Instead of two different sizes,

well, in addition to two different sizes

this year Google made two different phones,

there's the 499 Pixel 4A 5G

and the 699 Pixel 5,

and I'm reviewing them together

because even though they have different names

they are very similar phones.

I think of them as the no frills standard phone

and the kind of fancy upgrade,

just kind of fancy though,

Google isn't trying to beat the flagships with the Pixel 5

and it's not exactly breaking new ground

with the Pixel 4A 5G.

They're good but neither one of these

is gonna blow you away.

Not in terms of hardware features or in terms of speed

or price, or even in terms of camera

but because Google isn't overreaching,

it means that neither one of these phones

is going to let you down.

All right, look we're trying to fit two phone reviews

into a single video so we should really just get to it.

(upbeat music)

Google doesn't want the Pixel to be flashy,

it never really has.

These phones are simple and they feel simple

with matte finishes and slightly rounded corners.

You've got a square camera bump on the back

next to a rear mounted fingerprint sensor.

The screens on both are flat

with big round cutouts

for the selfie cameras inside the screen.

I think the design is pretty clean and classic,

but I get that the line between classic and boring

is thin and these phones are right on that line.

Now, even though the Pixel 4A 5G

and the Pixel 5 look very similar

there are subtle differences

when you start to look at them closely.

Let's start with the Pixel 4A 5G.

It has a 6.2 inch screen

and it's made out of plastic on the back

just like the regular Pixel 4A,

It feels fairly smooth but not too cheap.

One annoying thing is that the fingerprint sensor

on the back is just barely recess

so it can be hard to find,

but you do get a headphone jack, hooray.

It comes in black or white, and that's that.

When you hold it up against the slightly smaller Pixel 5

you can start to see where Google saved some money

on the hardware on this phone,

the bezels around the 4A 5G screen

are a little bit bigger

and they're not fully symmetrical on the top and the bottom.

There's also the weird fact that the 4A 5G,

which is the bigger phone

has a smaller battery inside, it's 3,885 milliamps

as opposed to the 4,080 on the Pixel 5.

Now, there's a $200 price difference

between these two phones

but look, they share the same processor,

cameras, storage, and software,

so really the only real reason to pick

the 5 over the 4A 5G

is that it's nicer in some fairly subtle ways.

First, it just feels a little bit nicer.

The Pixel 5 has a six inch screen and an aluminum body,

but since Google likes to keep its phones really utilitarian

that aluminum is covered with this sort of plastic coating.

It has a little bit more grip on the finish,

which I really like

and there's some sparkle inside the paint here too.

Oh, and it also has a fingerprint sensor

that you can actually feel,

it's just subtly nicer, like I said,

including having small and even bezels

all the way around the screen.

The Pixel 5 technically has stereo speakers,

but one of those speakers is a panel audio speaker,

which works by literally vibrating the screen to make sound

it's cool for phone calls

'cause you can put your ear wherever,

but for watching videos or playing games,

it means that one of the speakers

is kind of weak and tenney.

You also get wireless charging

thanks to a hidden cutout here underneath the aluminum.

There's a high 90 Hertz refresh rate screen

and eight gigs of Ram instead of six, which is on this one.

You can also get it in a sort of sage color

in addition to black.

I obviously prefer the Pixel 5

but again, you're paying 200 bucks for nicer things,

not really better performance,

so, let's talk about performance.

(upbeat music)

Both of these phones have a Snapdragon 765G processor

which is not Qualcomm's very fastest chip,

but it might be the Qualcomm chip with the best balance

of performance and battery life with 5G.

Even though these phones don't have

the biggest batteries in their class,

they're lasting all day for me, and then some.

On the 4A 5G I hit six hours of screen time,

and then on the Pixel 5 I just attacked it,

I did three hours of GPS tracking on a bike ride,

I played two hours of xCloud games,

you know, streaming from the Cloud,

I did a few hours of other stuff

and I still got from 6:00 A.M. to midnight

with that very heavy use.

The bottom line is that battery life

is way better than on the Pixel 4.

Google also added an extreme battery saver option

which just turns off a bunch of apps in the background,

unless you put them on an approved list.

I think a second battery saver option is dumb,

I think it's that what they call it extreme,

and I think it's sad that Google thought it was necessary

because battery life is fine,

and so as speed and performance.

