is like mind-boggling. I don't understand this approach. That manufacturers have you get less the more money you spend on a phone, but I digress. Let's go back to the pixel 5a. So what are the big pluses of this phone? Well, the first one is kind of obvious you're, getting absolutely fantastic cameras for the money.

Let's remember that this exact same setup was also part of the pixel 5 last year, and that thing was featured in a million shootouts with the Samsung s21 and the iPhone 12s, and it won some of those, and it lost some of those, but regardless it was definitely a camera system that could hand with the top-of-the-line flagships. So if this camera was competitive against smartphones in the one thousand dollar price bracket, imagine how competitive it's going to be against those at the 400 to 500 brackets. We're talking about the OnePlus note, 2, the Samsung, galaxy a525g or the iPhone SC and against those. The camera is going to look even more impressive than before. So google didn't feel the need to make any sort of improvements here and, to be honest, I think they're right, these cameras are still top-notch even today, you're also getting pretty snappy performance for most day-to-day usage and for light gaming, as well small caveat here.

In my experience at least the android 12 beta running on the exact same hardware and the former a5g has been a bit of a hit-and-miss in terms of experience. There have been quite a few bugs and a lot of app crashes and quite a few slowdowns and lags here and there in the operating system, which I'm honest, I think google will fully address before the full release of android 12. So performance should be snappy enough for pretty much 90, plus percent of users out there. You also get standard android 12, with the added benefits of the pixel range, such as hold my functionality or the call screen functionality. This, coupled with very good software support, so right now on Google's website, the pixel 5a will get support until august 2024, so we're getting three years of full software support for the phone, which is pretty compelling, I think the only other serious competitor in the android market that offers decent software support is Samsung at this point who have announced that their devices will be getting three and four years of software support going forward all in all.

In my eyes this is a fantastic package, a great phone one, that's very easy to recommend to most people, and there are some caveats here, and before we get those. I think it's the perfect time to tell you that if you enjoyed the video and enjoy the content overall, a thumbs up to the video and a sub to the channel would be absolutely amazing and now on to those cons that I'm talking about because again, every product has to have some of those. The first one is about the exterior. The design may not be to everyone's liking, I'm definitely not in that camp, but there's a lot of people who don't like the minimalistic approach and who would consider the exterior to be bland or just downright boring. Now the awful part is the availability, or we should better entitle it.

The unavailability, because you see the pixel 5a will launch in just the United States and Japan and even in the United States, there's going to be limited availability because it's only going to be offered by Google's PHY network or for Google's own store. So it's not going to be available through large carriers such as ATM t or Verizon, and this goes hand in hand with a bit of a software problem. Surprisingly enough, the phone won't include c-band 5g support at a software level. Now, if you don't know what 5g c-band is I'm, including a link to a detailed article in the description of the video below so check that one out, it's basically mid-band, 5g, that's going to be rolled out by 18 Verizon in the coming years and months in the United States, which promises significantly better coverage for 5g, while maintaining very high download speeds. Overall, the fact that this phone will miss out on that is not really a good idea for Google.

I don't understand why they have to do this now. Google is a bit committal about addressing this in a future update. But since it's just a software issue at this point I would say fingers crossed that they actually address it in one of their future software updates. So, overall, what do I think of the pixel 5 a5g? I think this is a very, very solid offering by google a very solid competitor in the cutthroat mid-range market of smartphones in 2021, and I'm happy they made it. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to be a runway success for Google in terms of sales because of those aforementioned availability issues, but critically, if you're in the market, for a mid-range smartphone and the budget that you have kind of matches to that of the pixel 5a, and it's also available in your general area.

I would definitely be considering it and shortlisting it against its competitors, because it's a serious value for money device and one that I can actually recommend very easily without ever actually seeing or holding, because I have its predecessor and if it's anything as good as the 485 g before it, it's going to be a fantastic phone with. That being said, thank you for watching, and I will see you next time.

Source : Tech with Andrei