It’s nearing 8 months since Google released the Pixel 3 and we extensively reviewed the phone. It also has been several years now since Google abandoned the Nexus line of devices; one of the most attractive aspects during the early days of Google’s own phones was their incredible value proposition and very competitive pricing. As Google evolved the Pixel line of smartphones, it was clear that we’d no longer see quite as attractive price-tags, with the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL nearing the $1000/€ mark.

Google apparently did see the higher price points as a hurdle for some consumers, and decided to expand its product line-up by introducing new mid-range devices at much more reasonable price-points, all while maintaining the key features that make the Pixel phones worth their namesake.

The new Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL, the latter which we’re reviewing today, are very much derived from the same DNA that was established in the Pixel 2 and further iterated upon in the Pixel 3 range. The Pixel 3a’s still come with the similar industrial design, feature an OLED display, and most importantly feature the very same full-fledged camera as their flagship siblings, at essentially half the cost. Of course, the lower price point comes with changes – a plastic body and a lower tiered SoC are among some of the compromises that have been made, along with a few other features that hit the chopping block.

Google Pixel 3a's
		Pixel 3a	Pixel 3a XL (Reviewed)
SoC		Snapdragon 670 2x Kryo 360 (CA75) @ 2.0GHz  6x Kryo 360 (CA55) @ 1.7GHz Adreno 615
DRAM		4GB LPDDR4X
Display		5.6" OLED 2220 x 1080 (18:9)	6.0" OLED 2220 x 1080 (18:9)
Size	Height	151.3 mm	160.1 mm
	Width	70.1 mm	76.1 mm
	Depth	8.2 mm	8.2 mm
Weight		147 grams	167 grams
Battery Capacity		3000mAh (Rated)	3700mAh (Rated)
Wireless Charging		-
Rear Cameras
	Main	12.2MP 1.4µm Dual Pixel PDAF f/1.8 76° lens with OIS
	Telephoto	-
	Wide	-
	Extra	-
Front Camera		8MP 1.12µm f/2.2 84° lens; fixed focus
Storage		64GB eMMC
I/O		USB-C 3.5mm headphone jack
Wireless (local)		802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5.0 LE + NFC
Cellular		UE Category 11 (DL) / Category 5 (UL) 600Mbit/s DL (3xCA 2x2 MIMO) 75Mbit/s UL
Other Features		Dual Speakers, 18W Fast Charging
Dual-SIM		1x nanoSIM
Launch Price		$399 / £399 / €399	$479 / £469 / €479

Starting off with the internal hardware of the Pixel 3a’s, we see the devices powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 SoC. Qualcomm had launched the SoC in August of 2018, so it’s not quite the newest unit on the market, but given the price sensitivity of the product category, that’s to be expected.

The Snapdragon 670 on paper looks very similar to the slightly higher-end Snapdragon 710: The SoC features 2x Cortex A75 derived cores at 2.0GHz and are paired with 6x Cortex A55 derived cores at 1.7GHz. In terms of computational power, it’s clear that we should be expecting the CPUs to perform quite a lot less than the Snapdragon 855 as well as last year’s Snapdragon 845. In terms of single-threaded performance at least, however theoretically the S670 would be able to compete with the S835, which was Qualcomm’s flagship for 2017. In fact, we’ll see some large performance similarities between the Pixel 3a and the Pixel 2, which is going to play a big part in terms of properly evaluating the end value of the Pixel 3a.

The GPU is an Adreno 615. Unfortunately we don’t tend to review mid-range SoC phones as much as we’d like to, so at first glance without testing there’s not too much context on exactly where this GPU lands in terms of performance. While I don’t want to spoil too much, don’t expect too much performance from the smaller IP block, although we’ll see some surprising power characteristics.

The phone comes with 4GB of LPDDR4X sourced by Micron – which is standard for the course and in my opinion still sufficient for today’s workloads – although it’s now on the lower threshold of what phones should be equipped with.

Arguably the phone’s biggest component compromise comes in the form of eMMC storage of which the devices only come with 64GB of, also made by Micron. While the typical NAND speed benchmarks aren’t too terrible, the different storage standard does struggle under heavy parallel workloads.

The display on the Pixel 3a XL is an OLED panel with a diameter of 6.0” with a resolution of 2220 x 1080 and a resulting aspect ratio of 18:9. The phone’s width is very similar to the Pixel 2 XL and Pixel 3 XL, so it’s still very much a big phone.

