Smartphone Guardian Review – The Pixel 4a may be one of the cheapest phones made by Google, but it’s also one of the best. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Pixel 4a is a return to form for Google’s smartphone efforts: a low-cost, mid-range phone that’s high-quality, long-lasting, and very small, with a great camera.
Smartphone Guardian Review
The £349 Pixel 4a is an attempt to strip a smartphone down to the bare essentials and then make them all work well.
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It’s included under the more expensive £669-and-up Pixel 4 range, which replaces last year’s Pixel 3a and 3a XL with a similarly sized phone, taking the 3a’s design and extending the display around the front of the device to fill.
The body is high quality, soft touch polycarbonate and looks surprisingly good. The 5.8in FHD+ OLED display looks great: it’s bright, sharp enough and has fairly slim bezels. There’s a large hole in the top left of the screen for the selfie camera and the display doesn’t have the 90Hz refresh rate of some more expensive rivals, but it does have HDR certification for watching movies.
The Pixel 4a has a 4.5% larger screen than its predecessor, while its overall body is 5.8% smaller. At just 144mm long, 69.4mm wide, 8.8mm thick and weighing 143g, the Pixel 4a is one of the smallest phones you can buy in 2020. It really feels great in the hand. This may disappoint superphone fans, but for those who crave a big enough screen in a small and light device, the Pixel 4a is a breath of fresh air.
The selfie camera pokes through a hole in the top left corner of the screen and takes up some space in the status bar. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
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The back of the device has a conventional fingerprint scanner that works on all apps. Google’s Face Unlock on the Pixel 4 worked great for unlocking the phone, but even after nine months, only a handful of third-party apps support it.
The top has a low-profile headphone jack. At the bottom is a universal USB-C socket for power. The stereo speakers on the phone are very good. No wireless charging or official water resistance rating.
Google was much more affected by the Covid-19 pandemic than other smartphone companies, which delayed the release of Pixel 4a by several months and meant that there was a lot of time between its announcement and the open sale in October. This also means that the phone will only be available in black to begin with.
The 3.5mm headphone jack on the top is very welcome as no headphones are included in the box. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
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The Pixel 4a lasts a long time between charging and fully recharging in around 90 minutes. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Pixel 4a uses an upper-midrange Snapdragon 730G chip from Qualcomm, one of the last remaining new processors that doesn’t have 5G, and a significant step up from the Snapdragon 670 used in last year’s Pixel 3a. It comes in a single version with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
Day-to-day performance is very good, matching the smooth operation you’ve come to expect from top-spec phones over the past few years. It’s hard to switch between apps, load images, unlock the phone, and other bits; Games like Real Racing 3 also did well.
Battery life is also good for a relatively small and light phone. The Pixel 4a lasts 31 hours between charges, significantly longer than the larger Pixel 3a XL and the iPhone SE (both 27 hours), running consistently from 7am on day one to 2pm on day two.
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That’s after spending three hours on 4G and the rest on wifi. And with the always-on display active, the screen stays on for up to five hours for email, messages and push notifications, browsing and using apps, five hours of Spotify via Bluetooth headphones, and around 20 photos. Turning off the always-on display added nearly two hours of battery life.
The Pixel 4a comes with an 18W fast charger that takes 90 minutes to fully charge the phone, reaching 50% in half an hour.
Google does not provide an estimate for the estimated number of full charge cycles from Pixel 4a batteries. However, the typical lifespan of a smartphone battery is at least 500 cycles to retain at least 80% capacity. Pixel 4a is usually repaired. Warranty repairs through iSmash, one of Google’s repair partners, or through the Google Store cost £110 for the screen or £60 for the battery.
The Pixel 4a contains approximately 45% post-consumer recycled material in its plastic mechanical components, part of Google’s commitment to include recycled material in all of its products starting in 2022. The company publishes environmental impact reports for some of its products. Google recycles all Pixel devices for free.
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The Pixel 4a ships with Google’s version of Android 10, and buyers can expect at least three years of OS and security updates, which is good for a phone of this price, but a bit behind Apple’s five-year support for iPhones (including the £419 iPhone SE).
The Pixel version of Android is sleek and well-optimized, running on the Pixel 4 series since October last year. Overall, it’s attractive and simple and works like any other version of Android with full acceptance of gesture controls, theme support and other additions made to standard Android 10.
But some of the Google exclusives above, first introduced with the Pixel 4, revolve around the use of artificial intelligence that works locally on the phone rather than on a remote Google server.
The new Google Assistant experience is very noticeable. It uses an advanced native voice recognition system to dramatically speed up the entire experience, allowing the assistant to understand and respond instantly without any delay. You can hit commands with blazing speed, from launching apps, to finding things, and completing tasks. It’s a night and day improvement and the process is done locally on your device, so it’s best to protect your privacy.
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The Pixel 4a also has a Google Now Playing system that detects songs playing around you and an impressive Google Recorder app that can transcribe speech in real time. A live captioning system that transcribes videos in real-time using on-device AI can now also be used for voice and video calls.
Google’s camera app is excellent, making suggestions like level and height adjustments without getting in the way. Photo: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Pixel 4a features Google’s excellent single camera system. It lacks the second camera for optical zoom from the Pixel 4, but retains many software features such as Google’s industry-leading Night Sight for super-low-light photography, Astrophotography mode for shooting the stars, Live HDR+, and lets you adjust the brightness. Real-time dark areas, as well as portrait mode for people and pets.
It’s probably the best point-and-shoot camera you can get for under £600, delivering sharp, balanced and highly detailed photos in most environments. But the Pixel 4a isn’t as versatile as some similar rivals with ultra-wide and zoom cameras. Video recorded up to 4K at 30 frames per second is quite good for the price, although I often accidentally blocked the microphone with my hand.
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The selfie camera is great, capturing decent images in most lighting conditions, but it struggles a bit with fine detail when zoomed out to full size.
By comparison, the Pixel 4 RRP is £669, the OnePlus Nord costs £379 and the iPhone SE costs £419.
It’s small, light and feels great. It has an OLED screen that’s colorful, sharp, and big enough for most things. Performance is good, the battery lasts a solid 31 hours between charges, and the camera is better than the price suggests. It also has a headphone jack, a rarity in 2020.
You get monthly security updates, at least three years of software updates, and Google-exclusive features, some of which are really impressive. The speed of the new Google Assistant is a game changer, but whether you normally want to talk to your phone is another matter.
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Of course, it’s not perfect. No 5G is offered (yet). The body is plastic and doesn’t feel as premium as metal and glass rivals, and there’s no water-resistant rating. The mid-range smartphone market is also becoming increasingly competitive, meaning the Pixel 4a faces stiff competition from some household names such as Apple’s £419 iPhone SE and the new OnePlus Nord, which offers 5G, more cameras and a larger , have better screen for £ . another 30.
But at £349 for a small, lightweight phone that works really well from a real Android manufacturer, the Google Pixel 4a is a great deal.
Pros: Great camera, good screen, good software and update support, good battery life, headphone jack, relatively small, very cheap Cons: No 5G,
