The Smartest $499 I've Ever Spent! - Pixel 7a Review

all right so this is the pixel 7A it is quite an impressive smartphone considering it's lower $499 price tag uh unfortunately there are some flaws and we will talk about that but first let's take a moment to cover the five pillars of a great smartphone starting with the display we all know that uh Google hasn't always been upfront you know on the Forefront of Technology fighting for the latest stuff no in fact when it comes to their Hardware I'd say Google has taken two steps back from the rest of the competition and decided you know what let's run on what's the most reliable so with the pixel 7A you have all the Standard specs it is a 108p display so that's you know standard that's you know what a regular smartphone display resolution would be this year they've actually made the upgrade to 90 HZ which is actually you know just you know 50% more frames than 60 HZ but I'd say when using the pixel 7A okay by standard it comes 60 HZ but if you go into the settings and you turn on smooth display you will feel a noticeable bump in smoothness and quality because simply 90 htz is those 50% more frames that just make the experience more smooth less jittery and hell now that I've used 90 htz I've been absolutely spoiled because I can't go back to 60 htz without noticing a major change other than that you know it's the standard stuff it's a HDR panel uh the whole punch in the display isn't much of an interruption you know just maybe when watching actual full screen content it's going to be slightly noticeable but other than that it's just standard stuff not very noticeable at all right so one of the other things is uh this pixel 7A has an indisplay fingerprint sensor now personally I have tried in display fingerprint sensors before and some were finicky some were not and here on the pixel 7A even though it's using an optical sensor which in theory is slower it's still decently fast enough for me to unlock my phone and boom I'm in all right so it's not as sluggish as people like MKBHD say it is but it's not the fastest there's also the option for Face Unlock but in my testing I rarely even used the face unlock cuz it was just not good like if you go into medium dim lighting it's not going to work at all cuz it's just using the standard RGB camera on the front of the display when it comes to the build quality of the 7A however you know you might notice some things so comparing it against the pixel 7 it's obvious the visor on the back that Jordi lege looking thing it's a plastic back plate which is actually back better for the phone considering you know if you're running it caseless and you drop it it's not going to be like super cracked and especially I know you know how phones are like usually very crack resistant nowadays I still don't trust myself enough so plastic is kind of my choice and it's not any less premium either other than that it has an aluminum frame so you know it's metal and it it feels pretty premium prum in the hands and you know it doesn't feel wrong it has a decent weight to it so it still feels premium in fact it's just like a couple grams off from the pixel 7 okay one of the things that's different on the pixel 7A compared to the 4A that I came from was the lack of a headphone jack so on this phone you won't get a headphone jack but that's been pretty standard for years now even the mid-range phones are feeling the lack of a headphone jack so that's that on the front the display is protected with Gorilla Glass 3 so it's not the high standard Gorilla Glass 5 or six of victus or you know victus 2 but it's still decently protected because gorilla Grass Tree frankly is good enough right now going on to the battery the battery on this phone is pretty good so it's a 438 5 mAh battery so that's you know just less than 5,000 mampers which some other mid-rangers in this price bracket are starting to offer nowadays but it's still incredibly functional uh the 7A actually improves one thing against the 6A which is the inclusion of wireless charging so this has 7 and 1 half watts wireless charging so it's not the fastest but it's enough for a trickle charge like overnight or maybe you're in your car navigating so in my testing I have actually put this through two different scenarios so the first scenario was actually using it on Android 13 I did that for a while and you know it was decently good at what it did you know uh while it was running and Android 1 I actually got about four 3 to 4 hours of screen on time which is okay with the Android 14 and the December feature drop let's just say the the phone took battery and pumped it up to 11 because this phone has been so reliable for me that in a standard day of use it could get five to six hours of screen on time based on how much I would use the phone of course if I ever played genin on it it would drop to like three or four hours of screen on time but that's because GHIN is just the single most power hungry game ever to exist now on to my favorite part of this video talking about the cameras because honestly I'm a bit of a camera freak the main sensor here is an upgraded 64 mapel main sensor with Optical Mage stabilization and it actually kicks out a decent result shutter leg doesn't really exist so what you'll be able to snap is what you see in that moment the video is supported up to 4K 60 frames per second but only 30 frames per second if you run the speech enhancement it also comes with a 13 megapixel Ultra wide at f2.2 uh this is you know a standard ultra white camera it's decently high res it has a bit of distortion around the corners it's a bit more noticeable on the 7A compared to some of the other Ultra whites that I've touched upon uh but you know it's still a very functional camera you can get some very artistic shots on it so that's pretty decent uh it is kept at 4K 30fps though moving on to the selfie camera uh quite possibly my least favorite camera on this phone so it's 13 megapixels but the sensor is incredibly small so I don't suggest using the selfie camera for anything other than like video calls or you know just the standard selfie shot it can record 4K 30 FPS but it's not the best it's it's it's not even the best selfie camera it's just decent it's functional it works it's a selfie camera come on right so uh other than that the phone supports two sims so it's one nano SIM and one eim and I've actually just loaded it up with one sim for Singapore and one eim for Malaysia cuz those are the two countries that I frequent the most some of the other stuff include all the AI smarts so things like portrait mode the Google Assistant which I've used quite a lot to control this air purifier to my side and it has has been great the Google assistant is so smooth on this right so of course with so many positives there are bound to be negatives uh one of them is actually you know things with heat so you've seen the complaints of people saying oh tensor G2 overheats a lot and sure that's a genuine problem that Google does have to solve on that and uh but in my experience and of course your mileage may very in my experience tensor G2 has only heated up when I'm doing heavy workloads on it so for example when I'm editing videos on cap cut or when I'm playing genin imp back or Call of Duty or when I'm filming videos yes it does heat up especially in a hot and humid country like Singapore it's hot as hell right but other than that there's not much of overheating issues it doesn't really overheat it just kind of gets a bit hot and toasty in the hands uh yeah other than that this phone is $4.99 you can probably already find it for $3.99 especially nowadays with all the flash sales and everything other than that not much else for me to say so I'll see you guys in the next one have [Music] fun

Channel: 13 Galaxy

Views: 15,274

Keywords: pixel, pixel 7a, pixel 7a 5g, Google pixel, Google, iPhone, android 13, android 14, iPhone 13, android, doctor who, genshin impact, call of duty, gaming, camera, 2023 midrange phone, 2023, 2024, android 2023, android 2024

Id: CYK4LmSFTXQ

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023