While the back of the phone very much looks nearly identical to the Pixel 2 XL or Pixel 3 XL, there’s one very major difference: Instead of being a metal or glass back body, the Pixel 3a’s come with a full plastic unibody shell.

The design decision very likely saves a lot on the production cost of the phone, and in my opinion Google’s material choice on the 3a’s has been excellent. The polycarbonate used is of very high quality and definitely one of the best plastic phones I’ve encountered. The phone still features the characteristic glossy top part of the phone, while the bottom is a sanded off matte finish that is surprisingly close to the finish of the glass back on the regular Pixel 3’s, which is great.

The one biggest issue I feel is that the plastic design will be significantly more prone to scratches and dents, and I especially don’t expect the top glossy part of the phone to remain unblemished after a few months of use.

A big selling point for the Pixel 3a is that it sports the very same camera module as the flagship Pixel 3 units. We find the Sony IMX363 sensor which is a 12.2MP unit consisting of 1.4µm pixels with full-sensor dual-pixel PDAF ability. The module houses the same OIS and f/1.8 aperture lens.

On the front camera, Google has dropped the wide-angle module from the Pixel 3 and the 3a only houses the regular front-facing camera, which is an 8MP 1.12µm pixel f/2.2 lens with fixed focus.

It’s to be noted that while Google has dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack from the Pixel 2 and 3, it does make a comeback for the Pixel 3a. Google explains that this is meant to make the device accessible to more users. It’s a bit sad that nowadays you have to buy a lower-tier smartphone to regain a lost feature.

Among other dropped features on the Pixel 3a is the lack of wireless charging. The 3700mAh unit on the XL and 3000mAh should fare fairly fine, and it is an acceptable compromise given the device’s price ranges of $399 for the 3a and $479 for the 3a XL.

System Performance

System performance of the Pixel 3a XL is an interesting topic given its mid-range SoC. Here as aforementioned in the introduction, the CPU power of the SoC should match up with that of the Snapdragon 835 from 2 years ago. The Snapdragon 670 in the Pixel 3a has two Cortex A75 derived CPU cores running at 2.0GHz, while the Snapdragon 835 had four Cortex-A73 derived cores at 2.45GHz. In general, the 22% clock frequency disadvantage should be compensated by the ~25% higher IPC of the newer core microarchitecture. It should be noted that the Snapdragon 670’s CPU cores aren’t expected to perform quite as high in IPC as the Snapdragon 845’s as it employs smaller cache configurations to reduce die size and cost. Thus it should be pretty much a toss-up between the S670 and the S835.

Starting off with the web-browsing workload in PCMark, the newer Pixel 3a does manage to stay ahead of the Pixel 2 XL, while as expected lagging behind the 2018 and newer devices.

The video editing workloads has hardly any significant performance differences on devices of the last few years, and the Pixel 3a performs well here although it’s to be expected.

The Writing 2.0 sub-test is the most important of PCMark. The Pixel 3a still manages to hold up well with some Snapdragon 835 devices and even some S845 phones such as the Galaxy S9 and Note9.

The photo editing score is competitive, again in line with the Snapdragon 835 generation.

The data manipulation framerate performance is in line with the Pixel 2 XL.

Overall in PCMark, the Pixel 3a performed surprisingly well. It was able to keep up with the Pixel 2 XL whilst even competing some of the worse Snapdragon 845 flagships from last year. There’s still evidently quite a larger gap to the more recent Pixel 3, but again that’s to be expected.

The web-browsing JS tests is where we’ll see more major differences to the Snapdragon 845 and newer devices, again, whilst the Snapdragon 670 performs well against the 835, it does have a significant lag behind newer generation SoCs.

Overall Performance – Very Good For Mid-Range

Overall I was very satisfied with the performance of the Pixel 3a XL. It was extremely snappy in everyday usage, and if all you do on a smartphone is social media-like activity, then you’d be hard to press to find any differences between the 3a and other flagship devices.

Where the Pixel 3a more notably fell behind in was web browsing and loading of heavier pages. Here it was evident that there is indeed quite a generational performance gap and the mid-range SoC isn’t quite able to give the same experience.

One thing to note and again we can’t accurately measure with existing tools is the storage performance of the eMMC module of the phone. I did notice quite significantly slower installation speeds compared to newer phones. It’s not a total deal-breaker as some eMMC implementations of years past, but again it’s a compromise Google had to make to reduce the costs of the phone.

