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00:00Hey what is up guys, MKBHD here. Pixel 3a. So, you may have seen this guy in a whole bunch
00:09of commercials and ads recently. They've been going hard with those campaigns and a lot
00:15of those are sort of hammering home the same two points. One, $399. That's the price. Starts
00:21at $399. And two, this phone has a better camera than others. Fun fact, all the ads
00:29just say Pixel 3a and phone X. I could have sworn after seeing a bunch of these, some
00:34of them said iPhone X. You probably thought they said iPhone X. But no, they all just
00:39say phone X. But Google, we all know you're talking about the iPhone X and in the fine
00:44print it says image shot on the iPhone XS. So why not just say Pixel 3a versus iPhone?
00:52Wouldn't that make the point even more powerful? Anyway, so both those two initial things are
00:56true. It does start at $399. That's how much I paid for this one. And it does have an
01:02excellent camera, one that's actually better than the iPhone, which by itself is kind of
01:06amazing at this price point. But of course, there's more to this phone and I've been using
01:10it for about a week. So I'll tell you about it. So bringing the phone down in price, as
01:14we know, is all about sacrifices. And there's been a ton of focus on this camera, naturally.
01:19And I'll get to that, but there are a bunch of other things about this phone to consider.
01:23The best way to analyze it though is still to compare it to its bigger brother, which
01:27is the $800 Pixel 3. They're aesthetically very similar. They even feel pretty much the
01:33same. Now the Pixel 3a is all plastic instead of glass, but they've actually done, I think,
01:38a great job of making it feel similar to the touch. And I could swear the plastic 3a is
01:43lighter when holding them next to each other, but the scale confirms they're pretty much
01:47the same weight too. This purplish color is also kind of funny. It looks basically
01:53sort of pale lavender from most angles, but if the light hits it right, sometimes it
01:58looks more blue, sometimes it looks more white. It really just depends on the environment
02:02you're in, but you do get that colored power button, which I appreciate. And then the only
02:06place you're losing out on build quality of this cheaper phone is the lack of wireless
02:10charging and no water resistance. And then you actually gain a headphone jack. Huh? Would
02:16you look at that? These budget phones just keep the headphone jack around, but other
02:19than that, it still really feels like a Pixel. Oh, and I've also noticed the fingerprint
02:23reader on the back of the 3a is a little bit more recessed than the 3. Again, here's the
02:293a and then the 3. Pretty sure that's because the Pixel 3 is all glass, so you have the
02:33glass fingerprint reader at the same level, but this is a plastic phone. You still need
02:37glass on the fingerprint reader, so they sort of indented it. And then the only other main
02:41aesthetic difference is the display, which is what you're looking at most of the time.
02:45So you're getting a slightly thicker bezel on both the top and bottom and the sides.
02:50And the Pixel 3a has a decidedly meh display. It's a little bigger than the Pixel 3. It's
02:55a 5.6 inch 1080p OLED, but it doesn't get very bright to the point where it actually
03:01can be kind of tough to see it outdoors. And then even when you're in normal indoor environments,
03:05it looks fine when you're staring straight at it, but the off-axis color shift is noticeable.
03:09It starts to go cool and a little green earlier than normal. So the display quality itself
03:14to me was a downgrade, which is a big deal to me since I'm someone who pixel peeps and
03:18does a lot of photo editing and things like that on my phone. So if you do that too, you'll
03:22notice. And then the speaker is a bit cut off too. So the Pixel 3, as we know, had dual
03:27front facing stereo speakers. One of my favorite things about it, the Pixel 3a still has that
03:32top speaker. So I'm glad to still have front facing audio, but then down at the bottom,
03:36the chin is super empty and you have a single downward firing speaker at the bottom that
03:41comes out of this grill. But what's funny is if you take some magnet paper to the back,
03:45you can see the speaker is all the way over on one side. And this is common on phones
03:49like the iPhone where the grill is just another resonance chamber for audio to come out. Turns
03:53out the sound doesn't actually come out both sides. It's just for show on the 3a, you can
03:58still easily block the one side that audio comes out the bottom grill. But again, at
04:02least it's still just half of the speaker pair. You still get audio coming out the
04:05top, so you're not totally blocking it and the speakers get pretty loud and they sound
04:09fine. So the main concern many people have had, and rightfully so, with the Pixel 3a
04:13is just, is it slow? A lot of budget phones nowadays or mid-range phones are still bringing
04:20the top high-end specs before they sacrifice with other things. Pixel 3a does not have
04:26top high-end specs. It has a Snapdragon 670, the Adreno 615, 4 gigs of RAM. And so if Pixel
04:323 was already having performance issues, what's this phone going to be like? Well, I'm here
04:36to tell you, after using this phone for a little while, it performs kind of just like
04:41the Pixel 3, meaning it's fine. It gets the job done. You will notice it's not as smooth
04:46as the higher-end ones, and it definitely struggles with RAM management still. There
04:50are apps closing in the background, only 4 gigs of RAM, but it just kind of works fine.
