Google's "Budget Friendly" Android Phone... PIXEL 4a Review By Blunty

Hello again, I am bounty squinting into the rather less diffused by clouds morning of Sydney than I had anticipated for this particular shot. You are currently looking at me through the front-facing camera of the pixel 4, a which, after a few delays, is finally in broad availability and most places where you people will be watching this, and I would like to thank the incoming helicopter for ruining my audio. While we wait for that helicopter to pass, why don't you go ahead and give me a thumbs up? Leave a comment down below uh subscribe ring the bell that kind of stuff, and we'll just sit here and enjoy the sound of a helicopter slowly gliding up above us. Now I don't do many phone reviews and such on my channel and when I do, it's normally a flagship model because well those are the ones I personally care about, because I use them as a tool in my content production, so they need to be very powerful for 4k video editing, and they need the best cameras on them, the best camera options and the most camera options, and none of that applies to this. It's not the most powerful, it doesn't have the best screen, it doesn't have the brightest screen, it doesn't have the highest resolution screen. It only has one camera on the back.

Furthermore, it only has one camera on the front here. Furthermore, it doesn't have any fancy depth fencing stuff. What it does do, though, is had a lot of the stuff that was great about its previous pixel 4 brethren, that sort of cuts away some corners and just leaves you with a core of a phone that has some of the fancier stuff they had, but also in a much much much more affordable price, and that's where this sits. This is the phone for people that care about cutting-edge features but want a real good phone and don't want any of the craft that comes with some other budget priced android phones out there. That always comes with you know: modified versions of android and skinned launchers and just all kinds of bloatware and crap like that.

This is from Google. This is a pixel phone. This is pure uncut, crystalline android, and that's what I like most about the pixel phone. Your basic specs run like this 5.8-inch screen at 1080 by 2340, giving it a crisp but not extraordinary. Pixel density of 443 PPI powered by a snapdragon 730 g CPU, with six gigabytes of ram and 128 gigs of non-expandable storage, a single rear, camera of 12.2 megapixels and a front camera packing eight megapixels and a battery capacity of 3140 William hours and a fingerprint sensor on the back, which works pretty well, actually fast, accurate, reliable. I never had a player, but not even once, which is unusual for a fingerprint sensor in my experience, but there is no facial recognition.

So this is your only security option. Aside from the pin, it even has one of them: their old school headphone jacks on it, for you, people still using wired headphones like some sort of caveman size, wise, it's great for one-handed use. Light comfortable feels well-made, even though it's polycarbonate plastic backing as a step back from the rather more robust and premium materials. I'm used to on flagship phones, I tend to go for its screen is covered in less than leading edge, gorilla, glass, 3, but that's still pretty good. For protection against accidental damage, the screen is also an OLED panel, which means it can do neat things like give you an ever present time display without it absolutely murdering your battery life.

Convenient though of that screen at max brightness, it can still be washed out a bit too easily in direct sunlight, making it a bit harder to read than say my iPhone is. For example, there is no wireless fast charging, but it does come with an 18 watt, fast charger and there's google's clever adaptive battery technology designed to maximize battery life claiming up to 24 hours of use. I never quite got that, but it was at least noticeably better than the more power thirsty Pixel 4 XL. Everything else about it is pretty unspectacular and that's by design it's very deliberately made to be an affordable uncomplicated, clean and pure android phone and being a pixel device. As I mentioned, it does mean you get unfitted unmolested pure android, and can rely on getting day one updates when a new version of android comes out.

The snapdragon 730g is enough power to make sure everything most people would consider day-to-day stuff runs. Nice and smooth- and it certainly is a very pleasant feeling everyday experience, we'll start out in the worst case scenario for a camera phone in the dark in video mode. It does fairly well resist boosting ISO, so much noise becomes a catastrophic issue and keeping frame rate and shutter speed, balanced and smooth enough for a decent if not especially well-defined. Image eroding on the side of overexposure rather than under bright spots, do tend to get washed out easily in controlled lighting circumstances, and this is slightly brighter than lighting. I usually use in the little studio setup, and you can still see it's having some grain issues on the darker spots there so about you know laptop web camera quality stuff out of the front-facing camera here, which I'm not completely delighted by, and it's doing some very strange things to the color of my skin.

It might be getting confused by the colorful backlights or something like that, but yeah, hmm, not wonderful. In less than ideal lighting conditions, it's rather more lacking. I also don't like that. It is again just like the pixel XL before it. The field of view is far too cramped for my liking in a portrait mode, particularly for front facing, where you're often trying to do group shots and stuff anyway.

It's just it's too tight video in low light from the rear facing camera is similarly not that exciting. It tends to overflow things a little. Furthermore, it is fairly clean and well-behaved by the standards of you know. Budget priced camera, phones trying to use the rear camera for a soft shoot thing feels pretty old-school by today's uh standards, not being able to see my framing or anything, but it is obviously noticeably better in low-light than the front-facing camera is, so you might have to resort to this from time to time. If that's what you need to do, but again, as I keep saying, if what you're after is a content creation tool, this phone's probably not high on your priority list anyway.