Overall, system and application performance of the Pixel 3a XL is very good for a mid-range device.

GPU Performance

Graphics performance of the Snapdragon 670 is something I admittedly didn’t have too much expectations for. The Adreno 615 of the chipset is a very cut-down version of last year’s Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon 845. In fact you shouldn’t be expecting much of an experience beyond light gaming. However as we’ll see there’s one interesting aspect of mid- to low-end GPUs: Their power consumption and sustained performance.

Starting off with the CPU-bound physics test of 3DMark, we see the Pixel 3a XL again largely fall in the performance category of Snapdragon 835 devices.

Switching over to 3D stressing workloads, we see some pretty mediocre results from the Pixel 3a XL and the Snapdragon 670. Here the phone and SoC is several generations behind even the S835.

Over the rest of the GFXBench benchmarks we continue to see quite lower-end performance. In general the Snapdragon 670’s GPU performance is around ½ to 2/3^rd of that of a Snapdragon 835 which puts it about 4 generations behind the top of the line right now.

The interesting aspect of the results is the fact that sustained and peak performance of the phone is essentially identical. There’s a very easy explanation for this: The power consumption of the Snapdragon 670 is so low, that it’s essentially impossible for the device to throttle. In fact, the active system power (load minus idle) of the platform was a meagre 1.5W, a far cry from the 5W+ flagship phones out there. The Pixel 3a merely got luke-warm near the SoC location but otherwise just felt the same as the ambient temperature.

Display Measurement

The display on the Pixel 3a XL is well specced for its range and price; the fact that Google opted to still employ an OLED panel rather than adopting a cheaper LCD does very well for the value of the new phone and does manage to differentiate itself from a lot of other devices from the competition, although we have seen more widespread adoption of OLED even in this tier.

Both the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL display panels are exclusively made by Samsung and use Samsung DDICs, which is a safe choice given the display issues we’ve encountered on past LG-sourced Pixel devices.

As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.

In terms of display brightness, it’s relatively on par with the manual maximum brightness levels we’ve seen from many OLED devices, with the Pixel 3a XL falling in at ~410 nits in the Natural display mode.

Unfortunately there’s no boost mechanism available, and the auto mode doesn’t have any high ambient brightness mode.

In terms of display modes, Google continues on with what we’ve seen in the Pixel 3. We have the “Natural”, “Boosted” and “Adaptive” modes. The phone by default comes in the Adaptive mode which is a highly saturated inaccurate mode. It’s been hinted to me that the reason Google opts to deliver the phone in this mode is because of pressure such as Samsung also having defaulted to saturated colours; however with this year’s phones this is no longer the case as the Korean vendor opted to ship it with accurate colours out-of-the-box, so I hope later this year Google will follow up doing the same in the Pixel 4.

The Natural mode is the phone’s most accurate colour profile and is colour managed, with accurate sRGB and Display P3 gamut targets. We’ll be remaining in this mode for our testing.

SpectraCal CalMAN
  

Starting off the greyscale accuracy tests, we see that the Pixel 3a XL does extremely well in the colour temperature department, achieving near perfect whites with an average CCT of 6428. The phone’s colour temperature seems to remain steady across brightness levels, although at lower brightness settings it does get a bit warmer towards 6100K. Nevertheless the differences are not perceptible and it’s a great result.

Minimum brightness falls in at 2.4nits, which is a little bit brighter than other phone’s minima, but it’s still adequate enough for evening low-light reading. As mentioned, the maximum falls in at 410nits at full-screen white with no further boosting. I did note that the screen does have APL brightness scaling, and did measure it go around 500 nits when showing lesser picture levels.

I did find some issues with the gamma: Oddly enough at 100 APL the results are near outstanding, and the 3a XL is able to achieve leading results with an almost perfect gamma as well as a greyscale dE2000 of 0.71.

The issue is, when going towards lower APL patterns, this behaviour falls apart and the panel clearly misbehaves in terms of luminosity and we’re seeing a gamma of 2.4-2.5.

Greyscale 200nits APL100 SpectraCal CalMANGreyscale 200nits APL65 SpectraCal CalMAN

Overall, because of the gamma issue, the phone ends up with a dE2000 of 2.21, which is still quite good. Please do keep in mind the gamma issues here as we’ll shortly see more drastic effects in the latter Gretag-MacBeth test.

