Google Pixel 3a Review: A for Ace! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what is up guys I'm QB HD 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 2. 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 vs. 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 bring 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 the best way to analyze. It, though, is still to compare it to its bigger brother, which is the $800 pixel 3 there 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 to this purplish color is also kind of funny. It looks basically sort of pale lavender for most angles, but if the light hits it right, sometimes it looks more blue. Sometimes it 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 gained a headphone jack huh.

Would you look at 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 more recessed than the three again here's the 3a and then the three pretty sure. That's because the pixel three is all glass, so you have the glass fingerprint reader at the same level. But this is a plastic phone. You still need glass and the fingerprint reader, so they sort of indented it, and I'm.

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 three. It's a five point: six 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. Furthermore, 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 is a 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 has a bit cut off too so the pixel three, 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. ? 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. It 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 speaker's 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 its low? 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 spec's, it has a snapdragon 670, the Adrian 615 4 gigs of ram, and so if pixel 3 was already having performance issues. What's this phone going to 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 4 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 at 1080p display and lower power internals, and this phone has killed it with the battery life.

I've consistently got over 5 hours of screen on time, with the three a 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 you cut down on the battery 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 oh, is, 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 a3 an 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 form, $4 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 I'm 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 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 is image, is an A+.

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 gonna, be a perfect 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 nuance than that. There are a lot of other competitive phones out around at this price. Now more than ever before, you have that before 6 that just came out at 500 bucks, but that's pretty nice.

You have the OnePlus 60 and the OnePlus 7 out there, the galaxy s 9 coming down in price from last year. So there's a lot of happening. The pixel 3 8 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 going to 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 a cysteine is still there the same, perfect 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 3, a simple as that. So there you have it thanks for watching, get you guys the next one, peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee