hey better late than never that's what i always say ladies and gentlemen
this is it the one and only google pixel
4a launching in canada on
september the whatever if who cares because everyone else has already made
videos about this so we're just going for it here ladies and gentlemen
the pixel 4a is part of an overall
industry trend that honestly
i'm surprised didn't take off sooner
being hands on with it i do wonder if things might have gone a little bit
too far here it's really plasticky
feeling you know what it reminds me of is like the old nexus 5
top spec like really good hardware but with an
unapologetically plastic build quality that helped to justify the low price and
a low price it does have at just 350 us
dollars the pixel 4a on paper looks like the
best bang for the buck for someone who cares
about the photos they can take with their smartphone but not necessarily the the raw gaming
horsepower let's get this puppy fired up here this
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at the link in the video description let's have a look at the accessories
real quick here okay got your sim removal tool
got your wall wart let's see this is a fast charger
nine volt 2n fast but not super fast
whoopsy daisies type c to type c and then i believe this puppy is for
transferring data or something like that you know how it feels in the hand though
brandon friendly it's one handable that's something that
honestly i as someone with smaller hands have really missed about flagship devices
but it's not too small just like you've seen on some of
apple's lower end devices i wouldn't describe it as a thick bezel but you've
got like a mid-size bezel all the way around as opposed to you
know what we used to see as the sort of the trendier move which
was kind of your wrap-around display on the side and then a bigger forehead or chin i still
absolutely hate hole punch displays and i can't wait for this atrocious industry
trend to go away but on a 350 device i'm a lot more willing
to overlook you know why they couldn't engineer an under screen display
or you know a pop-up or a flip around or whatever else the case may be
i'm already really coming around to it so it's got a rear fingerprint sensor
which it's not state of the art you know there's no face
you know dot scanning thing there's no under screen fingerprint sense or
anything like that but as a daily driver note 9 user i
the vast majority of the time just use my rear fingerprint scanner even though
i do have an iris scanner anyway like it is something
that i've really gotten used to over the years wow that was a really fast fingerprint setup
okay so it's coaching me on gestures this is not a good
initial setup gesture coaching thing though because i've seen better ones
that force you to actually perform the gestures before
allowing you to move on there's no squeeze that's something that's
missing on this pixel device compared to previous ones
honestly there's going to be quite a few pixel experience things that you're not
going to enjoy here so for one thing that is a single camera setup it's
actually still got this gigantic camera bump as though it did
have multiple cameras which has led to some speculation about the
upcoming 5g version of the pixel 4a maybe having more than just 5g added to it
because it's going to be 150 more dollars compared to what we might expect from an
upcoming flagship pixel device like a non-a variant
there's no high refresh rate display and the hardware is quite pedestrian
so even compared to the pixel 3 the
pixel 4a is not a super fast performer
it's 730g chipset is even slower than what you'd find in similar concept
devices like the lg velvet and the oneplus nord it's got just six
gigs of RAM and is only available with 128 gigs of storage
even though there's no micro sd expansion it's got just a 3140 milliamp hour
battery and even the camera which pixel devices are
famous for is just a 12 megapixel single lens
affair but what i'm expecting google to get
right with this device is of course the little things the
haptic feedback on this phone in spite of it being a
mid-tier to entry-level device is really good i don't know that other
than the iphone sc i have ever seen that before because
that's the kind of little touch that manufacturers who focus too much on
specs and not enough on experience tend to overlook another big one is
software starting with display calibration this is something that google and apple both
take very seriously whereas a lot of other
smartphone brands are all about you know pumping up the vibrancy at the expense of
true to life colors we actually shoot our videos at 18 by nine
and you can see that google appears to have positioned their hole punch
so that 16x9 content won't cut off
but if you're watching videos that are in a more cinematic aspect ratio it
looks like the default behavior is to just have a hole in your content something
that just is always going to bother me unfortunately
i will say though that if you had told me i was going to see an OLED display of
this quality on a 350 mobile device just
you know three short years ago i'd have told you you were freaking nuts
wow this is even on adaptive mode but there's hardly any difference between
natural and adaptive thank you google i would even leave this
adaptive mode on it's really not bad so on the bottom you've got your type c
port as well as speaker ports on the left you got
a whole lot of not much other than a sim tray on the top
hey you got a noise cancelling microphone and a headphone jack
and then over on the right you got your lock button as well as your volume up
and volume down quick double click there it's gonna launch the camera let's just
take a couple quick snaps i'm just i'm idly curious man they just get it
like so close to what your eye actually sees
don't they that looks way too sharp to just be 12
megapixels you gotta love all their ai nonsense eh
so far this is pixel exclusive although i wouldn't be too surprised to see it
rolled out to others in the future but you can actually use the same ai
nonsense that google uses to take a single lens shooter like this one
and apply background bokeh in post and
use that on your old photos as well like previous google pixel devices
there's unlimited high quality now not unlimited quality but
high quality storage for both photos and videos which i'll help a little bit at
least with the fact that it's only got 128 gigs of storage on board
i want to know if it has an amplified earpiece speaker that's a really big one for me
introducing the products that we are building
and there's a fair bit of device vibration it doesn't feel
premium when you've got the volume turned up support for hdr10
hlg and dolby vision a little bit of distortion
but it gets loud it's stereo it sounds not bad
this thing is going to be popular you guys it's all about delivering
you know that premium experience but selectively
in the places where people actually care about it three years of committed
software updates you get that pixel quality camera
processing but you get it for 350 because you don't need like a you
know crazy multi-camera setup a giant screen and
all that other all that other fancy stuff there's no wireless charging you know nothing like
that but it's responsive enough as long as
you've never experienced a high refresh rate display i don't think you would look at
this and go oh you you know 730g i simply cannot use it
to you know call my acquaintances
oh i don't have a sim in it so that's why i was trying to call you brandon if
my brother or my aunt or whatever like not enthusiasts but obviously they want
a device that like just freaking works was like hey what
phone should i get this or the iphone se are looking pretty
compelling the one area where this falls behind the
sc is that i would expect apple especially
given that they've got a flagship level soc in that thing
to provide support for it for longer so it's going to come down to kind of
how long you want to use your device for the iphone se is really a very
compelling option right now actually manufacturers are starting to really
bang that drum and you've got apple and google on board
now maybe we're gonna see the end of the you know twelve hundred dollar phone
or maybe we won't and they just
will be a little bit better and you can pay a lot more i guess that's fine too
you know what else is fine subscribing to ShortCircuit