Natural Mode - sRGB - SpectraCal CalMAN

Saturation accuracy for sRGB content is ok with an overall dE2000 of 2.28. The issue here is that the reds and blues are slightly undersaturated at all levels, which does reduce the gamut coverage of the panel.

Natural Mode - Display P3 - ​SpectraCal CalMAN

Display P3 content showcases the same issues of being under-saturated in the red and blues, also not quite reaching the maximum gamut of the colour space in this regard. Nevertheless, it’s a relatively errors are relatively linear so other than a slight under-saturation you will not see too major errors in terms of chromacity of colours.

In the Gretag Macbeth colour test with commonly found tones we see some of the larger issues of the Pixel 3a XL’s calibration:

GMB Natural - Sequentual APL100 ​SpectraCal CalMAN

​SpectraCal CalMAN

If we’re testing the colour patches sequentially at APL100 we are seeing some outstanding results with extremely accurate colours, with only a few tones being off-mark. The dE2000 here would have ended at 1.14 which is top-of-the-line.

GMB Natural - Sequential APL65 - ​SpectraCal CalMAN

​SpectraCal CalMAN

If however we test the pattern on a lower fixed APL (as we usually do), then we’re seeing some large errors in terms of luminosity, and we’re seeing the effects of the larger than optimal gamma we discovered before. Here the dE2000 of the GMB test falls in at 3.06, slightly above the limit of what should be acceptable.

However I wasn’t quite satisfied with my results as I noted that the phone was not actually behaving correctly even with fixed APL patterns. I noticed that luminosity also is highly dependent on the pattern window size, meaning the panel scales not only scales with APL, but also based on the % of pixels which are white. This causes quite a headache as it’s not actually possible to sequentially display automated patterns while keeping the luminosity constant.

I went ahead and just transferred our GMB colour patches onto a single static image and measured each square thanks to the small read head of the i1Pro.

GMB Natural Side-by-Side Patches ​SpectraCal CalMAN

​SpectraCal CalMAN

When measuring things in this manner, we actually see that things are actually worse than with the automated fixed APL method.

What’s actually happening here seems all too obvious: Google did very evidently calibrate their panels, however they did a massive mistake in their methodology. Either the engineers calibrated the display with full-screen and varying APL patches, which would pretty much explain the near absolute perfect results we’re measuring on the 3a XL, or the APL mechanism was enabled after the colour calibration took place. In my view I would point out to the former as the results are too perfect.

Unfortunately this does have a larger impact on the colour accuracy of the screen as we end up with an effective gamma of 2.5-2.6, and as seen in the final comparison picture colours are far too dark in relation to white, resulting in artificially more contrast.

Unfortunately this behaviour was actually also present on the Pixel 3 – however not quite with such a large difference. I do very much apologise to our readers for not catching this mistake last year, and in the future I’ll keep a closer eye on such behaviour. I’ve re-measured the Pixel 3 and it does very much negatively impact the accuracy score.

As for the Pixel 3a XL, this also does have a bad impact as the phone ends up with a dE2000 of 4.20 in the GMB chart.

Overall Display Conclusion: Still Good, Albeit Obvious Miscalibration

Overall the Pixel 3a XL display is still a good display. Having an OLED panel at this price category does remain a large advantage for the phone. Viewing angles and constrast are excellent, and while it doesn’t compete with flagships for brightness, it’s still very excellent and results in good sun-light legibility. The panel quality is excellent and the Samsung-sourced unit doesn’t exhibit any issues previously encountered on LG-sourced panels, and characteristics such as base power consumption are good.

It’s a pity for the colour calibration: Google very obviously paid attention to this and attempted to give the phone accurate colours, but they made a huge mistake in their methodology which results in the phone effectively having very inaccurate gamma and colour luminosity in actual content, resulting in darker-than-should-be colours.

Battery Life

Battery life on the Pixel 3a XL should be good: The Snapdragon 670 SoC is manufactured on a 10LPP process node and the microarchitecture should be in line with the Snapdragon 845. In effect, I expect the unit to have similar efficiency as the S845 generation of flagships.

The battery capacity of the 3a XL is also relatively large: 3700mAh. It’s to be noted that Google here is advertising the rated capacity, whilst some other vendors in the last few years have started to advertise the typical battery capacity, which can be 100-150mAh higher than the rated one. Props to Google to remaining honest in their marketing numbers here.

