but before we can talk about the Pixel 4a,

we have to talk about timing.

This phone isn't shipping until August 20th,

which is super late.

Google says it's because the coronavirus

kept it from finishing the final stages

of design and manufacturing.

But whatever, because this phone is coming up so late,

Google knows that it could conflict with other phones

that it's gonna release.

So it's just going ahead

and pre-announcing two other Pixel phones

that are coming out later this year,

it's pre-announcing the Pixel 4a 5G,

which is gonna cost $499,

and the Pixel 5 which is gonna cost,

I don't know.

And literally that's all we know about those phones,

but right now we have the Pixel 4a

and it only costs $349.

And I would use it, it's really pretty good.

It's just a little basic, there's no frills.

There's nothing fancy on it, pike at all,

but there's no weird software and it's not too big.

This is actually the most basic Android phone

that you can get.

And there's nothing wrong with basic.

(upbeat music)

Okay, let's just give you the basics of what this phone is.

I just said basics again.

I'm gonna say basics a lot in this video,

I'm gonna try and just turn that up down a little bit.

We'll see how I do.

The most important feature on a Pixel

is either Google software or it's the camera,

and you know what?

Let's just do it right at the top.

Let's talk about the camera.

It is really good.

There is a single 12.2 megapixel camera on the back

with optical image stabilization

and the front camera is eight megapixels

inside this little hole punch here.

Google's camera hardware

is never really anything special though,

because the focus

is always on making better use of that hardware

with computational photography.

So I compared the Pixel 4a which costs $349

to the Pixel 4 which costs $800,

it's a lot for a Pixel 4,

and the iPhone SE which costs $400.

And the results are that the Pixel 4a's photos

are almost indistinguishable from the Pixel 4

in almost all cases.

It is good in low light,

it is good with night sight.

It's good at HDR, it's pretty solid at zoom.

And it has that super contrasty Pixel look.

Now the iPhone SE does give some warmer colors,

which some people like,

but in general, I will take the 4a, especially in low light.

Do I wish that Google had put a wide angle

or a telephoto lens on the 4a?

Well, yeah, but those secondary cameras

are almost always worse than the main sensor,

especially on inexpensive phones.

So Google just left them out,

but that does have one weird side effect.

When you go into portrait mode on the 4a,

it has to do this really aggressive 2x crop

to make the portrait stuff work with the Pixel's math.

Other than that portrait mode is what you would expect.

It's not too great at the edges if you look too closely,

but it's fine for Instagram.

And speaking of math,

there is no extra image processor on the Pixel 4a

like there is on the Pixel 4.

So images do take longer to process.

If you take a photo and then jump right into the gallery,

you're gonna have to wait a beat

for the image to fix itself.

The other thing about Pixel phones

is that while their photos are great,

their videos are not so great.

If taking video is more important to you

than getting great still photos,

you might be better off with iPhone SE,

but in general,

I do still prefer these still photos of the Pixel

than I do on the iPhone.

Bottom line, this is a Pixel,

which means that it has a very good camera.

It is a $350 phone that can go toe to toe

with cameras that cost like, I don't know, $1,200.

That's still amazing.

Now the rest of this phone isn't amazing like the camera,

but the Pixel 4a does get almost all of the basics right.

I know, I said it again.

Okay, there's only one size.

It's got a 5.8 inch screen with a hole punch

and it's OLED at 1080p.

There is a fingerprint sensor on the back

and there's that one camera with a flash on the back,

one camera on the front,

and a headphone jack, hooray!

As you can see just by looking at it,

it looks pretty simple.

It has a plastic body

and it has Gorilla Glass 3 on the screen,

which is kind of a throwback,

we're coming up on Gorilla Glass 7.

I don't know, whatever, it's really well-built,

there's no flex to it.

And maybe it's because it's the same size

of regular iPhones have been

all the way back to the iPhone 6.

But if you don't like big phones,

this feels like the size of phone.

This feels like a really good size to me.

You can get any color that you want

as long as it's black.

Google likes to use cute names for its phone colors,

and it always calls the black ones just black.

And yeah, this phone is available just in black.

There is this neat seafoam blue-green power button though.

The Pixel 4a also does a good job

at a bunch of the other fundamentals.

