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Google Pixel 8a review: The best Android smartphone to buy today?
The Google Pixel 8a seems to have struck the perfect balance of aspirational, premium and practical
Mountain View, California: What do you want from a smartphone? After a decade and a half of iterative innovations, most smartphones today hardly have a differentiating edge. In such a market, as a user, all that you’d ideally want is a device that works for any task—be it gaming or photography. Of all the devices you can get your hands on, it is the Google Pixel 8a that strikes a balance of all features—along with a handful of cutting-edge smarts.
The Pixel 8a is the most affordable and least jazzy smartphone from Google. It costs half as much as the Pixel 8 Pro, but when you look at it closely, you realise there’s next to nothing that you miss out on. All this, at a pricing that is decidedly “affordable” in modern day terms—and you have what, prima facie, is the best Android smartphone in the market today.
‘It just works’
The irony here is that it is Apple, Google’s cross-town rival, that popularised the phrase “it just works”. Yet, at a time when Apple’s smartphones have retained their lofty halo, Google, with its Pixel 8a, seems to have struck a balance of aspirational, premium and practical.
At the heart of this is the Pixel 8a’s compact dimensions. The smartphone is nearly identical to the base version of Apple’s iPhone, with a 6.1-inch display that is big enough, but not unwieldy. With soft, rounded edges and a smooth rear panel, the smartphone feels every bit as premium to hold and use as devices that are twice as expensive.
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The Pixel 8a uses a 120Hz display, which is smooth and makes the menus look slick as you scroll through, while streaming video content is a great experience. Google claims to offer seven years of security updates and feature upgrades on the Pixel 8a, which potentially gives it at least twice the lifespan as most competing devices from other brands. If Google sticks to its word, then we have a winner in our hands.
Of course, it’s about AI
You can’t go too far in the tech world today without mentioning AI. At his I/O 2024 keynote on 14 May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai joked that a drinking game could have been made from the use of AI by Google in its two-hour keynote presentation. Side note: Google made 121 of them.
The Pixel 8a, too, uses AI as its main feature and in many ways, is the first smartphone at its price range to extensively offer AI features. You get Gemini Nano running natively on the Pixel 8a, which you’d see in Google’s Live Transcribe and summaries in the Recorder app, and the “Magic Audio Eraser” and “Magic Eraser” for videography and photography, respectively.
With the first, you can select a segment of your video that has any background noise that you want removed, and have the underlying AI model “understand” the noise and remove any similar noise of that nature from the entire video.
The same applies for Magic Eraser, which will let you edit or delete objects or people in a photograph. In our initial week’s usage, Google’s AI chops have clearly improved, leading to more actual desired results.
More importantly, what’s good to note is that Google’s AI innovations on the Pixel 8a feel less gimmicky, and more practical in a neat, compact form factor.
Ticking off essentials
Beyond the AI and its dimensions, the Pixel 8a packs in all the essentials. The 64-megapixel main camera takes excellent photographs, significantly thanks to Google’s underlying AI rendering the photos. The battery stamina is not the best, but can nearly last an entire workday—perhaps with a quick, 15-minute charge towards the end of the day.
You get a clean, unfettered Android experience on this note and can be assured of getting Android and security upgrades before anyone else.
There’s hardly anything in this entire package that Google gets wrong—the only thing that you can perhaps point at is a below-ideal battery life. But it isn’t so low that it’ll disrupt your life.
Could you really want more from a workhorse smartphone? The only doubts would be longevity and reliability. Historically, Pixel smartphones have faced hardware issues in the long run, which can potentially nullify all the above points. That remains to be seen.
Then, there’s the pricing. Google is charging ₹53,999 and upwards for the Pixel 8a, which is three-tenths lesser than what the Pixel 8 and equivalents from other brands cost. Despite it being nearly 25% higher than the Pixel 7a, it is safe to say that the Pixel 8a warrants this pricing. It does not feel unjustified, although what does feel unfair is that Google decided to significantly hike the Pixel 8a’s price in India—its global pricing of $499 (around ₹41,600) remains constant. That aside, it is one of the best Android smartphones in the market today.
Google Pixel 8a went on sale on 14 May, launched ahead of Google I/O 2024, the company’s annual conference. The author was in Mountain View, California to cover Google I/O 2024 at Google’s invitation.
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Business NewsLoungeBusiness Of LifeGoogle Pixel 8a review: The best Android smartphone to buy today?
First Published:17 May 2024, 08:00 AM IST
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