Pixel 3a Review
I will start this off by saying that I do not have another android phone to compare this phone too. However, I do have an iPhone 8Plus which I will be comparing it to when it matters.
Unboxing
The unboxing experience is mostly the same as what you would expect from a premium phone. A clean white box with some Google branding and some pictures of what's in the box, though my box came a bit banged up as it was shipped to me in just a DPD plastic bag (carphone warehouse you can do better). On the back securing the top to the bottom is 2 bits of tape with pull tabs, once pulled you then need to wait for gravity to do its thing. Thankfully it is not so tight a tolerance that you have to wait 5 mins for this to happen. After the bottom of the box has been released you are greeted by the Pixel 3a in its protective plastic, Beneath this is the documentation box (with your sim eject tool) up top with the wall adapter below it. Under the documentation, you will find your USB-C cable with a USB-A to C adapter and that's it for the box.
Physical Features
The device is almost identical in appearance to the pixel 3a. The biggest differences between the two are the lower speaker grill which has been moved from in front to the bottom edge. This makes this speaker easier to block than the pixel 3’s. I presume the reason for the move would have been to make the display assembly easier to manufacture. The other noticeable change is the addition of a headphone jack, Why this is added to the budget version of the phone and not the premium version is very strange. Most of the people that would want this connector would be people wanting a connector for their high-end headphones and I don't think that they would be looking toward a budget smartphone to get it. Less noticeable changes are the material used for the body of the phone now polycarbonate vs the originals metal and glass. Now while you would think that this would think this would make the phone lighter, It is but only by 1g. Now the reason behind this relative equal heft is twofold, 1 the device is actually a bit bigger than the 3 H5.7mm W1.9mm D0.3mm. The Second reason I will discuss in the next section.
Pricing and Specs
Image captured from https://store.google.com/gb/product/pixel_3a_specs
Now we are in the next section, The second reason for the almost identical weight is the battery it has gained 85mAh now while this may not seem like much when you pair this with the CPU chosen it makes a big difference. This Phone is Priced at £399, which is a good price for the bare specs of the phone. Now add to this the Pixel features and this becomes a brilliant price. This phone comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 with 4GB of ram, This fairly modest CPU does not really hold the phone back in normal day to day use. I could only see this actually becoming a problem if you want to do intensive gaming or Some kind of intensive processing….. I can't think of anything that would subject a phone to this kind or workload but I'm sure it exists somewhere. The Ram is again sufficient for normal use and is managed by some aggressive app closure policies to keep the phone snappy if your a person that likes multi-tasking allot of apps at once you may get annoyed when the phone closes the oldest apps. Going on to the camera this is the only thing that is the same as the pixel 3. In terms of the camera itself the 3a is however missing the pixels visual core, With the cameras post processing being moved to the phones CPU. This will make the post-processing of the pictures taken take longer, But the discount for this is worthwhile in my mind.
Using The Phone
This is where I will be comparing it to IOS, and I'm going to start off with something I do not like and hits me every day I use the phone. When you unlock the phone the app draw bounces and it was doing it from the moment I got the phone. I had to eventually call support it was annoying me so much and the response was to reset the pixel launcher, This got rid of my home page icons and seems to be a very extreme way of stopping the bouncing and I fear that this UI “feature” will return I would have preferred an option to disable this altogether.
Generally using the phone day to day other than UI elements bouncing at you for no reason I found nothing that stopped me from doing what I wanted. The only time you ever really notice the lower performance CPU is loading as it takes slightly longer to initially load things but once it's loaded you won't notice any difference, That is until you load more things and the limited multitasking has to start closing old apps.
The multitasking between iPhone and Android really confuses me the iPhone has only got 2GB of RAM ½ that of the Pixel 3a yet it has to close apps sooner, Now what I believe is happening in the iPhone is that it's doing a version of PC hibernation. Older apps up to a point have their ram contents moved into slower storage until it's needed and then loaded from its previous state instead of from the beginning.
Now I don't use this phone as much as my personal iPhone, I use this for “Business” email, 2 factor for my google accounts and monitoring of my servers and I get about 4 days on a charge I find this fantastic for a smartphone. It really brings me back to the old 3210 days.
Camera Comparison
Now I'm going to put several sides by sides here and I will comment as to what is what but I'm not going to comment on the images, I am no where near qualified to say what is better and im also a bit aesthetically challenged. So I will leave this decision to you as what is better.
Final Thoughts
This is not a flagship but throughout this, I have been comparing it to a flagship though and the reason for this is that this phone has allot of features available in its flagship brethren. While the physical specs are almost completely different all the software Google offers on the pixel is still there, the most important being prompt security and feature updates. The only bad bit is that googles support is only for 2 years compared to apples 5, This is however this is better than Samsung I recall having to wait months for Samsung to deliver any feature updates after the release from Google and this was on a sim free phone so I did not have to wait for the carriers to have their say in the Google update chain. Getting this phone has opened me up to the cheaper phones when they are done right they do all the things I ask for, my only issue is that the iPhone XR does not have force touch which I actually use quite a bit and I find myself missing on the pixel 3a.
My recommendation at the end of the day is if you are not going to be doing anything severely taxing on your phone (Playing any 3d game) you should be fine with the with this phone.