WEBVTT

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Google has been understandably taking a lot of flak for the value proposition of

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the pixel 8A I mean who would buy the value a series phone for $500 when the

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$700 pixel 8 is often on promo for

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anywhere from $50 to $100 off I mean it

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should be basically a no-brainer right but I think there's something that

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people have been overlooking here and that is that

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a this is still a really awesome phone

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in a lot of W that we're going to go over in the next little bit and B while

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the specs and the experience are permanent pricing is fleeting as Google

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has demonstrated again and again and again so if Google regularly promos the

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pixel 8 you can pretty much count on them to regularly promo the 8A so let's

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have a look at what the actual differences are between these phones starting on the outside the biggest

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difference is going to be the camera where the pixel 8A inherits exactly the

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same camera Hardware that we saw in the pixel 7A so any difference that you're

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going to get in image quality is going to be thanks to the tensor G3 processor

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rather than the older tensor G2 it's a 64 megapixel sensor so it's not like

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it's going to be taking super blurry images or anything like that and Google

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has added their latest processing tricks to it including support for real tone in

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video which is their attempt to better capture more diverse skin tones with

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that said there's only so much you can do in software and we did observe a

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noticeable difference in quality especially NVIDIA compared to the

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pixel 8 though if you're not comparing them side by side it's not like anything

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jumped off the screen at us as a problem with respect to white balance uh color

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reproduction or even the basics like the responsiveness of the shutter button

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which wow is really fast which probably

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thanks to the fact that it has almost the same internal Hardware as the pixel

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8 but we'll get to that in a moment first you're going to get all the latest

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AI features like best take magic editor and audio Magic Eraser and the screen

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that you'll be viewing it on is vastly upgraded over the older pixel 7A we

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actually love this screen the only obvious downgrade compared to the pixel

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8 is that it uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3 rather than Corning victus other than

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that the peak brightness both theoretical and what we actually

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measured is up in the neighborhood of 2,000 flipping nits making for an

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excellent HDR viewing experience the pixel count is identical so you're not

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losing any sharpness and compared to the 7 a we go from 90 HZ to a maximum of 120

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HZ on the Adaptive refresh rate display I'd say the only really noticeable thing

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is that it does have thicker bezels but

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hey depending on you know how you hold your phone that might actually be a

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feature rather than a bug speaking of holding the devices I recognize that

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most of you are going to put a case or at the very least a skin on your phone

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but as someone who generally goes bearback sometimes at Great cost

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I actually found the matte finish on the a series more pleasing to the touch than

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the glossy finish on the regular eight and I definitely do not miss that

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gigantic camera bump it's not that I can't get the eight into my pocket it's

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just that you know who likes speed bumps maybe children so they don't die okay

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okay generally I'm Pro speed bumps just not on my phone all

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right on the subject of speed bumps though we observed a difference in

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performance performance between these two devices in spite of them having on

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paper the same specs we'll get into that in a little bit more detail later but

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first let's finish up the exterior tour at the top we've got noise cancelling

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microphones on both but not on the rear that's right compared to the pixel 8 the

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pixel 8A has only two microphones rather

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than three on the left side we've got these SIM tray on the right side we've

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got the power button which can be used to summon Gemini now including ooh

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Gemini Nano which can run some machine learning models locally on the device

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for things like memo taking which is a welcome addition we've got the volume

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rocker over here and then finally at the bottom our USBC Port that handles

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charging ah but at different rates while

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the pixel 8 will do 27 Watts with a wire and up to 12 Watts wirelessly the 8A

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will only do 18 watts and 7 1/2 Watts respectively and features no support for

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wireless power sharing which is one of those features that seemed kind of

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Superfluous to me until long story short

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my wife lost her purse my phone was dead I needed it to communicate with someone

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at the same time that she needed her phone because we needed to get to a Tracker something something I needed

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Wireless power sharing and it saved Our Lives well her purse is life anyway the

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last big difference externally is one that you won't see instead of having

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ip68 water and dust resistance the 8A

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has IP67 which under most circumstances

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probably won't make a difference to your day-to-day use but could be the

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difference between being submerged for an extended period of time and dying or

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not dying but probably not did we ever open

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the box oh you get a sim removal tool a

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c Toc cable and a c TOA adapter no power

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brick because hey you know what go buy your own power brick let's talk about

