Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixel 8a TIPS and TRICKS | 20 PRO TWEAKS to master your new Pixel!”.
If you just got yourself a brand new pixel 8A, then you might be thinking what features does it have? What can it do that can make this phone better? Well, I’m going to give you 20 of them. 20 features that you might not know about your pixel. 8A, and actually these also work for your pixel 8 and your pixel 8 Pro. So let’s have a look at what we have. This video is also brought to you by the cook Tech 10 power bank, which is a really cool power bank and we’ll talk about that. A little bit later on, one of the big upgrades to the AA this year was 120 HZ, but it doesn’t come switched on by default out the box. But if you want to take full advantage of what this phone can do and make it feel like a premium device, then you need to go into your settings and switch this on and it’s really simple go to display and smooth display. And you can turn that on to 120 HZ, and now it has the exact same refresh rate as the 8 and the 8 Pro, and it just feels that little bit more premium when using it. And it does come at the cost of a little bit of battery, but I’ve been using it since launch and that small bit of battery that you lose for 120. Hz is 100 % worth it. Something that you can use your pixel 8884 is a webcam, and why wouldn’t you because it has some really good cameras and it’ll just upgrade whatever webcam. You have that’s satting your laptop at the moment, and actually it even makes my studio display. Webcam, look awful cuz.
The pixel AA is much better. All you have to do is plug it in swipe down and select what happens when that USB is recognized. You select, Android webcam inside something like Zoom or inside Google meets, and it’s that simple. You now have nice crisp. Looking video using your AA as a webcam, one of my favorite features that you have on the pixel AA is multiple user accounts? Now, if someone wants to use your phone, you might not want them going into photos or going onto stuff that you have that’s private. On your phone, so actually what you can do is you can create accounts for guests and you can create accounts for people that regularly use your phone.
This comes in really handy if you have like an annoying kid who just wants to watch YouTube all the time, but somehow, every time they use your phone, they not going into settings and completely changing the language to something you can never change it off from again. So if you put it into guest mode, they can use YouTube with without messing up any of your settings. Let’S move on to audio eraser and the pixel 8 series has a really cool feature where, if you go and record a video outside and there’s too much talking too much noise, there’s music that you might not want in that video, you can actually use audio eraser To just get rid of it completely, if you go to photos, find that video that you want to edit and then just select edit, an audio eraser and it’ll take a couple of seconds just to identify the sounds that are inside that video and you get a Few options to play with so you can manually adjust this or you can just have the auto Feature, work its magic and it does a pretty decent job. It’S not perfect by any means, but it’s actually really nice and you can just minimalize any of the noise that you might not need in your videos. Let’S stick with editing and talk about Magic Eraser, because I still can’t get over how good this is and if you’ve never used a pixel phone before then you might not know this even exists. But honestly it’s such a good feature.
We saw this on the pixel 8s at the end of last year, but if you’ve taken a photo with your pixel and there’s people in it that are ruining it, there’s maybe objects in it that are ruining it. All you have to do do is draw a circle around that and it will get rid of it and a lot of the time it will also just automatically say: do you want to get rid of these items in the photo and it will make it better As well as that, you can use magic Editor to change things like the sky. So if you take a photo on quite a dull day, you can use this magic, editor completely change the sky and make the photo just look a little bit better than it did when you actually tuck it. So a really cool feature that is bake straight into the photos: app sticking with photos. Let’S talk about AI wallpaper because there’s an option inside your wallpaper settings where you can create a unique is AI wallpaper and it’s a pretty cool feature, and sometimes you get some really nice wallpapers from it to do this. Just long press on your home screen select wallpaper and styles and then go to more wallpapers and then you’ll see in the top left.
You have ai wallpaper as an option and inside here you get a couple of options that you can pick from like presets. So things like soft focus and X-ray, and once you select that there’s a few options inside that you you can change, you just hit, create wallpaper and in about less than a minute you get something that can be really nice and sometimes they are a bit Naf. But I think on the whole they’re, actually quite usable wallpapers, and if you like the idea of creating your wallpapers but really like emojis, you can actually go into the Emoji part of this and create your own emoji wallpaper, not necessarily AI here.
But it does give you a couple of options if you really like emojis, one-handed mode is really useful when you need to get get to the top of that screen, but it’s not turned on by default. So to do this, go into your settings and just search for onehanded mode, and then you just switch it on and it lets you swipe down on that gestures bar at the bottom of the phone. So you can easily get to the top of the screen for things like notifications and the quick panel.
The next feature that the pixel has hidden away in its settings is quick tap. So if you double tap the back of the phone near the Google logo, you can have that gesture turn into opening any sort of certain app. So the way you do this go to settings and search quick tap, and that enables you to be able to do a couple of things. So you can open literally any app.
You want, like the camera YouTube, maybe your gym app or you can pick something that Google has set as a default, and there is a bit of learning here with that double tap, because you always have to try and get it on that Google logo pretty much 100 % of the time, but once you’ve mastered that this comes in really handy, so I have this setup as wet. So if I ever have to go into a shop, I just double tap the back of the phone. Then I can get up my Tesco Club card nice and quickly before I give you some of those next features to get that 8 even better. Let me talk to you about the cook Tech 10 power bank, and this is a seriously impressive, 10,000 Mah power bank, which has Ultra fast charging at 120 ws, and you can charge the power bank to 55 % in just 15 minutes. It’S lightweight Compact and airplane safe, so you can take it wherever you need to and use its type A and type c ports to charge your devices.
