- Hey guys, this is Austin!
And today we're here in Mountain View
for Google's annual I/O conference
where they've announced the brand new, cheaper
Google Pixel 3A.
Now this phone has leaked, and leaked, and leaked.
I mean, the first time we saw this
was back in December,
and this even last week was on sale at Best Buy
before it was even actually announced.
So, we got the Pixel 3A a little bit early,
so right as we got to Google I/O they handed it to us.
And uh, that's me.
- Yours is more flattering than mine.
Check mine out, guys.
(Austin laughs)
Biggest eyes I've ever seen.
- Now what makes this special is the price.
So the Pixel 3A starts at just $400
and the Pixel 3A XL is $480.
Now sure, that's not dirt cheap or anything,
but around half the price of the standard Pixel 3,
that is a big, big difference.
And really the main idea here is that
you're really not losing a lot
when you go down in that much lower price bracket.
It was not long ago that a flagship phone cost
five, maybe 600 dollars.
However in the last couple years
we've seen some major changes on that front.
I mean, you're talking about the iPhone that's $1,000,
the Galaxy S10 which can go well above $1,000.
I mean, even the standard Pixel 3 starts at 800 bucks,
and can stretch all the way up to, what,
like 950 bucks or something?
Now it's cool to see high-end phones
that are really pushing the boundaries
of what we can do with tech,
but not everyone wants to spend $1,000
or even $2,000 in the case of some of these
high-end folding phones.
Something like the Pixel 3A which delivers
a very similar experience for something
that's much more reasonable,
I do think does make a lot of sense for most people.
I mean really, for the vast majority of people
who are watching this video right now,
if you're buying a two to four hundred dollar phone,
you're getting 90% the experience
of a much more expensive flagship.
And that is definitely a good thing.
I have a question.
- Yes sir?
- What do you think about a $400 Pixel 3A?
And should someone actually buy it?
- Um, it depends, it depends on--
- Does the fact that I'm putting a microphone
straight in your face without you having any warning
change your opinion here?
- No, it doesn't but it's very close to my mouth.
- That's how you're supposed to use a microphone.
- Is that true?
- Ken, is that true?
- [Ken] Yes.
- Yes.
- [Danny] But I don't know if somebody
should buy this or not,
I think it's, I think it's legit.
- You heard it here first.
- Legit.
- Hi, friend.
- Hey, how's it going?
Hey, what's up?
- I'm putting the microphone uncomfortably close to people.
- I know, it's very, it's like,
I don't know what I'm supposed to,
am I supposed to lick it?
Um, I'm liking the cameras,
been playing around with the cameras
for the past couple of days.
Uh, for that price point,
I think that's the biggest selling point.
- I gotta say, after looking at all of the other colors,
the black does look kind of boring.
But there's a lot more the Pixel 3A than just the color.
Especially there's a lot more to it than just the looks.
So to get to this lower price point,
one of the main cuts here is the build quality.
As opposed to it being made out of metal and glass,
it is all plastic.
Now, they've actually done a pretty good job of hiding this.
So the back finish feels almost identical
with the sort of matte finish on the bottom
and the sort of the glossier finish on top.
When you look at it on the side
it is very clear that this is a plastic phone,
and that's a little bit of a concern at $400.
If it survives the JerryRigEverything test maybe,
I don't know, it gives me a little bit of pause.
It certainly doesn't feel quite as premium
when you hold it on the side, I mean it's just,
it's just glossy black plastic, it's not...
- No!
What are you, I'm not gonna JerryRigEverything it
right here in front of the stage,
this phone got announced like twenty-five,
like, twenty minutes ago?
Aw man, it bends really easy.
Mmm.
No, I'm not gonna do that.
Now, there's no wireless charging
or any kind of official water-resistance,
but both the 3A as well as the 3A XL don't have a notch.
Now this does look a little dated to be honest,
especially when you consider that a lot of other phones
in this price point have tiny notches, but,
on the other hand you don't have the Pixel 3 XL's notch,
so yeah.
You know one thing the 3A does have, a headphone jack!
Yes my friends, Google's decided
to bring back the headphone jack on the lower end models.
Which is a really interesting decision.
I guess because there's really no reason
not to include it, but then if that's the case
why didn't they include it on the higher end models?
Anyway, also what you do get, thankfully,
are also stereo speakers.
Now, it's really loud here,
so I actually really haven't been able to test them
all that much, but the fact that we do have stereo speakers
as well as the headphone jack is awesome on a phone,
well pretty much any phone, but especially
something with a $400 price point.
There are actually very few differences between
the Pixel 3A as well as the XL.
The main difference is that
the XL has a larger 6-inch display compared to 5.6 inches
as well as this has a bigger battery.
3,700 million amp-hours as well as 3,000,
but besides that they are pretty much the exact same phone,
same cameras, same specs, all that kind of stuff.
