Google Pixel 4a 5G – Design and Features
It may feel a bit hyperbolic, but the Pixel 4a 5G is one of the best sensory phones I’ve ever had. The size is perfect for my hands. At 2.9 x 0.3 x 6.1 inches (W x D x H), it’s on the largest side – a full half-inch taller than the iPhone 11 Pro. But the Pixel 4a 5G can hide its size behind a weird slim plastic frame, one that makes it feel sturdy, relatively high-quality, and much more elegant than something like the aforementioned iPhone.
While that plastic body feels less pricey than the iPhone and less slippery than the glossy plastic on other Android phones, I still really enjoyed it. A plastic phone comes with a sense of freedom. This is not a phone you can cover in case. You go there, and it will (hopefully) be good. And despite the polycarbonate body, the craftsmanship in the Pixel 4a 5G is unmistakable.
It’s as slim as can be, with a matte black body with very little branding – just a gray Google “G” on the back. If you prefer a color phone, you need to look elsewhere. Like the Model T, it comes in one color: black. On the back, you’ll find a fingerprint scanner and a square camera jack that has the same 12.2 MP dual camera and 16MP ultra-wide camera as the Pixel 5. There is only one character succeed in the design: white on the side. (The non-5G version of the 4a comes in a more sprite baby blue color, with a weird macaroni-and-cheese orange button).
The front is equally rugged, with a central bezel and a minuscule-punch front-punch camera. (Funny, that punch-hole is just in the right place to completely count down the hours of ads in several freemium games I’ve played.) The top is equipped with the 3.5 headphone jack. mm not completely dead; at the bottom, a USB-C port, and stereo speakers (which are fixed in large weird gaps near the port).
Inside the phone, you’ll find a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G, 6GBs of RAM, and a 3800 mAh battery that can sustain the 6.2 ”OLED for 48 hours advertised.
Of course, the star of the show is the 5G cellular capabilities, and this is where your miles will change dramatically.
While 5G will dramatically increase your internet bandwidth, it even hits anyone. Despite being on AT&T and firmly on the company’s 5G coverage map, I was only able to get a “5Ge” connection – which is simply marketing a fluff that incorporates most of AT&T’s LTE network. Nevertheless, I was able to get down 175mbps and upload speeds of 58.5mbps. That was more than fast enough for Stadia, GamePass, and more, but less than a tenth of what AT&T reported a 2Gbps theoretical peak. If I didn’t get a chance to see real 5G in the Bay Area, I suspect that 5G is still more widespread than advertised.
Finally, inside the box, there is a USB-C to USB-C charger and – if this is Google, not Apple – an 18W USB-C charger.
Google Pixel 4a 5G – Performance and Gaming
The Pixel 4a is powered by Qualcomm’s powerful (but not the most powerful) processor, the Snapdragon 765G. Not only does going the flagship route help keep the price of the Pixel 4a down, but it also prevents the phone from ripping off the butcher update levels you saw on it. other devices (Pixel 5 included).
Fortunately, update rate limitation was one of the only areas I noticed sub-optimal performance, but I noticed it. Especially after testing the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, an even cheaper phone with the same processor and 90hz refresh rate. However, the Pixel was fully capable of every game I threw to play, from Call of Duty: Mobile to Asphalt 9 to Elder Scrolls: Blades. Surprisingly, the phone never got hot, even after an hour of graphics-intensive racing in Asphalt 9. Even when I was charging the phone at the one time, he stood firm.
The phone’s 3800 mAh battery performed well too, just draining 5% in 15 minutes of playtime across games and services. This didn’t matter what intense Android games I tried. I also experienced the same 5% drop while streaming Eternal Doom on Stadia.
And on that note, if you can find a reliable 5G (or even 5GE) connection, you can stream games almost non-stop. I tested Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming for literal hours, and my experience was as near unobtrusive over the network as I have ever been before. (And again, I was on AT & T ‘s supercharged LTE network, not real 5G.) Of course, for whatever reason, I had more issues over my WiFi that were much faster than I did over data cells. But beware bill payers: if you have data capacity, streaming will help you to find it quickly. In five minutes of Stadia, we’ve burned through more than a gig of data, and spent an hour 10GBs of bandwidth.
Google Pixel 4a 5G – Camara
The Pixel 4a has the same camera system as the Pixel 5, which includes a 12.2-megapixel core and a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera. In between, you can take photos at .6x, 1x, and 2x zoom.
These cameras take sharp pictures. Individual hair strands were clear even when moved inwards. The camera system is very fast, too. Unfortunately, in many images, the suction was completely out of control, throwing pictures of the sunset in an impractical orange glow as they dyed the grass green. almost alien.
At the same time, the selfie camera could not make my quarantine hair look good, but it took good pictures, especially when I was using the face-to-face photo mode. In low light, the photo mode greatly reduced sound but em emed enough to make me look almost like a videogame character.
To test Night Sight, Google’s low-light feature, I took several photos in varying degrees of gloom, including some overly dark situations. That kind of light will never produce sharp images, but I really liked the results. You have to keep the Pixel steady while your sensor lets in more light, but Google seems to be better compensated for the move than Apple. Several of the photos I took looked almost lit if they were a little soft.
Google Pixel 4a 5G – Purchasing Guide
The Google Pixel 4a 5G is available for $ 499 at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from Google.