Google Pixel 4a 5G – Design and Features
It might sound a bit hyperbolic, but the Pixel 4a 5G is one of the best feeling phones I’ve ever held. The size is perfect for my hands. At 2.9 x 0.3 x 6.1 inches (W x D x H), it’s on the larger side – a full half-inch taller than the iPhone 11 Pro. But the Pixel 4a 5G can hide its size behind a weirdly sleek plastic frame, one that makes it feel sturdy, relatively high-quality, and much grippier than something like the aforementioned iPhone.
While that plastic body feels less premium than an iPhone and less sleek than the glossy plastic on other Android phones, I still really enjoyed its feel. A plastic phone comes with a sense of freedom. This isn’t a phone you’ll cover in a case. You’ll drop it, and it will (hopefully) be fine. And despite the polycarbonate body, the craftsmanship in the Pixel 4a 5G is undeniable. It’s as subtle as could be, with a matte black body with minimal branding – just a grey Google “G” on the back. If you prefer a colorful phone, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Like the Model T, it comes in one color: black. On the back, you’ll find a fingerprint scanner and a square camera bump that houses the same 12.2 MP dual-pixel camera and 16MP ultra-wide camera as the Pixel 5. There’s just a single flourish of personality in the design: a white button on the side. (The non-5G version of the 4a comes in a more spritely baby blue color, accompanied by an awkward macaroni-and-cheese orange button). 
The front is equally sparse, with a medium bezel and a minuscule hole-punch front-facing camera. (Hilariously, that hole-punch is in precisely the right spot to completely obscure the countdown timers on ads in several freemium games I played.) The top is equipped with the not-quite-dead 3.5mm headphone jack; the bottom, a USB-C port, and stereo speakers (which are recessed in strangely large gaps near the port). Inside the phone, you’ll find a respectable Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G, 6GBs of RAM, and a 3800 mAh battery that can keep the 6.2” OLED up-and-running for an advertised 48 hours. Of course, the star of the show is the 5G cellular capabilities, and this is where your mileage will seriously vary. While 5G will drastically increase your internet bandwidth, it’s anyone’s guess if you’ll even have it. Despite being on AT&T and firmly in the company’s 5G coverage map, I was only able to receive a “5Ge” connection – which is, put simply, marketing fluff that encompasses most of AT&T’s LTE network. Even so, I was able to receive 175mbps down and 58.5mbps upload speeds. That was more than fast enough for Stadia, GamePass, and more, but less than a tenth of what AT&T’s reported theoretical peak of 2Gbps. If I didn’t get a chance to see real 5G in the Bay Area, I suspect 5G is still more scattered than advertised. Finally, inside the box, there’s a USB-C to USB-C cord and – being this is Google, not Apple – an 18W USB-C charger. 
Google Pixel 4a 5G – Performance and Gaming
The Pixel 4a is powered by Qualcomm’s powerful (but not most powerful) processor, the Snapdragon 765G. Not going the flagship route helps keep the Pixel 4a’s price down, but it also prevents the phone from rocking the buttery refresh rates you may have seen on other devices (Pixel 5 included). Fortunately, the refresh rate limitation was one of the only areas I noticed sub-flagship performance, but I did notice it. Especially after testing the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, an even cheaper phone with the same processor and a 90hz refresh rate. Still, the Pixel was perfectly capable of playing every game I threw at it, from Call of Duty: Mobile to Asphalt 9 to Elder Scrolls: Blades. Surprisingly, the phone never got hot, not even after an hour of graphically-intensive races in Asphalt 9. Even when I was charging the phone simultaneously, it held up admirably.
The phone’s 3800 mAh battery also performed well, only draining 5% in 15 minutes of playtime across games and services. This held no matter which intensive Android games I tried. I also experienced the same 5% drop while streaming Doom Eternal on Stadia. And on that note, if you can find a reliable 5G connection (or even 5GE), you can stream games almost flawlessly. I tested Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming for literal hours, and my experience was as close to flawless over the network as I’ve ever experienced. (And again, I was on AT&T’s supercharged LTE network, not real-deal 5G.) In fact, for whatever reason, I had more issues over my much-faster WiFi than I did over cellular data. But bill-payers beware: if you have a data cap, streaming will help you find it quickly. In five minutes of Stadia, we’ve burned through more than a gig of data, and an hour spent 10GBs of bandwidth. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=google-pixel-4a-5g-image-samples&captions=true"]
Google Pixel 4a 5G – Camera
The Pixel 4a has the same camera system as the Pixel 5, which includes a 12.2-megapixel main and a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera. Between the two, you can take shots at .6x, 1x, and 2x zoom. These cameras take sharp photos. Individual strands of hair were clear even when zoomed in. The camera system is perfectly fast, as well. Unfortunately, in many images, the saturation was entirely out of control, casting sunset portraits in an unrealistic orange glow while tinting the grass an almost-alien hue of green.
Meanwhile, the selfie camera couldn’t make my quarantine hair look good, but did take decent photos, especially when utilizing the face-smoothing portrait mode. In low-light, the portrait mode substantially reduced noise but smoothed my face enough to make me look almost like a videogame character. 
To test Night Sight, Google’s low-light feature, I took a variety of photos in varying degrees of gloom, including some too dark situations. That kind of lighting is never going to yield tack-sharp images, but I was extremely impressed with the results, nonetheless. You have to hold the Pixel steady while your sensor lets more light in, but Google seems better at compensating for movement than Apple. Several of the photos I took looked almost entirely lit if a bit soft. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-smartphones&captions=true"]
Google Pixel 4a 5G – Purchasing Guide
The Google Pixel 4a 5G is available for $499 at Amazon, Best Buy, and direct from Google.from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3numIjr
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