Review: Google Pixel 4A

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Julian Chokkatu for WIRED.

And this is Google's newest phone.

And it's the best phone you can buy right now,

it doesn't have a ton of flashy features,

but it does only cost $350.

That's $50 less than last year's Google Pixel 3a.

It's rare to see a phone get better in every way,

but still be cheaper.

For that price, you get really good performance

with Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G processor

and six gigabytes of RAM.

The kind of performance

where you don't really see any stutters or lag

even when you're gaming.

The 5.8-inch screen is also really nice,

Google trimmed down the bezels around the screen

for a bit of a modern flare,

and it even added a hole-bunch camera for the selfie camera

for a little bit more screen real estate.

It's an OLED screen too,

so it's plenty sharp and colorful,

and it's even visible outdoors.

Though, if it's a particularly sunny day,

you might have to squint a little bit.

I just really like holding and using this phone.

The polycarbonate body has this grippy,

chalkboard-like texture that's really nice to the touch.

The buttons are super clicky.

And it's very compact and lightweight.

It's only a little bit bigger than the iPhone SE,

making it one of the smallest Android phones

you can buy as of late.

Pixel phones are known for their excellent cameras

and the 4a is no different.

It has the same 12.2-inch megapixel sensor

as the one on the pixel four.

And I just can't stop taking photos with this phone.

Whether it's day or night,

you're gonna get really good looking details in your photos,

natural colors and excellent exposure.

And that's with high contrast scenes too.

This phone even fares better than phones

that cost several hundred dollars more.

For example, this photo

compares the night mode

taken with the Pixel 4a

and the night mode taken with the Samsung Galaxy S20 plus,

which costs $1200.

The Pixel 4a edges out a little bit

with stronger details and much better color temperature.

Google is bringing a couple of features down

from the Pixel 4a like astrophotography mode.

So you can put the Pixel 4a on a tripod,

point it at the sky and can capture the stars

if you're in a dark enough area.

There's also live HDR plus,

which lets you see what the image

will look like before you take it.

So you don't have to wait through

long image processing times to see the end result.

Other services include NFC for Google pay,

which is not something you'll find

on many other cheap phones.

There's also a headphone jack, yay,

as well as a fingerprint sensor on the rear,

which is something I prefer more

than the under-glass fingerprint sensor

on newer phones.

Now, it's not perfect.

There are a couple things missing.

For example, there's no wireless charging,

there's no IP-rated water resistance,

and there's no microSD card slot.

You do get 128 gigs of storage,

which is par for the course

for other cheap phones in this price range.

But if you fill that up,

your only other option to expand space

is to pay for cloud storage.

And don't worry, battery life is actually pretty good.

It's just not really remarkable.

We've seen phones in this price range

that can go for two or three days.

This phone, if you're a power user,

will probably last you a full day

and if you use it Lightly or with average use,

you can probably have it last

until the morning of the second day

but nothing really more than that.

To me, those are pretty minor inconveniences,

considering the $350 price tag

and everything else you'd get with the Pixel 4a.

And that's without even talking

about the software side of things.

This phone will get three years of Android security updates

and version upgrades.

And that's just something you don't really see

on any other cheap Android phone,

let alone even phones

that cost several hundred dollars more.

Plus, there are so many small smart features

that are just genuinely helpful.

There's Now Playing, which will detect songs playing

in my background and let me know what it is.

There's Call Screen, which scans my phone calls,

so I don't need to pick up robocalls or spam calls.

And there's something called Live Transcribe,

which will transcribe almost any audio

that's coming out of the phone

that even works with phone calls.

There's also a Personal Safety App,

which has car crash detection built-in,

And you can also schedule check-ins

with emergency contacts for extra safety.

And of course, we can't forget

about the improved Google Assistant,

which is my favorite phone voice assistant.

It's also now much more deeply ingrained

with the phone.

The Pixel 4a makes it really hard

to stomach the skyrocketing prices of phones these days.

The fact that you can get great performance,

decent battery life,

a really, really great camera or nice screen,

all in a compact, durable frame for $350

just makes this a no brainer.

Pre-orders are live now and can buy the phone

officially on August 20th.