Now, you are missing out on the spec side of things.
So inside, you'll find a Snapdragon 670 processor,
as opposed to the 845 on the Pixel 3,
as well as the 855 on a lot of high-end flagships
such as the Galaxy S10e, as well as the S10 and well,
most everything else.
So the interesting thing about this
is that they're really banking on the idea
of software being incredibly well optimized.
Now the Pixel line is kind of interesting for that
because a lot of times they're incredibly fast
when you first get them, and yet
the Pixel 3 has certainly had some issues with sort of
that long-term liability of it actually staying fast.
So we'll have to see how well things go
but at least at first glance it does seem
to be pretty reasonably snappy
and it does have that same four gigs of RAM, although
you are limited to only 64 gigs of storage on this guy.
Really the star of the show here is the camera.
So Google has claimed that this
is a very, very similar experience
to what you will find on the standard Pixel 3.
As far as I can tell the hardware itself,
so the lens, the sensor, the optical image stabilization,
is all pretty much identical here.
The main difference is going to be on the software side
as well as on the processing side
because it does not have that same Snapdragon CPU,
which means that even though it has a Snapdragon processor,
it probably won't have the exact same performance.
So when we've done a few tests
and kinda played around with it,
we have gotten pretty similar results.
It's a very sharp camera, you do have things
such as Night Sight, but this is really the main question
of whether or not will it actually have
that super high-end camera performance.
First impressions seems to be good, right?
It seems to be really close, but
I don't really feel comfortable saying
oh, it's the exact same as the $800 Pixel
until I have a little bit more time to play with it.
But if they nail the camera, this is absolutely
the killer feature of the Pixel 3A.
I mean, it really is kind of
the main feature of the Pixel in general.
So if you're talking about something that's 400 bucks
that has some of the best image quality
of any smartphone you can buy,
that is an incredibly compelling value proposition.
I'm cold, can you tell that?
When you come to a Google event,
you have to come prepared, right?
I walked in they're like hey Austin how's it going,
here's a badge, here's a hat, I'm like,
thank you very much, I'm gonna wear
that hat for my entire video.
Is it difficult to listen to a guy
who's wearing a propeller hat as he tells you
to buy very expensive technology?
I don't think so, seems reasonable enough to me.
Also, speaking of some of the stuff
they announced here at I/O,
is a lot of security and privacy updates.
So we literally just did a video pointing out
some of the slightly questionable policies
that Google has related to privacy.
So it's actually really nice to see
that just a couple days after that video,
obviously they watched it
and changed their entire business model
to kinda support privacy better.
Or we just got lucky and posted our video
right before it was completely obsolete.
(laughs)
- What, what do you mean?
Really, the main selling point with the Pixel 3A
is that for half the price of the standard Pixel 3,
you're getting a very similar experience.
And I mean, that's kind of hard to argue with.
Now, it has been no surprise that the Pixel 3
has not been the strongest seller.
It was a Pixel that very much kind of bumped up the price
and for a lot of people it wasn't super well received.
I mean I think a lot of people
do consider the Pixel 3 to be a good phone
but the sales really haven't backed that up.
So it does make a lot of sense that Google would go
on a lower-end option with the Pixel 3A
and bring as many of these high-end features as possible,
and it seems like they've done a pretty good job.
It's easy to compare this to something like
the iPhone XR, or the Galaxy S10e,
both of which are kind of like
the budget versions of the flagships,
but this really doesn't quite compete.
I mean, first of all it's like half the price
of both of those phones, so that kinda makes it difficult.
And on top of that it is a very much lower-end phone
as far as the specs and the build quality goes.
Really, the main thing that this has in common
with other Pixels is of course
the software experience, as well as the camera.
Besides that, it's a plastic Android phone
with mid-range specs, I mean it's decent, it's solid,
but it really does come down to that software
as well as that camera experience.
I mean the Redmi Note 7 Pro that we did a video on recently
is $200, so half the price of this,
and it has better specs as well as
a pretty solid 48 megapixel camera.
Now is this going to out-perform it on that camera side,
and maybe on the software side?
Pretty positively, I mean,
it's stock Android and it's super smooth,
but it's still a huge, huge amount of competition
when you can get a phone which is, on paper,
even better than this in a lot of ways for a lot cheaper.
And also, it's not made of plastic, so.
This price point really is an incredibly competitive market,
and it is going to be interesting to see
just how well the Pixel 3A stacks up
once I spend a little bit more time
with stuff like the camera and whatnot.
So if you enjoyed this video,
make sure to smash that notification bell,
because Ken and I got up at three o'clock this morning
to make this video for you,
and if you wanna make Ken happy, you know what to do.
The bell.
I'm guilting you into clicking the bell right now.