In the our web-browsing test, we indeed see the Pixel 3a XL perform extremely well with a result of 11.3h. As I mentioned, the phone falls very closely to the efficiency of S845 devices with similar battery capacity: the OnePlus 6T being the closest comparison point to the 3a XL.

The phone is able to showcase much better battery life over the Pixel 2 XL and the Pixel 3 in the charts because these two phones suffer from inefficient LG panels and DDICs. Unfortunately we don’t have a Pixel 3 XL to compare to.

In PCMark we again see equality with S845 devices of similar capacity: Again the 3a XL falls in almost the same range as the OnePlus 6T here.

Overall, the battery life of the Pixel 3a XL is excellent. Google did well with opting not to go with LG for this line-up as I fear it would have resulted notably worse battery life results, and I hope the company does the same for the Pixel 4 phones.

Whilst we don’t have a review unit at hand to test, we expect the regular Pixel 3a to perform 15-20% worse, in line with the 23% smaller battery capacity of 3000mAh.

Camera - Daylight Evaluation

The main selling point of the Pixel 3a phones is that they offer the very same rear camera and shooting experience as the more expensive flagship sibling. The differences between the two phones are non-existent in terms of the camera module, however we do see a larger difference in terms of the supporting internal hardware. One obvious big change is that the 3a phones do not feature Google’s Pixel Visual Core. Although functionally the PVC doesn’t offer anything that the SoC’s own DSP isn’t capable of, it would have been able to accelerate the processing. However this shouldn’t really be much of a concern on mid-range devices as it’s a good compromise to make in terms of achieving the same pictures quality.

We’ve reviewed the Pixel 3 camera last year and went more in-depth into the camera performance back then. Ever since there’s been a lot of new devices on the market – so although Google still claims the Pixel 3a to be able to compete at the flagship level, how does this still compare to what’s out there from the competition?

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

In the first scene we see only very minute differences to the Pixel 3. There’s a bit of a change in colour temperature and the 3a posts slight less saturated colours than the Pixel 3. Overall if you wouldn’t have the devices side-by-side you’d have a tough time to notice the differences.

In terms of detail, the phones are still leading. In terms of exposure Google continues to have large issues in terms of exposure, going for a much darker than actual rendition. The Pixel 3a is lacking any levels beyond 90% in reds and particularly the greens of this scene, even though it’s in broad sunlight. Dynamic range is also quite limited as the phone over-emphasises shadows that aren’t there.

[ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

In the next scene again Google posts an acceptable result, however it’s again way too dark. Fortunately the processing doesn’t actually flatten highlights, meaning you can get an accurate and much better result by simply increasing the brightness of the picture after-the-fact.

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ]
[ Honor 20 Pro ] - [ G8 ]
[ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

The next shot we see the 3a also differ from the 3: The 3a is using a 30% longer exposure at slightly higher ISO and thus does a bit better in preserving bright highlights. Interesting again is the slight difference in colour temperature, this time around I’d say the 3a has the better rendition. Details and textures are excellent on both phones. The image is again too dark but easily fixed with slight adjustments.

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Continuing on we again see very slight differences. The 3a’s exposure is 20% longer and does manage to capture a slightly more representative scene in broad sunlight. Dynamic range continues to be an issue as the shadows remain the worst among all the phones. This time around it’s very hard to recover information after-the-fact.

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ] - [ G8 ]
[ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Detail in the scene is excellent all-round, however again we’re lacking in dynamic range and overall too dark image.

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

The phone’s detail remains excellent and preserves all textures accurately, however yet again we’re seeing a bit of a struggle in terms of dynamic range and exposure. In this case the camera is exposing for the highlights on the cloud, which ends up disadvantaging the whole rest of the scene. Again it’s possible to rectify this and get better results, but it needs manual work after the fact.

Daylight Camera Conclusion

Whilst we found some very small differences between the Pixel 3 and the new 3a, the phone’s camera largely perform the exact same. In daylight pictures unfortunately this means some of my larger grievances with Google’s processing are still very much present in the Pixel 3a: Too dark pictures that aren’t representative of the scene and limited dynamic range that favour too much preserving highlights of bright scenes rather than keeping shadow detail.

