Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I think y’all overlooked something… – Pixel 8a”.
Google has been understandably taking a lot of flak for the value proposition of the pixel 8A. I mean who would buy the value a series phone for $ 500 when the $ 700 pixel 8 is often on promo for anywhere from $ 50 to $ 100 off. I mean it should be basically a no-brainer right, but I think there’s something that people have been overlooking here and that is that a this is still a really awesome phone. In a lot of W that we’re going to go over in the next little bit and B, while the specs and the experience are permanent, pricing is fleeting, as Google has demonstrated again and again and again so if Google regularly promos the pixel 8, you can pretty Much count on them to regularly promo the 8A. So let’s have a look at what the actual differences are between these phones, starting on the outside.
The biggest difference is going to be the camera where the pixel 8A inherits exactly the same camera Hardware that we saw in the pixel 7A. So any difference that you’re going to get in image quality is going to be thanks to the tensor G3 processor rather than the older tensor. G2. It’S a 64 megapixel sensor. So it’s not like it’s going to be taking super blurry images, or anything like that, and Google has added their latest processing tricks to it, including support for real tone in video, which is their attempt to better capture more diverse skin tones with that said, there’s only So much you can do in software and we did observe a noticeable difference in quality, especially in video compared to the pixel 8, though, if you’re not comparing them side by side, it’s not like anything jumped off the screen at us as a problem with respect to White balance, uh color reproduction or even the basics, like the responsiveness of the shutter button, which wow is really fast, which probably thanks to the fact that it has almost the same internal Hardware as the pixel 8, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First you’re going to get all the latest AI features like best take magic, editor and audio Magic Eraser, and the screen that you’ll be viewing it on is vastly upgraded over the older pixel 7A. We actually love this screen. The only obvious downgrade compared to the pixel 8 is that it uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3 rather than Corning victus other than that the peak brightness, both theoretical and what we actually measured is up in the neighborhood of 2,000 flipping nits making for an excellent HDR. Viewing experience the pixel count is identical, so you’re not losing any sharpness and compared to the 7 a we go from 90 HZ to a maximum of 120 HZ on the Adaptive refresh rate display I’d say. The only really noticeable thing is that it does have thicker bezels but hey depending on you know how you hold your phone. That might actually be a feature rather than a bug.
Speaking of holding the devices, I recognize that most of you are going to put a case or, at the very least, a skin on your phone. But as someone who generally goes bearback, sometimes at Great cost. I actually found the matte finish on the a series. More pleasing to the touch than the glossy finish on the regular eight – and I definitely do not miss that gigantic camera bump. It’S not that I can’t get the eight into my pocket.
It’S just that. You know who likes speed bumps, maybe children, so they don’t die. Okay, okay, generally, I’m Pro speed bumps just not on my phone all right on the subject of speed. Bumps though, we observed a difference in performance performance between these two devices, in spite of them having on paper the same specs, we’ll get into that in a little bit more detail later, but first, let’s finish up the exterior tour at the top, we’ve got noise. Cancelling microphones on both, but not on the rear, that’s right compared to the pixel 8. The pixel 8A has only two microphones rather than three. On the left side, we’ve got these SIM tray on the right side. We’Ve got the power button which can be used to summon Gemini now, including ooh Gemini Nano which can run some machine learning models locally on the device for things like memo taking, which is a welcome addition.
We’Ve got the volume rocker over here and then finally, at the bottom, our USBC Port that handles charging ah, but at different rates, while the pixel 8 will do 27 Watts with a wire and up to 12 Watts wirelessly. The 8A will only do 18 watts and 7 1/2 Watts respectively and features no support for wireless power sharing, which is one of those features that seemed kind of Superfluous. To me until long story short, my wife lost her purse. My phone was dead. I needed it to communicate with someone at the same time that she needed her phone because we needed to get to a Tracker, something something I needed Wireless power sharing and it saved Our Lives. Well, her purse is life anyway. The last big difference externally is one that you won’t see. Instead of having ip68 water and dust resistance, the 8A has IP67, which under most circumstances, probably won’t make a difference to your day-to-day use, but could be the difference between being submerged for an extended period of time and dying or not dying, but probably not did we Ever open the box, oh you get a sim removal tool, a c Toc, cable and a c TOA adapter, no power, brick! Because hey you know what go buy your own power, brick.