04:55I don't know if maybe I'm even more critical because I just came from the OnePlus 7 Pro,
04:59which is the smoothest, fastest phone I've ever used. But Pixel 3a just kind of feels
05:03like it chugs along, doesn't care too much about smoothness, and just eventually does
05:07what you say. So opening and closing apps, and multitasking, and opening files, and
05:12editing photos, all that stuff, it doesn't lag at all, it's just not as fast, but it's
05:18not too slow or unusable. It's just fine. So this phone also has slower internal storage
05:22than other flagships, and I can tell in the speed of opening a lot of bigger apps and
05:26bigger files, but, you know, it's not killing me. And then one part of the performance of
05:30this phone that I can say actually does much better than its older brother is the battery
05:35life, because you're only pushing a 1080p display and lower power internals, and this
05:39phone has killed it with the battery life. I've consistently got over 5 hours of screen
05:44on time with the 3a, usually more, and on heavy days, I could just barely kill it in
05:49a day. So this is refreshing because some phones in this budget class do cut down on
05:53the battery, some don't, but this one actually has physically larger batteries than the flagship
05:59brothers, so that was kind of nice to see. Battery life, good on the 3a. So that just
06:03leaves the last part, the part that Google knows they have on lock, the cameras on the
06:08Pixel. So the 3a has the exact same hardware for the single rear camera, same sensor, same
06:14glass, same OIS and everything. On the front though, you go from dual front facing cameras,
06:19one ultra wide and one standard, to a single selfie camera that's sort of in between, so
06:23it's a little wider than normal, but it's not quite the full ultra wide, so it's a good
06:27compromise. But in this rear camera, this is the reason to get hyped over this phone
06:31of course. Photos from the 3a are very detailed and have tons of dynamic range and great color.
06:37Taking pictures with it, it's so easy to forget it's a $400 phone because no other budget
06:42phone takes photos anywhere near this good, especially in the more challenging lighting
06:46scenarios. So like shooting directly into the sun or in darker lighting, things like
06:51that, it's no question Night Sight is still on another level. Now something else to note,
06:55the Pixel 3a does not have the dedicated image processing chip or pixel visual core
07:01that the flagship has. So what does that mean? Basically that now it's processing images
07:05on the Snapdragon 670 instead. I found that this has almost zero effect on the actual
07:10final image quality. Really the only thing you'll notice for sure is photos take a little
07:14longer to actually process after you snap the photo. That's about it. So overall, if
07:19Pixel 3's image is an A+, then this is an A. And that's still miles ahead of any other
07:25camera of any phone in this price range. So should you buy a Pixel 3a? Of course, this
07:31is going to be a really good phone at the price for a lot of people, but it's not just
07:34as simple as saying, Oh, it's just like the Pixel, but cheaper. It's just a little more
07:38nuanced than that. There are a lot of other competitive phones out around at this price
07:42now more than ever before. You have that Zenfone 6 that just came out at 500 bucks, but that's
07:47pretty nice. You have the OnePlus 6T and the OnePlus 7 out there, the Galaxy S9 coming
07:52down in price from last year. So there's a lot of happening. The Pixel 3a chops down
07:56in a couple places where some other mid range phones wouldn't have. So it doesn't have the
08:00super high end specs and it's just never going to feel blazing fast. And of course, no wireless
08:06charging and no water resistance. We know that, but it does bring down a lot of those
08:10things from higher end phones like its big brother that we love so much. Like that same
08:14fingerprint reader on the back. The same squeeze for assisting is still there. The
08:18same really good haptic motor, which is underrated for stuff like typing and notifications. The
08:23same super smart software experience that will be updated first in line and an even
08:28better battery life. And then of course the best camera quality of any phone. So there
08:32are other things that are more important to some people than just the camera, in which
08:36case there's a whole world of other phones in this world that you can look into, like
08:40I mentioned. But if you're in it for the best possible photo quality and the absolute
08:45best software experience for 400 bucks, you're looking at it right here. Pixel 3a, simple
08:50as that. So there you have it. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one.