Google has been understandably taking a lot of flak for the value proposition of
the pixel 8A I mean who would buy the value a series phone for $500 when the
$700 pixel 8 is often on promo for
anywhere from $50 to $100 off I mean it
should be basically a no-brainer right but I think there's something that
people have been overlooking here and that is that
a this is still a really awesome phone
in a lot of W that we're going to go over in the next little bit and B while
the specs and the experience are permanent pricing is fleeting as Google
has demonstrated again and again and again so if Google regularly promos the
pixel 8 you can pretty much count on them to regularly promo the 8A so let's
have a look at what the actual differences are between these phones starting on the outside the biggest
difference is going to be the camera where the pixel 8A inherits exactly the
same camera Hardware that we saw in the pixel 7A so any difference that you're
going to get in image quality is going to be thanks to the tensor G3 processor
rather than the older tensor G2 it's a 64 megapixel sensor so it's not like
it's going to be taking super blurry images or anything like that and Google
has added their latest processing tricks to it including support for real tone in
video which is their attempt to better capture more diverse skin tones with
that said there's only so much you can do in software and we did observe a
noticeable difference in quality especially NVIDIA compared to the
pixel 8 though if you're not comparing them side by side it's not like anything
jumped off the screen at us as a problem with respect to white balance uh color
reproduction or even the basics like the responsiveness of the shutter button
which wow is really fast which probably
thanks to the fact that it has almost the same internal Hardware as the pixel
8 but we'll get to that in a moment first you're going to get all the latest
AI features like best take magic editor and audio Magic Eraser and the screen
that you'll be viewing it on is vastly upgraded over the older pixel 7A we
actually love this screen the only obvious downgrade compared to the pixel
8 is that it uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3 rather than Corning victus other than
that the peak brightness both theoretical and what we actually
measured is up in the neighborhood of 2,000 flipping nits making for an
excellent HDR viewing experience the pixel count is identical so you're not
losing any sharpness and compared to the 7 a we go from 90 HZ to a maximum of 120
HZ on the Adaptive refresh rate display I'd say the only really noticeable thing
is that it does have thicker bezels but
hey depending on you know how you hold your phone that might actually be a
feature rather than a bug speaking of holding the devices I recognize that
most of you are going to put a case or at the very least a skin on your phone
but as someone who generally goes bearback sometimes at Great cost
I actually found the matte finish on the a series more pleasing to the touch than
the glossy finish on the regular eight and I definitely do not miss that
gigantic camera bump it's not that I can't get the eight into my pocket it's
just that you know who likes speed bumps maybe children so they don't die okay
okay generally I'm Pro speed bumps just not on my phone all
right on the subject of speed bumps though we observed a difference in
performance performance between these two devices in spite of them having on
paper the same specs we'll get into that in a little bit more detail later but
first let's finish up the exterior tour at the top we've got noise cancelling
microphones on both but not on the rear that's right compared to the pixel 8 the
pixel 8A has only two microphones rather
than three on the left side we've got these SIM tray on the right side we've
got the power button which can be used to summon Gemini now including ooh
Gemini Nano which can run some machine learning models locally on the device
for things like memo taking which is a welcome addition we've got the volume
rocker over here and then finally at the bottom our USBC Port that handles
charging ah but at different rates while
the pixel 8 will do 27 Watts with a wire and up to 12 Watts wirelessly the 8A
will only do 18 watts and 7 1/2 Watts respectively and features no support for
wireless power sharing which is one of those features that seemed kind of
Superfluous to me until long story short
my wife lost her purse my phone was dead I needed it to communicate with someone
at the same time that she needed her phone because we needed to get to a Tracker something something I needed
Wireless power sharing and it saved Our Lives well her purse is life anyway the
last big difference externally is one that you won't see instead of having
ip68 water and dust resistance the 8A
has IP67 which under most circumstances
probably won't make a difference to your day-to-day use but could be the
difference between being submerged for an extended period of time and dying or
not dying but probably not did we ever open
the box oh you get a sim removal tool a
c Toc cable and a c TOA adapter no power
