Google's new product Pixel 4a Is it worthy?
This finally is the Pixel 4a. But before we can talk about
the Pixel 4a, We have to talk about timing. This phone isn't shipping until
August 20th. Which is super late. Google says it's because the coronavirus kept
it from finishing the final stages of design and manufacturing. But whatever,
because this phone is coming up so late, Google knows that it could conflict
with other phones that it's gonna release.
It's pre-announcing the Pixel 4a 5G. Which is gonna cost
$499 and the Pixel 5 which is gonna cost, I don't know. And literally, that's
all we know about those phones, but right now we have the Pixel 4a and it only
costs $349.
In addition, I would use it. It is really pretty good. It is
just a little basic, there are no frills. There is nothing fancy on it, pike at
all, but there is no weird software and it's not too big.
This is actually the most basic Android phone that you can
get. In addition, there is nothing wrong with basic. Okay, let us just give you
the basics of what this phone is. I just said basics again. I am gonna say
basics a lot in this post. I am gonna try and just turn that up down a little
bit. We will see how I do. Let us just
do it right at the top. Let's see: Top 10 Google Pixel Mobile Phone in 2020
Specifications:
Let's talk about the camera:
It is good. There is a single 12.2-megapixel camera on the
back with optical image stabilization and the front camera is 8.0 megapixels
inside a little hole punch. Google's camera hardware is never anything special
though because the focus is always on making better use of that hardware with
computational photography.
So I compared the Pixel 4a which costs $349 to Pixel 4 which
costs $800, it's a lot for a Pixel 4, and the iPhone SE which costs $400. In
addition, the results are that the Pixel 4a's photos are almost
indistinguishable from Pixel 4 in almost all cases.
It is good in low light; it is good with night sight. It is
good at HDR; it is solid at zoom. In addition, it has that super contrast Pixel
look. Now the iPhone SE does give some warmer colors, which some people like,
but in general, I will take the 4a, especially in low light. Do I wish that
Google had put a wide-angle or a telephoto lens on the 4a?
Well, yeah, but those secondary cameras are usually worse
than the main sensor, especially on inexpensive phones. Therefore, Google just
left them out, but that does have one weird side effect.
When you go into portrait mode on the 4a, it has to do this aggressive
2-x crop to make the portrait stuff work with the Pixel's math. Other than that
portrait mode is what you would expect. Moreover, speaking of math, there is no
extra image processor on the Pixel 4a like there is on the Pixel 4.
Therefore, images do take longer to process. If you take a
photo and then jump right into the gallery, you are gonna have to wait for a
beat for the image to fix itself. If taking video is more important to you than
getting great still photos, you might be better off with iPhone SE.
In general, I do still prefer these still photos of the
Pixel than I do on the iPhone. A $350 phone can go toe to toe with cameras that
cost like, I do not know, $1,200. That is still amazing. Now the rest of this
phone is not amazing as the camera, but the Pixel 4a does get almost all of the
basics right.
About the Design:
Okay, there is only one size. It has a 5.8-inch screen with
a whole punch and it's OLED at 1080p. There is a fingerprint sensor on the back
and there is that one camera with a flash on the back, one camera on the front,
and a headphone jack, hooray! As you can see just by looking at it, it looks simple.
It has a plastic body and it has corning Gorilla Glass 3 on
the screen, which is kind of a throwback, we are coming up on Gorilla Glass 7.
I do not know, whatever, it's really well-built, there's no flex to it. And
maybe it's because it's the same size as regular iPhones have been all the way
back to the iPhone 6. However, if you do not like big phones, he feels like the
size of the phone.
This feels like a good size for me. You can get any color
that you want as long as it is black. Google likes to use cute names for its
phone colors, and it always calls the black ones just black. Moreover, yeah,
this phone is available just in black. You have stereo speakers on the earpiece
here and one on the bottom.
Hardware:
It has 6 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage. Actually that
128 is important. You cannot expand it, but it is double what the base $399
iPhone SE has. So technically the Pixel 4a is 100 bucks less than the
equivalent 128-gig iPhone SE.
The screen quality on the Pixel 4a is fine. It used to be
super rare to be able to get OLED at this price point, but that is changing a
little bit. Moreover, I think this OLED looks good. It is obviously not the
best one that I've ever seen. The color skews a little bit warm in certain
lighting conditions.
It is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G. The G stands for faster
graphics. Moreover, I think this draws less power than a Snapdragon 865 with a
5G modem. This is also not a 5G phone, by the way.
However, does that processor make the Pixel 4a slow?
I can see it, sometimes it happens to take a beat longer to
open, and sometimes scrolling in Chrome is gonna feel a little bit junky, but
it's not terrible. In addition, this phone feels a lot smoother than the
Samsung Galaxy A51, which is like kind of in the same class here.
Smoother is the key thing because this is using Google's
version of Android. Which is super clean, super easy to get around. It does not
have a bunch of extra crap that you do not want.
Conclusion:
This phone is basic, but many phones in this price range do
not even get the basics right. The Pixel 4a does.
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