Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm cabby HD here and this is the new Google pixel 3 a don't know yet what the a stands for but we can basically think of this phone as the budget version of the pixel 3 and this is yet another phone that was leaked into oblivion we knew pretty much everything about it on paper before it came out the 3 a name the design all the specs pretty much the packaging the only thing we didn't really know was the price we knew it would be the budget pixel but how low could they get the price there was some speculation on it but now that it was fully announced yesterday at Google i/o we have that too it'll start at 399 so this is the 3a XL there's a larger version of the two phones as well and on the outside as you can tell it's almost impossible to tell it apart from a regular pixel three just by looking at it it shows the design language of it's more expensive brothers pretty clearly but to me this is a really interesting and potentially awesome $400 phone so when you think of a typical champion budget Android phone in 2018-2019 that's the one that brings the high-end specs all the way way down in price which is amazing but you know you're gonna sacrifice in three main areas and that's the camera always and the screen and the build quality like it's so consistent in this world think of the polka phone f1 for example budget phone of the year last year it turned everybody's heads because it got the latest and greatest snapdragon 845 and freaking 8 gigs of ram and a four thousand milliamp hour battery so it killed it with the specs but again with those three main things the screen you knows it was okay it's fine it was a six inch LCD screen so nothing to complain about but it's not flagship the camera it was better than actually most people expected for the price but it was definitely not a flagship camera either and then a build quality is you know it's plastic but this pixel 3a in that same world kind of flips that formula it flips the script backwards on its head where this blatantly sacrifices in the specs this is a Snapdragon 670 and four gigs of RAM you know obviously mid-range but it has a killer camera and it has a pretty great screen I don't think I've ever been able to say a budget Android phone actually legit has an excellent camera like sometimes it's great for the price you know like the polka phone but actually competing with flagships yeah this would be a first so if your priorities are in image quality specifically this turns into an excellent option so build quality of course is still what they make sacrifices on like I said it looks just like the pixel 3 but as soon as you hold it you know it's lightweight it's made of this hard plastic instead of glass I mean it's polycarbonate is what they call it but you know plastic and then there's some corners cut out with the hardware there is no wireless charging in this pixel 3a there's also no water resistance they didn't spend money on the IP certification and there's also of course still no expandable storage pixel 3 also had a pair of stereo front-facing speakers while the 3a is giving you a single top front facing speaker up where the earpiece usually is and then there's nothing in the chin it's still the same size but you have speakers now at the bottom of the phone but that's still more front-facing power than I can say about some flagships and then it's down to a single rear facing and single front-facing camera instead of the dual front facing cameras of the bigger brothers but it's not all cons though I mean they did obviously take those shortcuts to save their money but there's still some things from the pixel that have trickled down and are now top of their class for a 400 ollar phone first of all then I've been trying to go bezel as' which some would have argued would have looked cooler but that means no knotch so some people will definitely appreciate that in a world where the pixel 3 excels bathtub notch still exists it also has the same haptic motor or the same excellent vibration motor as the pixel 3 which from my experience has been literally the best in any Android phone which is great because there are a lot of Android phones that have bad vibration motors that make them feel even cheaper than they are so having an excellent one is a nice touch oh and it has an extra port you see this this little small circular three-and-a-half millimeter circle up here that's for headphones it's got a headphone jack also on top of that this is a 1080p OLED display a lot of budget phones in this range are rockin IPS LCD displays OLED screens generally have looked better have pitch-black blacks and are more common on higher-end phones so an OLED display in this one like oneplus used to when they made $400 phones it is a nice to have and then of course the camera the pixel 3a shares the same single camera sensor and essentially the same camera software as the current image quality reigning champ the older-brother pixel 3 which is incredible and that not only makes this instantly the best camera in any budget phone I've ever used but arguably right up there as the best camera on any phone period which is awesome for this price so that's why I say they liked they flipped the typical formula for a budget Android phone sort of backwards they used to always be it's so predictable you know you're gonna get some high-end specs brought down but you know where the sacrifices are gonna be but this is uh this is very different like Google is definitely trusting your software to give you a good enough user experience in spite of the mid-range specs but having an incredible camera and having an actually pretty great screen on this phone is just a very different set of corners to cut now I do think it makes sense to be concerned a bit about those specs just because it's a pixel again and even the flagship pixel three with this newest silicon hasn't had the best time staying fast over time so an even lower end set of specs while the pixel three a might suffer the same fate and in the three thousand milliamp hour battery or thirty seven hundred milliamp hour on the XL are not massive but I still think they should fall right in line with about average again considering the more expensive brothers weren't really endurance champs either but overall I'm glad I have this phone in my hands it feels like it's gonna be a fun one to play with and let me know what you guys want to see in the full review it's been a wild since I've reviewed a sub $500 phone thanks to phones getting so expensive lately but let me know what you're interested in and if you would carry you know a phone that makes the right trade-offs like this for 400 bucks it's not a bad start let me know what you think thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace