Gadgetory

- 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.