The camera’s preservation of details however is excellent as it has among the best retention of textures of a lot of phones: Here Google just avoids any stupid smudging noise reduction algorithms as it’s simply not needed.

The thing is, the Pixel 3a isn’t really a flagship phone so our comparison here isn’t quite as fair. Yes Google does proclaim it has the same flagship camera, but I was never really of the opinion that the camera was all that good, particularly in daylight. Compared to what’s actually achieved by other devices in the same price-range, the Pixel 3a does offer excellent camera quality, although it’ll actually have tough competition from some phones from Asian vendors.

Camera - Low Light Evaluation

Google’s Night Sight feature was a primary marketing point for the Pixel 3a: Google last year did raise the bar in terms of computational photography and it managed to save the Pixel 3 from otherwise ending up with more mediocre low-light results.

In general there’s no too much new on the Pixel 3a, and the night-time scenes between the new phone and the flagship predecessor are identical, so I’ll skip the detailed evaluation as we’ve covered things extensively against the current line-up over the last few months.

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

[ Pixel 3 ] - [ Pixel 3a ]
[ OnePlus 7 Pro ] - [ OnePlus 6T ]
[ S10+ (E) ] - [ S10+ (S) ]
[ P30 Pro ] - [ Honor 20 Pro ]
[ G8 ] - [ Oppo Reno ] - [ iPhone XS ]

Low-Light Camera Conclusion

As with the Pixel 3, the Pixel 3a is saved by the Night Sight mode which still is among the best computational photography implementations out there in current phones. Since the Pixel 3, Google was beaten in low-light by various Huawei and Honor phones, and more recently Samsung’s new night mode looks to perform better than Google’s.

The Pixel 3a however remains quite unique in its price range in regards to low-light photography, and the only real competition here is from mid-range Huawei phones, as other manufacturers haven’t yet caught up with their camera algorithms. Unfortunately I don’t have more mid-range phones on hand to contextualise the Pixel 3a’s performance against other such mid-range devices, but I expect the phone to still perform extremely well.

Speaker Evaluation

The speaker situation on the Pixel 3a and 3a XL is quite different from that of previous Pixel iterations. In particular the new phone differs in that the bottom speaker is no longer a front-facing unit, but rather a more regular bottom-firing design.

Furthermore while the earpiece does serve as a stereo unit, it acts more like a tweeter while the main speaker takes care of lower frequencies.

In terms of the maximum volume of the phone, the Pixel 3a XL doesn’t quiget get as loud as other devices on the market, but it’s still more than sufficient to listen to in louder environments.

What we notice in the results in that the difference between holding the phone one-handed in portrait mode and two-handed and having the phone cupped, is that the delta is a lot higher than what we see on the Pixel 2 or Pixel 3; this is a case of the phone not having quite as good frontal directionality due to the bottom firing speaker.

In terms of the speaker stereo bias, there’s a clear loudness advantage to the right side / bottom speaker. While the earpiece is there, its frequency range is very limited in the low and mid-range and offers a lot more treble. The main speaker on the other hand has a very limited high frequency range.

Listening to content however with both speakers is quite good: The two speakers complement each other extremely well, and especially in the higher frequency ranges the Pixel 3a XL does very well. It’s notably lacking in the lower frequency and bass, but it’s still a very good experience.

The big thing to note here is that while the output isn’t perfect, the phone doesn’t suffer from the same high volume distortions as the Pixel 3 if you hold it wrong.

Overall, the speaker audio quality the 3a XL is very good for a phone in its range, particularly as we’re just used to mono speaker setups in devices from the competition.

The phone’s 3.5mm headphone output is good and seems certainly better than Google’s 3.5mm headphone dongle audio quality, however it did lack a bit of clarity in the higher frequency ranges compared to higher end models. Nevertheless, it’s good that Google opted to actually include this feature in the 3a series.

Conclusion & End Remarks

We don’t review mid- and lower-end devices nearly as often as we’d like to here, but the Pixel 3a was an interesting device to have put through the mill.

In terms of design, there’s nothing really exciting about the Pixel 3a XL. Google opted to keep it safe, avoiding any notch or fancier screen design, and simply went for the larger top and bottom bezels on the front of the phone. Whilst this isn’t a terrible design choice, it’s to be noted you can get a lot more modern looking phones from the competition.

