Just three days ago, I finally hit my breaking point with the iPhone and I went,
look, I just need an Android that has a decent camera, clean software,
and reasonable performance. I picked up the nothing phone 3a. If only I'd known that I was going to come in this morning and be greeted by the Pixel 9a,
an option that nails all of those requirements and comes with seven years of security updates now.
Let's start with the pink one, shall we? Oh, sorry, excuse me, peony.
Pivoine? Rose? Pivoin? The main highlights compared to the Pixel 8a are, of course, the slightly larger, brighter display,
the higher capacity, faster charging battery, and the move from IP67 to IP68 water and dust
resistance. Being a member of the Pixel 9 family, you also move to the Tensor G4 processor,
which should amount to improved performance, albeit not as much as the 9 and 9 Pro,
given that it has only eight gigs of memory versus 12. But with all of that said,
the thing that really stands out to me, even after dailying the nothing phone 3a for just a few days,
is the near complete lack of a camera bump. Not only does it stand out compared to monstrosities
like this, but even compared to the Pixel 8a, the privilege of being able to put my phone down
on a table and have it functionally not even move, no matter where I tap on it,
that's really appealing. Man, this one's been hilarious. Like, I legitimately have trouble
getting it into my pocket sometimes. Watch this, okay? Okay, well, the one time it works,
maybe my technique has just gotten better. Whatever, the point is, it definitely gets
stuck sometimes. In terms of accessories, Google has taken the, you'll get nothing and
you'll like it approach. You get a sim removal tool and a USB 2 USB-C to C cable. What is this,
three feet? Oh, okay, with packaging that disintegrates the second you touch it,
but is eco-friendly. So shout out that. Actually, it's all cardboard. Nice. Yep,
a three foot cable. It at least feels decent. The good news is you probably won't need that
cable very often. Google claims an unprecedented 30 plus hours of battery life on the 9a with
up to a hundred hours in their extreme battery saver mode. While we weren't able to reproduce
those numbers exactly, what we did find was that in our standard battery life test, it beat the
Pixel 9 by about 20% and it beat the Pixel 8a by about 40%. So it's clear that Google has been
hard at work on the efficiency of both their hardware and their software. Speaking of software,
Google promises seven years of security updates for the 9a, which is a major value add for the
tens of dollars more that you might pay compared to other mid-range Android devices.
And there's a lot more to like. While they're not going to win any awards for design creativity,
it's an awfully cute phone, especially in this pink color. On the right, you'll find a lock button
as well as volume rocker, neither of which have any opposing buttons that you could accidentally
mash while you're trying to press them. I consider that a plus. At the top, you've got a mic for
noise canceling. At the bottom, we get a USB 3.2 port. Boy, did I ever miss that when I was dailying
the iPhone 16 plus and I needed to ingest photos. Sim tray as well as a speaker girl. And finally,
at the back, we get a 48 megapixel wide camera as well as a 13 megapixel ultra wide camera to go
with our camera flash. On the front, our selfie camera is also 13 megapixels capable of 4k 30
video recording. And as always, you can expect the camera experience to be pixelicious. Or at
least I hope you can. I haven't actually tried it yet. All right, let's try out this camera. I'm
really excited about this because if I could have a phone that had a decent enough camera,
but no huge camera bump, I'd be very interested in that. Definitely some post processing going on
here, as you would expect from an AI enabled device. That is really not the best I've seen.
And it's probably going to be better than the 3a pro, just my merit of not over sharpening the
crap out of everything. But I got to give the pixel the edge. Look at that. You can still make out
the creases in the fabric here, whereas they're blown out on the 3a pro for nothing. That is a
perfectly acceptable selfie camera. I mean, I wish the guy taking the picture didn't look like that,
but hold on a second. How's my ultra wide? I mean, that's the one that's only 13 megapixels,
right? Like, are we going to have enough resolution here, boys? Coming back to AI for a minute,
while the 9a is packed with Google's AI features, it has their Gemini Assistant, it has their Pixel
Studio so you can create and edit memes and share them and stuff. It's got call assist, so you can
apparently hear calls more clearly and it'll wait on hold for you because it only has eight gigs of
RAM. It can't run the same large models as its bigger non-A brethren. So for one thing, Gemini
is apparently like a smaller version that doesn't run in the background all the time, so some things
might be a little bit less responsive. It also doesn't support pixel screenshots, which is kind
of like Windows Recall, but for Android and it doesn't support their call notes feature. Honestly,
though, am I the only one who heard all of that and went, that sounds great? Am I missing something
here? I mean, it's not good that this is the first A series phone where they've dropped features
compared to the regular non-A, but are those not the ones that we would have turned off anyway?