You've got stereo speakers on the earpiece here

and one on the bottom,

it's got six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage.

And actually that 128 is important.

You can't expand it,

but it is double what the base $399 iPhone SE has.

So technically the Pixel 4a is 100 bucks less

than the equivalent 128 gig iPhone SE.

The screen quality on the Pixel 4a is fine.

It used to be super rare

to be able to get OLED at this price point,

but that's changing a little bit.

And I think this OLED looks pretty good,

it's obviously not the best one that I've ever seen.

The color skew a little bit warm

in certain lighting conditions.

But look, the bezels are relatively small.

The Pixels feel fairly close to the surface of the glass

instead of being weirdly set back

like they can feel on other phones.

(soft music)

Now the phone is missing some stuff though.

So for example, there's no wireless charging,

which sure, but come on,

that's like expected these days.

Google also dropped a thing

where you can squeeze it to bring up the Google Assistant.

And I don't care.

I don't miss that at all.

You don't get fancy higher frustrate screens

or multiple cameras or a water resistance rating.

And that last one, that does kinda suck,

but Google dropped all that stuff

so that it could focus on the essentials

and had to get those right.

And I think that Google

might might've gotten

the most important, essential thing right, battery life.

So there's really only two ways

to improve battery life on a phone,

put it in a bigger battery

or make the phone draw less power.

And I think Google tried to do both on the Pixel 4a.

It has a 3,140 milliamp hour battery,

which is small by today's standards,

but it's still 300 milliamps more than the Pixel 4.

And the Pixel 4's battery life, it's bad,

but the Pixel 4a's battery life, well, it's not amazing,

but it's fully acceptable.

You should be able to make it through a full day.

I'm getting around 4 1\2 to 5 hours of screen time,

which to me is enough.

The other thing that helps with battery life

is drawing less power.

And the screen is a big part of that,

so a 5.8 inch screen isn't huge, so that helps.

But I think the processor inside the phone

is the more important part.

It is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G.

The G stands for faster graphics.

And I think this draws less power

than a Snapdragon 865 with a 5G modem.

This is also not a 5G phone, by the way.

But does that processor make the Pixel 4a slow?

I can see it,

sometimes it happens to take a beat longer to open

and sometimes scrolling in Chrome

is gonna feel a little bit junky, but it's not terrible.

And this phone feels a lot smoother

than the Samsung Galaxy A51,

which is like kind of in the same class here.

Smoother is the key thing,

because this is using Google's version of Android,

which is super clean, super easy to get around.

It doesn't have a bunch of extra crap that you don't want.

Like these days Samsung

is fully just putting ads in its software now.

(sighs)

Google is guaranteeing three years

of software updates for the Pixel

and I think this processor

is really gonna be showing its age at three years,

but it should make it.

But if you compare that to the iPhone SE

whose processor right now is a beast,

it's gonna last longer

and it's probably gonna get like five or six years

of software updates.

So that's something to keep in mind.

So look, I know that basic is an insult,

it means that it's common.

That it's every day, but you know what?

In your life, you need to have some simple things

that are consistent and reliable.

But what I'm saying

is I would be very happy with this phone.

And I don't know why anybody would buy a Pixel 4

when this phone exists

and as for the upcoming Pixel 4a 5G for 500 bucks,

me, I don't care that much about 5G yet

and we don't know what other changes

are coming to it officially,

and as for the upcoming Pixel 5,

honestly, all I can say

is I really hope that Google changes up

its flagship phone strategy this year.

But wherever the Pixel 5 lands,

it's going to be in a different market than this phone

because the Pixel 4a is for the sub-$400 market.

Here is another word that gets used as an insult, cheap.

The Pixel 4a is cheap in terms of cost,

but other than being a little, I don't know, plasticy,

it doesn't feel cheap.

Now it's not as fast as an iPhone SE.

And it probably won't last as many years

as an iPhone SE will, but it costs less

and it has a really nice version of Android on it

if you want Android.

Look, at this price point, you just can't have it all.

I've talked about that with the Samsung Galaxy A51,

John just talked about it with the OnePlus Nord.

Companies have to pick where their priorities are

and Google picked the camera

and then for everything else

that just made sure that it hit a baseline level of quality.

This phone is basic,

but a lot of phones in this price range