brick because hey you know what go buy your own power brick let's talk about
the insides both of them feature Google's tensor G3 processor 8 gigs of
RAM and a minimum of 128 gigs of storage
new with the 8A is the option to go up to 256 gigs of storage making this for
people who take a lot of pictures and record a lot of video a far more viable
option than a series phones in the past and the best part is unlike Apple
they're charging a reasonable price for that storage upgrade just $60 at MSRP
which as we know Google is a little
flexible about there are a couple of other downgrades on the spec sheet but
these might not be as bad as they seem for one thing we go from Wi-Fi 7 down to
Wi-Fi 6E yeah your download speeds could
be slower on an 8A versus an 8 but it's worth noting that in the real world
things like DNS lookups are likely to contribute more to your page loading
speed than the maximum throughput that you can get over the air the other one
is that the battery is slightly smaller but this is where things get very very
interesting because in our endurance test the pixel 8A actually outperformed
the pixel 8 with its bigger battery and
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also an option now to get back to what matters Genji impact right they're
obviously both logged into the lab's account so we can't play on both phones
at the same time but that's fine it doesn't matter the difference in
performance was very small anyway with both phones managing in the neighborhood
of around 40 to 45 frames per second
average but they weren't quite the same
we observed that the 8A ran about 1.3 de
hotter on the skin of the device versus the eight and ran about 2% lower both in
terms of averages and 1% lows this could
be related to the different thermal Solutions in these phones but while
Google hasn't confirmed this we believe that it may come down to slight
differences in clock speed because it's not just in genin Impact that we're
observing these differences in performance in for example our endurance
test which involves playing back a YouTube video at a locked 250 nits for
as long as possible we got an entire
extra hour of battery life out of the 8A
compared to the eight and the best way to explain this would be if the
processor were running at a lower clock speed overall it's not a difference that
we observed in day-to-day interaction with the device it's extremely Snappy I
mean especially now that it runs at 120 htz just like the higher-end devices but
if it's going to get me a little bit of extra battery life honestly I'm kind of
into it curiously on the subject of the battery we found that both the 8 and the
8A charged in the same amount of time time and what we determined is that this
came down to the cable that we were using because both were using a 30 W
charger which is well above the capabilities of both devices and it
turns out that Google includes only a 3 amp rated cable with both of these
devices so if you want to actually take advantage of the superior charging rates
of the eight you have to go and Source yourself a third party cable a minor
detail but one that could matter to you now it's time for everyone's favorite
part of the video crab rave
nice that stereo
sound not the loudest thing and there is some a little bit of audible crackling
and Distortion at the upper range of its capabilities but when you compare this
to $500 phones from years ago pretty
decent sounding speaking of the biggest
benefit of the 8A is one that we have haven't talked about yet that isn't
visible and that you won't find even in the software menus and that is software
support just like the rest of the 8 family the pixel 8A is getting 7 years
of software updates and that's not just security I'm talking full OS upgrades
and even feature drops now we've obviously seen that Google hasn't
necessarily brought all of the latest
features to their older devices the 7A is still lagging behind for example even
in AI features that are processed in the cloud rather than directly on the device
but it's clear that Google is finally addressing the competitive disadvantage
they've had against apple whose users are able to just take for granted that
they buy an iPhone and they can probably use it until they are totally sick of
the thing or Until It Breaks so the
value proposition with the 8A here is pretty compelling and I can definitely
see some users looking at the pixel 8 on promo and going well I mean come on for
a of only $150 or even $100 yeah I'll
take the better camera the better IP water resistance uh Wi-Fi 7 the faster
charging if I go and Source my own cable there's a lot of value here but
depending on promos that difference could be more like the MSRP difference
of $200 and you got to remember that especially in North America a lot of
consumers are buying phones on contract and if that subsidy is fixed you know
let's say a $300 or $400 subsidy you
could be looking at a different price of $100 or $250 $300 so it's not
necessarily a 20 to 30% difference in
price it could be a lot more and there could be a lot more of this video but I
think I'm kind of done subscribe to ShortCircuit