I have reviewed a ton of Android phones

at the top flight Snapdragon 865 processor,

so I can feel when big heavy apps like big games

launch a little bit more slowly

but it's not noticeable in everyday use.

And since the Pixel 5

has a 90 Hertz higher refresh rate screen,

things like scrolling and animations

are really nice and smooth.

Google's version of Android is still clean and easy to use

and you get Android 11 out of the box.

I really like how Google does things on Android,

it's always just a little bit less fiddly

than other versions,

but I admit you don't get a lot of flashy features,

but I mean, there are a couple that are neat,

you can have the Google Assistant sit on hold for you

so you don't have to listen to the whole music,

and the voice recorder app on the Pixels

can output these little automated videos

that show a transcript as you speak,

it's kind of fun.

Google is joining the rest of the US 5G

hype industrial complex

and trying to make us believe that 5G

is a huge deal right now

and you're gonna get incredible speeds with it,

but unless you're very lucky in where you live, you won't.

For me in Oakland, 5G and Google Fi

is no faster than LTE and sometimes it's slower.

Oh, and if you want the 4A 5G slightly bigger screen,

and you're on Verizon

you have to pay a hundred bucks more

because Verizon's millimeter wave flavor of 5G

is more expensive, also really hard to find.

My take is that if you need a phone right now

you might as well get a 5G phone if you can afford it

but don't upgrade just to get a 5G phone.

One last performance thing

Google dropped the Pixel Neural Core photo processing chip

which means that all the photo processing

happens on the main processor,

which isn't the fastest,

so you have to wait a lot for images to process

before you can look at them.

Now the shutter on the camera is still really fast

but yeah, I felt that speed hit,

Oh yeah, the Pixel camera,

we should talk about that.

(upbeat music)

The camera has always been the Pixel's key strength

and the new thing this year is an ultra wide camera

instead of a telephoto one.

Finally, the really good news is that

the cameras are as good as they've always been on the Pixel,

but that also means that they're just

as good as they've always been on the Pixel.

There is some tweaking around with how images are tuned,

there are some new features that I really do love

and some improved video

which was always a Pixel's a weak spot.

But the bottom line is that

Google hasn't really pushed the state of the art here,

and everybody else has kind of caught up,

the cameras on the Pixels are really good

but then so are Apple's and Samsung's and Oneplus's.

Google is sticking with what it knows basically

right on down to the same main 12 megapixel sensor

that it's been using since the Pixel 3,

Google says it lets them adapt their algorithms

on the same platform.

So, Google's Pixels are still well detailed and contrasty,

they still excel at night mode

but I think the results this year

are just a little bit closer

to what Apple and Samsung do with color,

they're just a little bit more yellow

than what I expect out of a Pixel,

but it's still fine.

Google has also made night sight automatic now,

so you don't have to switch over

to a separate mode to use it

but you can turn it on and off as you wish.

It's also doing night sight for portraits

which is neat, but you can start to see

the limits of the algorithm here,

in challenging conditions

the HDR effect looks just a little bit over-processed.

I also wish that the Pixel camera didn't punch in

for so many of its modes,

portrait mode and video always make me

take a step back to get the shot.

For portraits Google Photos has this new thing

where you can adjust a virtual light sources

position and intensity,

it's really good even if I don't know

how often I'm actually gonna use it.

Now, the ultra wide, the new camera,

it's fairly good, it's 16 megapixels,

and like on other phones,

you can see a small drop in quality,

but it's not a huge drop off,

those algorithms are still working here.

Still though, you can't shoot 4K with the ultra wide,

and another trade off is

I have to admit the telephoto quality does take a small hit

compared to the Pixel 4.

Now to me, the most important upgrades ought to be in video.

So the Pixel can do 4K 60 finally, but not 4K 24.

Google has a new default stabilization

that's good enough to leave on all of the time

unless you really try to break it,

I think it works quite well.

There's three other stabilization modes,

so there's locked,

which just keeps the image in frame and steady,

like the phone is on a tripod

and it's actually kind of incredible.

Active is for when you yourself are bouncing around,

when you're walking, or on a bike, or whatever.

And then there's cinematic pan

which is basically just slow mode

with some extra stabilization,

it is really cool, but it drops you down to 1080P.

Now, these stabilization modes

are not the most amazing quality that I've ever seen

but they do let me pull off shots

that I might not have been able to have gotten