Why don't we talk about the screen? Unlike the 8a, which was limited to 1400 nits HDR and about
2000 nits peak brightness under sunny conditions, the 9a boasts 1800 nits peak brightness in HDR
and 2700 nits, which by the way, in our testing, we were able to get pretty darn close to.
Let's check out some HDR video, shall we? Wow, does that ever look good? Now these days,
manufacturers have a tendency to fudge the numbers a little bit around peak brightness and HDR brightness.
So we don't really bad an eye if things are a little bit off, but with that said, we sure are
impressed when they nail it and Google nailed it here. We got within about 100 nits of their claims
across the board. This thing looks outstanding to the point where the performance seems to be
basically on par with the regular Pixel 9. It even features a 60 to 120 Hertz variable refresh rate
for its OLED panel. I really like this thing so far. How are the speakers though?
Something I always want to know. Typically Google has been pretty good at this, so...
Wow, good stereo separation. Considering how small that earpiece speaker is, I'm really impressed
by that. That is a great soundstage on a tiny little 6.3 inch phone. Well, not that the phone
itself is exactly 6.3 inches. That is a bit of a bezel, you know? That's a trizel. But the speaker
quality is actually really solid. Like, can I just take one of these after the video?
Does anyone know? I'm just going to take one and I'm going to try it for a bit.
Well, not really. They belong to Linus Media Group Incorporated. I never checked out the video
recording. That's something that traditionally has just been plain better on the iPhone, my God.
I really hope that there's some processing that's going to happen after the fact to make this not
terrible. Nope, it's awful. It is just, it's just awful. The chips are awful. They're the wrong shape
and they're just awful. Yes, this is a more expensive phone. This is a 16 plus. Oh my God.
Like, in a pinch, I could shoot an LTT video on this thing. In a pinch, I would just have pain
from this thing, you know? Like, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. Yes, they are.
Like this is horrible. I really hope that there's some processing that's going to happen.
The mic is great though. That's nice. That's nice to see. Like, man, the amount of noise in this
piece of crap by comparison. I mean, yeah, I bet the 9 is not any different. Man, I would go 9A
just to not have this horrible camera bump. Okay, yeah, expect markedly better performance in
low light situations on the regular 9 versus the 9A. I mean, it makes sense. Look how much
bigger that flip and lenses. Just, it's a thing you should know. I still think I would choose this
because this is a pretty tough scenario. It's very dark in here. Ah, yes, instead of Wi-Fi 7,
we're stuck with Wi-Fi 6E. Personally, I don't think that's a huge deal on a mobile device like
this, but your mileage may vary. We also, you know, speaking of things that I'm just not going to get
over, okay, like giant camera bumps, camera holes, there's a hole in your display, which has actually
bothering me quite a bit on the iPhone 16 Plus while I was using it. Dude, I watch movies on my
phone. Having a hole in my movie. Like, I want to watch the whole movie, not the hole in the movie.
There's a few more housekeeping items. It supports Bluetooth 5.3. The front glass is Gorilla Glass
3.0. The back is a composite material that is matte, apparently, and I can confirm it is indeed
quite matte. Seems less slippery than the nothing 3a pro, which I'm only comparing this to because,
well, it's in a similar price point, and I've been using it for the last few days. That was kind
of convenient, wasn't it? Except that I spent hours switching over to it, and now I'm going to spend
hours switching over to this. Or maybe not, because maybe the transfer wizard will work this time,
and I'll just go for my iPhone, because I'm only, I have like three days worth of SMS messages that
aren't synced. Uh, what else can I say about it? Oh, yes, it supports wireless charging,
which the nothing phone does not. Yeah, let's go. Not that I care that much about that. I don't
really use it. And on the subject of things I don't really care about, the gaming performance is
fine. It's about on par with the regular Pixel 9. I never game on my phone, but if you do,
then you will find this to be quite suitably adequate for adequate gaming. So it's 500 bucks
for the 128 gig version, but you can also get it with 256, which you might need, because as
usual with modern phones that are not even high end in this case, but whatever, you don't get
expandable storage. It doesn't have a headphone jack. I mean, it detects if you're in a car crash,
though. So I guess that's cool. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.