It just has to be good enough for most people, and I certainly think it exceeds that requirement as far as I'm concerned, even as a camera nerd, I'm less than enthusiastic as with many camera phones. The protective glass in front of the lens elements causes bouncing of reflections of point light sources, causing some weirdness like you're, seeing here, but to be fair, pretty much. Every camera phone I've touched in the last several years does this, but once you do get into better lighting like a decently lit city street, for example, where you might want to take a drunken selfie with your mates on the way home from the pub well as soon as we're allowed to go back to pubs and such I guess, you'll be fairly happy with the results, certainly above what I'd call a good enough standard for the type of customer it's aimed at and in fact, with a little more care and manual adjustments rather than the think-free point-and-record. Most people go with. It can even be quite good and of course, you've got the usual special modes of slo-mo and time-lapse and such options that are nice.

But I suspect the average customer for a phone in this marketplace slot aren't very likely to use. I did hit some issues, usually with trying to do close-up stuff with the less than well-behaved autofocus, though, but yeah. Basically, once the sun comes up, it's an entire middle of the road affair easily and by a wide margin better than good enough for the average customer of a phone like this, but for a camera nerd a little less than ideal, it doesn't handle motion or colors or sharpness, or any basic image attribute, especially well. Its auto processing of color is anywhere from boring to over the top, and it tends to over sharpen things a little for my tastes as well, but again outside of point and shoot. If you take some more care with things, it can be a pretty serviceable tool and, of course, standard rules apply of never ever using digital zoom, but unfortunately that is the only telephoto option here, as, unlike an ever-growing number of phones these days there is only one camera lens on board.

So if you do want to zoom in, I would strongly suggest not using the digital zoom, just walk closer, your lazy bugger. Now when it comes to the AI computational, photography, stuff, the background, blurring and portrait mode is about the same as it was on the other recent pixel 4 family members, quite often very, very good, but occasionally easily confused by things like frames of glasses. For example, regular stills are like video easily better than good enough for the average Joe, but not very inspiring for someone with actual photography in mind, not by any means bad, just not outstanding in even a small way, except for the night sight mode which, just like my experience with its bigger brother, the Pixel 4 XL, is astoundingly impressive. Low light photos can look a lot better than you would expect them to be alright, so the specs decently good, the screen decently good, the speaker- is decent to good the camera experience decent good. What about gaming? I kind of hate mobile gaming, I'm sure there are some good mobile games out there.

In fact, there's one mobile game on the horizon that I'm very excited about, but we'll talk more about that in probably about a week's time, but I judge you if you're a mobile gamer, I just don't like mobile gaming as an ecosystem, because it's responsible for some of the most vile, manipulative disastrously insidiously toxic monetization bull crap. That has bled itself into real gaming on other platforms, and I blame mobile gaming and mobile gamers to some extent for that. But some of you do care about it. So let's have a look. So here's the deal with gaming, if you're a heavy mobile gamer just like if you're a content producer chances are you'll, be looking past.

These budget built middle of the road products, but for a splash of time-burning gaming here and there a bit of casual gaming or to keep a younger kid happy and distracted on a phone that if they manage to break or lose you won't be tempted to. I don't know I'll drop them out. Yeah, no worries here it like pretty much everything else it does is good enough. I can certainly tell you: games like Minecraft, for example, run a bit chunkier on this than they do on the pixel XL, but not anywhere close to making it unplayable it's just enough to notice, but yeah, just like. I wouldn't recommend this phone to someone wanting to make content out of it.

Furthermore, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this phone to someone. Who's uh got a prime interest in mobile gaming, but if you do like to do a little of gaming here and there absolutely no worries here- easy-peasy, so there you go the Pixel 4a from the perspective of someone who has for like more than a decade now always reached for the flagship model of a phone to satisfy his particular needs. And, quite frankly, I liked it a lot more than I thought it would for a budget priced android phone. I think it should keep a lot of people out there quite happy who don't have you know the refined tests and requirements that I do so. You reckon Pixel 4a for you or not also keep in mind by the time this video finally goes live the pixel, 4a 5g variant.

Will be just on the horizon, it will be. We expect larger the same just with 5g on board, so if you do have access to or a need for that extremely fast data connection, uh keep that in mind, maybe just hold out for a little while longer, because that announcement should uh if rumors are to be believed to be coming very, very soon. So until then thank you, as always for uh your attention. Uh. Thank you as always to the glorious patrons scrolling up above that, thank you as always to the always noisy city of Sydney, which was perfectly quiet when I sat down and set my camera up, but as soon as I pressed record, noise started from every single direction possible and the sun sort of crawled out from behind something that was partially shadowing it.

So I'm dealing with this incredibly harsh light and that's just life. I guess.

Source : Blunty