And, of course you can use that real time display to see all the information you might need it’s fantastic. If you’re a gamer as well, because if you have a Nintendo switch, for example, it can charge that fully 1.3 times. If this cook te 10 power bank sounds like a little bit of you check the description below and there’ll be a link there.
Where you can pick one up yourself, let me talk to about Circle to search, but everybody at this point knows what Circle to search is. If you don’t know what it is with circle to search, all you have to do is press that gestures bar at the bottom, and you draw a circle around anything. You see on your screen and what it’ll do is it’ll go off and it will search it for you and you don’t even have to leave the you’re in, because you can do that. Google search on top of it. So it’s a really cool little feature and I use this a lot when watching a video, because if you do Circle to search when a video is on, it will pause it exactly on that frame. So you can search the product within that video and go off and find it really easily.
But there is something else that I use Circle to search for. I use this all the time to copy text from an image, because it’s so much quicker than going into Google lens, and even if you go into Google photos, you can’t actually do this without opening Google Lens. So this is by far my favorite part of circle to search the next tip. To get the most out of your AA is when you’re in that camera app.
So there’s something that you can do called flip to selfie. If you go into gestures and turn on that, setting that is flip to selfie, all you have to do is flip that phone just a little bit and it’ll swap its camera to the selfie camera. Another really good one here is flip to shush. So if you ever put your phone screen flat down on the table, it will turn on do not disturb mode automatically. So can come in really handy when you’re getting a phone call. If you just search flip to shush in settings, you can turn it on and then it’s just ready to go, and this does come in really handy, but just remember to not put your phone flat down on the desk by mistake, because if you do you’ll miss Every single notification all day, another feature that I use all the time is bedtime mode, and I have it to come on at a specific time, every single night and annoyingly it doesn’t actually enable Do Not Disturb mode automatically, which I think is weird. So you have to do this yourself, so when inside digital well-being and bedtime mode, if you scroll down, you can actually turn on do not disturb for anytime that you have bedtime mode enabled.
What you can do as well here is enable the Bedtime mode for any time that you plug your phone in after a certain time. Co screen is a really cool feature that you might not know about if you’re new to Google pixels. Essentially, it just allows Google Assistant to answer your call with an automated message telling that person that you’re screening the call and when the person on the other end starts talking you’ll get a transcript in real time of, what’s being said, and then you can pick from A few different options and prompts here to carry on the call or you can just get them to call back later and to turn that on just go into your phone and go into these settings.
And you can enable it just here and depending on where you are in the world, you might see a few different options as well things like direct my core, because Google Assistant here can transcribe menu options for you, which means that you don’t have to wait to Hear like all nine options, when you actually call like a bank, for example, one more inside that phone option is hold for me as well. So if you hate being on a hold, then this will be perfect for you, it’s similar to the other options and this one uses on device technology to recognize when someone is ready to speak. So what it’ll do is it’ll. Give you a notification when you’re able to use this and you’ll then get a notification when that horrible elevator music has stopped, and someone has answered so you can go back to that call without having to just sit there. Listening to the elevated music for about 3 hours of your life, I think it’s a really cool feature. I’Ve used it a couple of times and it just makes calling these companies less dreaded than it already is.
Let’S do some really quick ones now, and battery percentage is something that is not turned on by default, so go to battery and just toggle it on, and it’s nice and easy RCS chat is a good one to turn on as well. So you can see when someone is typing or when they’ve read your message. Go into your messages, app tap on message, settings and you’ll see the option right at the top, which is to turn those RCS Chats on so just make sure you have them on and one of the first things that I always do when you get a new Pixel is to change those lock screen shortcuts to something that’s actually usable. I have mine on, do not disturb and silent, because it’s just easier than having to go into the phone and unlock it to turn those on.
So if you go to wallpaper and styles in the settings, you can pick from a few different ones here. The options aren’t amazing, but it lets you put something you might actually use on your lock screen and if you don’t like the way that those tiles are configured in quick settings, then you can edit that really easily as well, so just swipe down twice from the Top of the screen and you’ll see a little pencil in the bottom right corner and then all you have to do is hold and drag the tiles. The exact same way that you might want them really simple, but a load of people just don’t know you can do it and tip 20 that I have for. You is to turn on clear calling now this isn’t set on by default, and so many people don’t know this exists. What it’ll do is it’ll reduce background sounds in a call to make sure that you can hear the other person and sadly it doesn’t work from your end to make your environment quieter and it does need a Wi-Fi connection or a good data signal to work. But it actually does a really decent job and makes being able to hear people on the other end a little bit easier there.
You can breathe 20 tips to help you improve using that pixel 8A, and these are also available on the pixel 8 and the 8 Pro as well. So if you’ve been using those phones for the last few months, you might have seen some of the features in this article that you didn’t even know existed. So let me know if any of these features are new to you in the comments below, but also, let me know if I’ve missed out a feature in this list that you use every day that I might not even know about make sure you subscribe as well To the Android authority YouTube channel before you head off and if you do that, then I’ll see you in the next article .