Let’S talk about the insides, both of them feature Google’s tensor, G3 processor, 8. Gigs of RAM and a minimum of 128 gigs of storage new with the 8A is the option to go up to 256 gigs of storage. Making this for people who take a lot of pictures and record a lot of video a far more viable option than a series phones in the past and the best part, is unlike Apple, they’re charging a reasonable price for that storage upgrade just $ 60 at MSRP, Which, as we know, Google is a little flexible about. There are a couple of other downgrades on the spec sheet, but these might not be as bad as they seem.
For one thing we go from Wi-Fi 7 down to Wi-Fi 6E yeah. Your download speeds could be slower on an 8A versus an 8, but it’s worth noting that in the real world, things like DNS lookups are likely to contribute more to your page loading speed than the maximum throughput that you can get over the air. The other one is that the battery is slightly smaller, but this is where things get very, very interesting, because in our endurance test, the pixel 8A actually outperformed the pixel 8 with its bigger battery and we’ll get to that. After this message from our sponsor dbrand, all right dbr has something special for you today.
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I assume short.com would be the vanity URL. I guess you can buy debrand stuff there or you could just not that’s also an option now to get back to what matters Genji impact right, they’re. Obviously, both logged into the lab’s account.
So we can’t play on both phones at the same time, but that’s fine. It doesn’t matter. The difference in performance was very small anyway, with both phones managing in the neighborhood of around 40 to 45 frames per second average, but they weren’t.
Quite the same. We observed that the 8A ran about 1.3 de hotter on the skin of the device versus the eight and ran about 2 % lower, both in terms of averages and 1 % lows. This could be related to the different thermal Solutions in these phones, but, while Google hasn’t confirmed this, we believe that it may come down to slight differences in clock speed because it’s not just in genin Impact that we’re observing these differences in performance in, for example, our Endurance test, which involves playing back a YouTube video at a locked 250 nits for as long as possible, we got an entire extra hour of battery life out of the 8A compared to the eight and the best way to explain this would be if the processor were Running at a lower clock speed overall, it’s not a difference that we observed in day-to-day interaction with the device. It’S extremely Snappy. I mean especially now that it runs at 120 htz, just like the higher-end devices. But if it’s going to get me a little bit of extra battery life, honestly, I’m kind of into it.
Curiously, on the subject of the battery, we found that both the 8 and the 8A charged in the same amount of time time and what we determined is that this came down to the cable that we were using, because both were using a 30 W charger, which Is well above the capabilities of both devices, and it turns out that Google includes only a 3 amp rated cable with both of these devices. So if you want to actually take advantage of the superior charging rates of the eight, you have to go and Source yourself. A third party cable, a minor detail, but one that could matter to you now it’s time for everyone’s favorite part of the video crab rave nice. That stereo sound not the loudest thing, and there is some a little bit of audible, crackling and Distortion at the upper range of its capabilities. But when you compare this to $ 500 phones from years ago, pretty decent sounding speaking of the biggest benefit of the 8A is one that we have haven’t talked about. Yet that isn’t visible and that you won’t find even in the software menus, and that is software support just like the rest of the 8 family. The pixel 8A is getting 7 years of software updates and that’s not just security. I’M talking full OS upgrades and even feature drops now. We’Ve obviously seen that Google hasn’t necessarily brought all of the latest features to their older devices. The 7A is still lagging behind, for example, even in AI features that are processed in the cloud rather than directly on the device. But it’s clear that Google is finally addressing the competitive disadvantage. They’Ve had against apple, whose users are able to just take for granted that they buy an iPhone and they can probably use it until they are totally sick of the thing or Until It Breaks.
So. The value proposition with the 8A here is pretty compelling and I can definitely see some users looking at the pixel 8 on promo and going well, I mean come on for a of only $ 150 or even $ 100 yeah I’ll. Take the better camera, the better IP water resistance, uh, Wi-Fi 7, the faster charging. If I go and Source my own cable there’s a lot of value here, but depending on promos, that difference could be more like the MSRP difference of $ 200. And you got to remember that, especially in North America, a lot of consumers are buying phones on contract, and if that subsidy is fixed, you know, let’s say a $ 300 or $ 400 subsidy. You could be looking at a different price of $ 100 or $ 250 $ 300, so it’s not necessarily a 20 to 30 % difference in price.
It could be a lot more and there could be a lot more of this video, but I think I’m kind of done subscribe to Short Circuit .