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the insides both of them feature Google's tensor G3 processor 8 gigs of

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RAM and a minimum of 128 gigs of storage

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new with the 8A is the option to go up to 256 gigs of storage making this for

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people who take a lot of pictures and record a lot of video a far more viable

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option than a series phones in the past and the best part is unlike Apple

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they're charging a reasonable price for that storage upgrade just $60 at MSRP

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which as we know Google is a little

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flexible about there are a couple of other downgrades on the spec sheet but

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these might not be as bad as they seem for one thing we go from Wi-Fi 7 down to

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Wi-Fi 6E yeah your download speeds could

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be slower on an 8A versus an 8 but it's worth noting that in the real world

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things like DNS lookups are likely to contribute more to your page loading

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speed than the maximum throughput that you can get over the air the other one

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is that the battery is slightly smaller but this is where things get very very

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interesting because in our endurance test the pixel 8A actually outperformed

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the pixel 8 with its bigger battery and

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we'll get to that after this message from our sponsor dbrand all right dbr

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are blank thank you very much dbrand go to I assume short.com would be the

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vanity URL I guess you can buy debrand stuff there or you could just not that's

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also an option now to get back to what matters Genji impact right they're

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obviously both logged into the lab's account so we can't play on both phones

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at the same time but that's fine it doesn't matter the difference in

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performance was very small anyway with both phones managing in the neighborhood

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of around 40 to 45 frames per second

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average but they weren't quite the same

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we observed that the 8A ran about 1.3 de

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hotter on the skin of the device versus the eight and ran about 2% lower both in

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terms of averages and 1% lows this could

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be related to the different thermal Solutions in these phones but while

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Google hasn't confirmed this we believe that it may come down to slight

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differences in clock speed because it's not just in genin Impact that we're

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observing these differences in performance in for example our endurance

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test which involves playing back a YouTube video at a locked 250 nits for

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as long as possible we got an entire

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extra hour of battery life out of the 8A

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compared to the eight and the best way to explain this would be if the

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processor were running at a lower clock speed overall it's not a difference that

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we observed in day-to-day interaction with the device it's extremely Snappy I

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mean especially now that it runs at 120 htz just like the higher-end devices but

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if it's going to get me a little bit of extra battery life honestly I'm kind of

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into it curiously on the subject of the battery we found that both the 8 and the

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8A charged in the same amount of time time and what we determined is that this

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came down to the cable that we were using because both were using a 30 W

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charger which is well above the capabilities of both devices and it

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turns out that Google includes only a 3 amp rated cable with both of these

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devices so if you want to actually take advantage of the superior charging rates

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of the eight you have to go and Source yourself a third party cable a minor

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detail but one that could matter to you now it's time for everyone's favorite

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part of the video crab rave

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nice that stereo

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sound not the loudest thing and there is some a little bit of audible crackling

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and Distortion at the upper range of its capabilities but when you compare this

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to $500 phones from years ago pretty

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decent sounding speaking of the biggest

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benefit of the 8A is one that we have haven't talked about yet that isn't

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visible and that you won't find even in the software menus and that is software

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support just like the rest of the 8 family the pixel 8A is getting 7 years

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of software updates and that's not just security I'm talking full OS upgrades

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and even feature drops now we've obviously seen that Google hasn't

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necessarily brought all of the latest

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features to their older devices the 7A is still lagging behind for example even

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in AI features that are processed in the cloud rather than directly on the device

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but it's clear that Google is finally addressing the competitive disadvantage

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they've had against apple whose users are able to just take for granted that

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they buy an iPhone and they can probably use it until they are totally sick of

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the thing or Until It Breaks so the

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value proposition with the 8A here is pretty compelling and I can definitely

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see some users looking at the pixel 8 on promo and going well I mean come on for

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a of only $150 or even $100 yeah I'll

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take the better camera the better IP water resistance uh Wi-Fi 7 the faster

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charging if I go and Source my own cable there's a lot of value here but

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depending on promos that difference could be more like the MSRP difference

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of $200 and you got to remember that especially in North America a lot of

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consumers are buying phones on contract and if that subsidy is fixed you know

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let's say a $300 or $400 subsidy you

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could be looking at a different price of $100 or $250 $300 so it's not

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necessarily a 20 to 30% difference in

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price it could be a lot more and there could be a lot more of this video but I

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think I'm kind of done subscribe to ShortCircuit