hi everyone aaron here for Zollotech and this is google's brand new pixel 4a
this is a budget phone that has from what most people are saying
a really great camera and so this comes in at just 349.
and will come out on august 20th now it's available in just
one color and that's called just black so let's go ahead and open it up
and see what we've got so google was nice enough to send this along so i
could take a look at it and it's not a sponsored review but they
did send the phone so let's go ahead and open this up and
see what we've got we'll do a size comparison we'll set it up and then
we'll actually see what it's like as far as its pictures now this year we don't
have the xl version it's just the 4a so this is a
little bit smaller than i thought so i'll set this aside we'll take a look
at that in a moment and let's take a look inside the box
so we'll take this out and we've got a little bit of
documentation here let me take this apart
got a sim card tool and then we also have
our safety and warranty and a get starting guide inside we have a usbc to
usbc cable we also have an adapter that
allows us to transfer our information and then we have a power brick this is
the typical pixel power brick we've seen before and this supports up
to 18 watt fast charging so let's put this aside and take a
closer look at the phone so here's the phone itself let's peel
this cover off and it should be a really nice screen
size the bezels look pretty small but it's got a matte plastic back to it
it looks pretty good in fact it's very similar to the pixel 4
xl as you can see here's a size comparison so it's not
quite as big but let's go over the outside of it and
then we'll talk about the specs so on the back it's all black and then
we have our fingerprint reader we've got a single camera
we'll talk about the specs in a moment on the right side we have a power sleep
wake button and a volume button and it's got a nice clicky feel to it
and this button is sort of a bluish green color on the bottom it
looks like we've got two speakers and a usbc
jack on the left hand side there's nothing really other than a sim card
tray slot so let's open that up now inside the sim card tray slot is just
room for one sim card there's no expandable storage but for
the price you get 128 gigabytes of storage so that's pretty good
and then on the top we have a microphone and a headphone jack which you don't see
too often so for 350 dollars you get this if you
want to wait for a 5g version that will ship this fall for
4.99 now internally we have qualcomm snapdragon
730 with six gigabytes of ram and then on the front we have a 5.81
inch 2340 by 1080 443 pixel per inch oled
display it supports hdr and uses gorilla glass 3 so it's a step back but gorilla
glass 3 is pretty hard and should resist scratches pretty well
on the front we have an 8 megapixel f 2.0 fixed focus lens
with 1080p 30 video and on the back we have a 12.2 megapixel f
1.7 with optical image stabilization dual pixel phase detect autofocus camera
with 4k 30 video now let's go ahead and turn it on and then we'll talk about
some of them some more specs and see what it's like
so it's booting up here you'll see it's a nice edge to edge display
and to give you a size comparison with say the iphone se which i think is it's
going to be its main competitor it's very similarly
sized it's a little bit bigger the display has a higher resolution and
pixel density but it seems about the same size
so again next to the pixel 4 xl you'll see the screen size so let's go
ahead and get this set up now bluetooth crashed the second i
turned it on so that's kind of interesting but let's go ahead and hit
start and we'll get this set up and see what
it's like to use so we'll connect to a wi-fi network i'm
going to skip the sim card for now next it says you can transfer your data
so we'll hit next and we can plug in our old phone and
what i want to do is actually transfer data from my pixel 4 xl to this
device so i can try it out the same way i would use it there
so let's go ahead and plug it in
so i've got my pixel 4 xl and let's plug it into the pixel 4a
there we go it says phones connected check your other phone
copy data verify verified me we'll hit confirm and it's copying the
account now it's saying getting account info says checking for data and then we
can choose what we want to copy or not copy
so photos and videos i don't need to copy those
and let's go ahead and hit copy and it will move everything over so we'll wait
for this to finish and then we'll continue so now that it's
copying i can continue to set this up we'll hit next
i have to agree to their terms hit accept
accept now i need to set up a pin once i set up a pin
i need to set up pixel imprint so we'll go ahead and
hit next and then touch the sensor on the back to set it up
and it says it's added and we'll hit continue
now it says your assistant will be right with you and it looks like
the setup is done or copying is done so we'll hit close on the pixel 4
xl and then we'll go over to the 4a and continue it already recognizes my voice
so i'll go ahead and hit next and we'll say no thanks to anything else
and then it's just giving us tips and tricks so it's going to
continue doing this add some finishing touches and then we should be able to go
to the home screen now it's saying i can go home i'll hit next
switch apps it's just telling me how to use this
and we'll swipe up to go home and now it's completely copied from my pixel 4a
or 4xl rather to the 4a so it gives you an idea of the display let's see what
what wallpapers are available so there's no new wallpapers per se but let's go
ahead and switch to this one or maybe we'll go to
for fun we'll pick a daily wallpaper and set that
so now i'll wait for everything to finish installing it's going to take a
while for all of these apps to install once that's done we'll take a closer
look at it but the battery in this is 3140 milliamp hours
many people that have used it already are saying that it's better than what we
had with the pixel 4xl which is great we don't have squeeze to activate
android assistant so we have to swipe up from a corner
and go into assistant here and then also i need to install a bunch of
updates as well so i'll wait for this to finish and then we'll take a closer look
at it now i have everything moved over from my