Google’s choice of plastic on the 3a works quite well- it’s a high grade polycarbonate and the matte part of the back cover really feels more premium than what you’d expect. There’s still some concern in terms of durability; the phone will be significantly more prone to scratches than a metal or glass phone, and I don’t expect the top glossy part of the phone to age that well with usage. The bonus here of course is that there’s no risk of breaking the back panel if you do happen to drop it.

In terms of performance, everyday usage and CPU bound tasks perform very well thanks to the Snapdragon 670. The chipset performs at around the level of a Snapdragon 835, which while isn’t the best experience by now, it’s still extremely respectable.

Google’s choice of going with eMMC isn’t quite a dramatic as one would think, thanks to the filesystem optimisations and relatively good quality NAND, there’s only limited scenarios where the downgrade is noticeable. Still, yes it’s a tad slower on application installations, however I do find it as a reasonable compromise.

The display on the Pixel 3a XL is good: Opting to go OLED in this price-range is still an excellent choice as there’s still a lot of vendors opting to go the LCD route. Whilst it’s evident that Google tried to calibrate the display, they did so incorrectly, and the phone ends up with a messed up gamma curve that spoils an otherwise good calibration, with the end result ending up as just “ok”.

Thanks to the larger 3700mAh battery and the high efficiency of the Snapdragon 670 as well as no obvious issues on the part of the display panel, battery life on the 3a XL is excellent and falls in line with S845 generation flagship phones of similar battery capacity. The key here is that the 3a XL does a lot better than the regular Pixel 3 and Pixel 2 XL due to not having the bad LG display panels.

The camera on the Pixel 3a is supposed to be the hallmark feature of the phones as it sports the very same camera sensor on as on the Pixel 3 line-up. The camera results between the two phones are indeed near identical and this comes with all the advantages as well as disadvantages.

In daylight, the Pixel 3a still doesn’t produce very realistic exposures as Google’s processing always prioritises on maintaining the brightest highlights of a scene at the cost of much reduced dynamic range in the shadows. Many times there’s also an evident lack of any levels beyond 90%, and the aforementioned exaggerated blacks. In many shots it’s possible to fix this after-the-fact, but in some shots there’s just too little dynamic range.

Details on the Pixel cameras remains amongst the very best even when compared to the latest flagships. Here Google’s lack of any degrading daytime noise reduction is able to correctly preserve details and textures, and I have no idea why other vendors keep failing in this regard.

Low-light photography thanks to Night Sight is among the best out there. The mode has been bested now by Huawei and Samsung, however in the mid-range class of devices the Pixel 3a should very much hold significant advantages.

Speakers on the Pixel 3a XL are good – it’s not the best, but the fact that the phone even has stereo is something that’s a differentiating factor against mono competitors. Having the 3.5mm headphone jack is also pleasant and useful, even though it’s a bit ironic that we have to use the cheaper Pixel models to have this feature.

Value Verdict: North Amercia

Overall, the verdict on the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL should be based on the value proposition that the phone offers. In order to come to any conclusion here we need to investigate what the options are.

For users in the North America, things are relatively straightforward. Due to a lack of options and restrictive market, the Pixel 3a seem like very good choices given their price of $399 for the regular and $479 for the XL.

The real only competition the 3a would have here is if you manage to get a previous generation flagship at a reduced cost. For example a new Pixel 2 XL can still be found for cheaper than the 3a XL at the time of writing. Also if you’re into it, there’s a large amount of other older flagship devices one could buy and simply slap on Google’s camera APK- ironically invalidating most of the advantages that come with buying a Pixel phone.

Still, getting a new phone such as the 3a with guaranteed future software updates and the many exclusive North American Google ecosystem features makes sense and I can see the value in that.

Rest of World

For users in the rest of the world, I don’t think the Pixel 3a phones are competitive.The phone’s sole advantage here lie in the software experience that is sometime more streamlined than what most Asian OEMs besides Samsung are able to offer.

For example a Xiaomi Mi9 with the Snapdragon 855, more competent triple-camera setup, an under-screen fingerprint scanner, and a flagship design currently costs only 394€ in Europe which is actually cheaper than the 486€ price tag of the Pixel 3a XL. There’s a ton more options from other vendors such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor and even some mid-range series from Samsung that overall make so much more sense in terms of value.

Unfortunately I fear Google will have very little success with the Pixel 3a outside of North America, and if you're amongst those regions there’s very little reason to get the new phone if you’re aiming to maximise the bang-for-buck.