Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixel 3a Review: A for Ace!”.
Hey what is up guys, i’m kid bhd here, pixel 3a, so you may have seen this guy in a whole. Bunch of commercials and ads recently they’ve been going hard with those campaigns and a lot of those are sort of hammering home. The same two points. One 399: that’s the price starts at 399 bucks and two. This phone has a better camera than others, fun fact, all the ads just say: pixel 3a and phone x. I could have sworn after seeing a bunch of these, some of them said iphone x.
You probably thought they said iphone x, but no, they all just say phone x, but google. We all know you’re talking about the iphone x and in the fine print it says image shot on the iphone 10s. So why not just say pixel 3a versus iphone.
Wouldn’T that make the point even more powerful anyway, so both those two initial things are true. It does start at 399 bucks, that’s how much i paid for this one and it does have an excellent camera, one that’s actually better than the iphone which by itself is kind of amazing at this price point. But of course, there’s more to this phone and i’ve been using it for about a week, so i’ll tell you about it. So bringing the phone down in price, as we know, is all about sacrifices and there’s been a ton of focus on this camera. Naturally and i’ll get to that, but there are a bunch of other things about this phone to consider best way to analyze. It, though, is still to compare it to its bigger brother, which is the 800 pixel three they’re aesthetically very similar. They even feel pretty much the same now. The pixel 3a is all plastic instead of glass, but they’ve actually done. I think a great job of making it feel similar to the touch and i could swear the plastic 3a is lighter when holding them next to each other, but the scale confirms they’re pretty much the same weight too. This purplish color is also kind of funny. It looks basically sort of pale lavender from most angles, but if the light hits it right, sometimes it looks more blue sometimes looks more white. It really just depends on the environment you’re in, but you do get that colored power button, which i appreciate and then the only place you’re losing out on build quality of this cheaper phone is the lack of wireless charging and no water resistance, and then you actually Gain a headphone jack huh.
Would you like that these budget phones just keep the headphone jack around, but other than that it still really feels like a pixel? Oh and i’ve also noticed the fingerprint reader on the back of the 3a, is a little bit more recessed than the three again here’s the 3a and then the three pretty sure. That’S because the pixel 3 is all glass. So you have the glass fingerprint reader at the same level, but this is a plastic phone. You still need glass on the fingerprint reader, so they sort of indented it and then the only other main aesthetic difference is the display, which is what you’re looking at most of the time so you’re getting a slightly thicker bezel on both the top and bottom and The sides and the pixel 3a has a decidedly meh display it’s a little bigger than the pixel 3.
It’S a 5.6 inch 1080p oled, but it doesn’t get very bright to the point where it actually can be kind of tough to see it outdoors and then, even when you’re in normal indoor environments, it looks fine when you’re staring straight at it, but the off-axis color Shift is noticeable, it starts to go cool and a little green earlier than normal. So the display quality itself to me was a downgrade, which is a big deal to me since i’m someone who pixel peeps and does a lot of photo editing and things like that on my phone. So if you do that too you’ll notice and then the speaker is a bit cut off too so the pixel 3, as we know, had dual front-facing stereo speakers, one of my favorite things about it. The pixel 3a still has that top speaker. So i’m glad to still have front-facing audio, but then down at the bottom. The chin is super empty and you have a single downward firing speaker at the bottom. That comes out of this grille, but what’s funny is if you take some magnet paper to the back. You can see the speaker is all the way over on one side, and this is common on phones like the iphone where the grille is just another resonance chamber for audio to come out turns out. The sound doesn’t actually come out both sides.
It’S just for show on the 3a, you can still easily block the one side that audio comes out, the bottom grille, but again at least it’s still just half of the speaker pair. You still get audio coming out. The top so you’re not totally blocking it and the speakers get pretty loud and they sound fine.
So the main concern many people have had, and rightfully so with the pixel 3a is just. Is it slow? A lot of budget phones nowadays or mid-range phones are still bringing the top high-end specs before they sacrifice with other things. Pixel 3a does not have top high-end specs.