pixel 4 xl and all the apps are laid out the same
way i added a couple others but it's pretty much exactly the same
all of my messages and everything else and so i've been using it for a little
bit i had it update and one of the great
things about this is it gets all of the latest updates
so the update that actually came out yesterday at the time of recording this
video is also out for this device so if i go
into my system updates here you'll see it has the august 5th update
on it even though it's august 4th so it seems to be that we're going to
get all these updates just like you would expect with a pixel
device but the overall usability of this seems to be pretty good
most of the time it's really fast it does feel a little bit slower due to
maybe that slower refresh rate than we have on the 4xl for
example so if i just scroll through the the app
drawer here you'll see it's a little bit smoother on the 4xl
due to that 90 hertz refresh rate but we have 60 hertz on the pixel 4a
and that's good enough for most in fact every iphone has 60 hertz
so it seems to be doing okay and then i tried out a couple different apps we'll
take a look at a couple games in a moment but if we take a look at the
camera the cameras are pretty interesting we
only have a forward-facing camera that's got a fixed focus
so you can see here it's fixed and maybe i'll go to video and it will
record 1080p so this is the 1080p video from the
forward-facing camera of the pixel 4a and so i'm not sure how it sounds but
it's probably not as good as this microphone but it may sound halfway
decent now as far as the rear facing camera the
rear camera should record in 4k so we have selfie
illumination for the forward facing let's spin it around here
go back and you'll see that we've got our different settings so
let's go into our settings here and you'll see it kind of lags from time to
time so we've got our grid and then video
stabilization which it has that's built in
and of course we've got 4k like i said so advanced
and then you can do raw plus jpeg control we'll go back here
go back and you can do 16 by nine crop now let's go to video mode and take a
look at those settings quick you'll see we've got 4k at 30p like i
said and again framing and things like that
so you've got all of those different
settings as well as frequent faces so it will recognize as well now let's take
a look at some of the photos and videos from this camera
and see how they look compared to say the pixel 4 xl
as well as maybe the iphone se for a quick comparison
now other than the cameras the display on this phone is actually hdr like i
said earlier so if we go to one of my videos
you'll see that we have 1080p hdr we don't have 1440 or 4k
but we do have hdr so if i rotate this hit play
the speakers are actually decent too so here take a listen to these
and the speakers actually surprised me a bit because i wasn't expecting
stereo speakers out of the top but we have stereo speakers from the top
earpiece here and the bottom as well it sounds pretty decent
and it's better than i expected from a budget phone of this price
now as far as gaming i'm sure quite a few people will want to try that out so
let's go into asphalt 9 as well as we'll try call of duty in a moment but you'll
see we'll resume here and you can see the frame rate so
i played around with this a little bit they do sometimes
slow down a little bit you'll see as i drift i had to start this game over a
little bit but as i drift around this corner or go through this
building you'll see all the action going on and it seems to
be okay but occasionally it has a little bit of a hiccup as you can see
now if we go back home and try out a game like call of duty
we'll wait for it to load now i'm in call of duty mobile and i just wanted to
show you the frame rates it seems to be very playable i don't really see any
issues here although occasionally it seems to have a
slight slowdown but the screen is vibrant and you saw the
little hiccup there the screen is vibrant and it's very playable
now while playing that for just a moment i did start to feel the back of the
device get a little bit warm that's to be expected but it does seem
like it's going to heat up quite a bit as you play so maybe it'll slow down as
you have extended gameplay but it seems to be okay overall
now the only thing that this phone doesn't seem to have that some people
may care about is there's no dual cameras on the back
like the pixel 4 xl there's also no wireless charging so you
will have to use the usbc on the bottom for most people that won't be a problem
but it doesn't have those features i wish they would have included that coil
since those are fairly inexpensive from what i understand but other than that it
doesn't have that and it has 802.11 abgn and ac there is no wi-fi six so it's not
really a bad price for all of the other
features that you're getting a decent display and everything else
and then of course that battery that i mentioned earlier 3140
milliamp hours i expect it to get at least through a day from what i'm seeing
online of course it will take further testing
to know that for sure but you'll see it should last until 1 15 pm that would be
tomorrow and so battery usage of course has only been
used for a little bit since i've been setting this up and using it for the
games during this video but it seems like it should get through
a day without a problem for 349 dollars i would definitely check
it out now you'll also get three years of software updates with pixel devices
and you've got a year warranty so i would definitely check one out if you
wanted a budget phone that actually seems to perform pretty
well will run all of your basic social media apps and things like that
fairly smoothly and has a pretty decent camera for the money i don't know that
you can distinguish this camera from the pixel 4 xl based on
the photos i showed you you don't have that squeeze for google
assistant but other than that it's a pretty good deal
but let me know your thoughts about it in the comments below and if you'd like
to see any further videos maybe a comparison
with the 2020 iphone se i'd love to hear from you in the comments below
if you haven't subscribed already though please subscribe and if you enjoyed the
video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is
Aaron i'll see you next time
you