At $350, a win for those on a budget
People generally adore Google for bringing useful technology to the masses at an aggressively low price, if not free.
For those who like that, I have happy news: Google is getting really, really good at the price cutting, while still bringing quality, with its smartphones.
The evidence? The Pixel 4A smartphone, which the company introduced last Monday.
With this latest device, Google took the best stuff from its $800 high-end Pixel 4 — specifically, an excellent camera system and a large, bright screen — and squeezed it into the body of a $350 device. That’s $50 less than last year’s Pixel 3A, which was Google’s first budget phone.
The Pixel 4A is cheaper than high-end devices largely because it lacks the frills in fancy phones, such as wireless charging and a face scanner. But for what you pay, it’s a great value. Its camera quality and bright screen are on a par with many of the best smartphones out there.
Like the $399 iPhone SE, which Apple released in April, the Pixel 4A is a sign that you no longer need to pay through the nose for a great smartphone with a nice camera.
“It’s been a long time coming for this market, which has always been focused on the high end because of the dominance of Samsung and the iPhone,” she said.
I tested the Pixel 4A for two weeks. Here’s what I found.
Google, which prides itself on being driven by data, surveyed its customers to find out what they wanted in a smartphone. A
large screen, long battery life, lots of storage and great camera quality were among the features that people cared most about.
For the most part, that’s what you get with the Pixel 4A. Let’s run through its features:
• The screen measures 5.81 diagonal inches and relies on OLED technology, a newer type of display that can be made thinner, lighter and brighter with better color accuracy and contrast than its predecessor. For a device in this price range, this is a roomy, attractive display, with nice colors and deep shadow detail.
• The 4A has a reasonably long battery life. On a typical workday juggling emails, calls and texts, I had more than 30% battery life left in the evening. But on weekends, playing games and watching videos with the 4A drained the battery in a few hours.
• The 4A comes in only one model with a generous amount of storage: 128 gigabytes, which is enough for most casual users to store thousands of photos and lots of apps and games.
• Pixel phones are famous for their camera system, which has software features powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Pixel 4A has Google’s most important camera features, including Portrait mode, which puts a picture’s main subject in sharp focus while gently blurring the background. It also offers Night Sight, which makes photos taken in low light look as if they had been shot in normal conditions, without a flash.
The 4A lacks some features that were in the Pixel 4 — such as wireless charging and a face scanner for unlocking the phone.
But Google left out one big feature that does matter: water resistance. So it was disappointing not to have it because durability was another feature that people wanted most in their smartphones.