It has a snapdragon 670, the adreno 615 four gigs of ram, and so if pixel 3 was already having performance issues, what’s this phone gon na be like well, i’m here to tell you, after using this phone for a little while it performs kind of just like The pixel 3, meaning it’s fine, it gets the job done. You will notice it’s not as smooth as the higher end ones and it definitely struggles with ram management. Still. There are apps closing in the background only four gigs of ram, but it just kind of works. Fine, i don’t know if maybe i’m even more critical, because i just came from the oneplus 7 pro, which is the smoothest fastest phone i’ve ever used, but pixel 3a, just kind of feels like it chugs along, doesn’t care too much about smoothness and just eventually does What you say so opening and closing apps and multitasking and opening files and editing photos all that stuff. It doesn’t lag at all, it’s just not as fast, but it’s not too slow or unusable.
It’S just fine, so this phone also has slower internal storage than other flagships, and i can tell in the speed of opening a lot of bigger, apps and bigger files. But you know it’s not killing me and then one part of the performance of this phone that i can say actually does much better than its older brother is the battery life, because you’re only pushing a 1080p display and lower power internals and this phone has killed. It with the battery life i’ve consistently got over five hours of screen on time, with the 3a, usually more and on heavy days.
I could just barely kill it in a day. So this is refreshing because some phones in this budget class do cut down on the batteries some don’t, but this one actually has physically larger batteries than the flagship brothers, so that was kind of nice to see battery life good on the 3a. So that just leaves the last part, the part that google knows they have on lock the cameras on the pixel. So the 3a has the exact same hardware for the single rear, camera same sensor, same glass, same ois, and everything on the front, though you go from dual front-facing cameras, one ultra wide and one standard to a single selfie camera, that’s sort of in between. So it’s a little wider than normal, but it’s not quite the full ultra wide. So it’s a good compromise, but in this rear camera this is the reason to get hyped over this phone. Of course, photos from the 3a are very detailed and have tons of dynamic range and great color taking pictures with it. It’S so easy to forget it’s a 400 phone, because no other budget phone takes photos anywhere near this good, especially in the more challenging lighting scenarios. So, like shooting directly into the sun or in darker lighting things like that, it’s no question night sight is still on another level. Now something else to note. The pixel 3a does not have the dedicated image, processing, chip or pixel visual core that the flagship has. So what does that mean? Basically that now it’s processing images on the snapdragon 670? Instead, i’ve found that this has almost zero effect on the actual final image quality.
Really, the only thing you’ll notice for sure is photos take a little longer to actually process after you, snap the photo that’s about it. So, overall, if pixel 3’s image is an a plus, then this is an a and that’s still miles ahead of any other camera of any phone in this price range. So should you buy a pixel 3a? Of course this is going to be a really good phone. At the price for a lot of people, but it’s not just as simple as saying oh, it’s just like the pixel, but cheaper, it’s just a little more nuanced than that.
There are a lot of other competitive phones out around at this price. Now, more than ever before, you have that zenfone 6. That just came out at 500 bucks, but that’s pretty nice. You have the oneplus 6t and the oneplus 7 out there, the galaxy s9 coming down in price from last year. So there’s a lot happening. The pixel 3a chops down in a couple places where some other mid-range phones wouldn’t have so it doesn’t have the super high-end specs and it’s just never gon na feel blazing fast and, of course, no wireless charging and no water resistance. We know that, but it does bring down a lot of those things from higher end phones like its big brother, that we love so much like that same fingerprint reader on the back. The same squeeze for assisting is still there the same, really good, haptic motor, which is underrated for stuff like typing and notifications.
The same super smart software experience that will be updated first in line and an even better battery life and then, of course, the best camera quality of any phone. So there are other things that are more important to some people than just the camera, in which case there’s a whole world of other phones in this world that you can look into like i mentioned, but if you’re in it for the best possible photo quality and The absolute best software experience for 400 bucks you’re looking at it right here, pixel 3a, simple as that, so there you have it thanks for watching catch. You guys the next one peace .