This year, Google is introducing a phone that pulls out all the stops, including a cutting-edge, in-house-made SoC, enhanced camera specifications, and a dramatic new design. If you’re searching for those types of game-changing enhancements, we recommend the Pixel 6, which will be released soon as possible. In comparison, the new Google Pixel 5A is a really dull upgrade. This time around, the screen is a little larger, there’s an IP classification for water resistance, and the battery gets a nice bump. That’s pretty much it.
But here’s the thing: the Pixel 4A and 4A 5G were already excellent midrange phones, and rather than interfering with a successful formula. Google has updated the 5A’s design to keep it at the top of its class. Even better, the 5A is $449, which is $50 cheaper than the 4A 5G’s launch pricing.
The Pixel 5A is competent, but not outstanding. There are a few drawbacks to be aware of: its security support strategy is sufficient but not exceptional. It also strangely lacks software compatibility for C-band 5G frequencies, which US carriers will begin using in the coming years. It’s only available in the United States and Japan, and it’s not even available through the big carriers in the United States.
However, Google has managed to remedy some of the shortcomings of its prior A-series devices while also lowering the price. That’s not bad for a dull update.
The Pixel 5a costs $504.54 and comes with 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. Mostly Black is the only color choice. Unlocked models are available via the Google Store and the Google Fi cellular network.
Like the Pixel 4a, the Pixel 5a’s major competitor is the iPhone SE, which is presently the iPhone SE 2022. It begins at $429 and boasts a significantly more powerful chipset. However, you get half the storage (64GB) of the Pixel 5a, a single back camera instead of two, and an LCD screen rather than an OLED display.
The Pixel 5a is only available in the United States and Japan, possibly because of a chip shortage that caused earlier this year’s speculations of the phone’s cancellation. We still don’t know if Google will increase the Pixel 5a’s availability in the future, even though it was released a few months ago. Google’s current focus is on the Pixel 6, which costs just $150 more than the Pixel 5a and starts at $599.
With the exception of the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, Google’s design language has been quite straightforward. In many ways, it’s quite minimalist, yet it’s also rather useful. In that regard, the Pixel 5a looks like an unremarkable big plastic phone. Except for the mint-colored power button, nothing on the phone stands out.
And perhaps that’s the way it should be. I enjoy fancy-looking phones like those from Samsung or OnePlus, but I also value functionality over aesthetics. The Pixel 5a isn’t going to turn heads, but that wasn’t the point. Instead, this $449 phone is only focused on software. That mostly translates to remarkable camera skill, as you’ll see in a moment.
The Pixel 5a has a solid build quality and an IP67 water-resistance rating. This is a first for the A-series Pixel phones. The 5a features a smooth, soft-touch feel despite being a huge polycarbonate slab. Unfortunately, this attracts fingerprint oils, which are easily visible on the black plastic. These oils can be hard to remove with simply your shirt or a microfiber cloth, unlike fingerprints on glass phones.
A basic square camera module, the fingerprint sensor, and a little Google “G” towards the bottom are all that’s visible on the back of the Pixel 5a. There isn’t much going on around the front, either. The phone’s large 6.34-inch display spans virtually the whole front of the device, with razor-thin bezels all around. Compared to the Pixel 4a, the new phone appears to be a higher-end handset.
The Pixel 5a, like previous A-series Pixels, contains a 3.5mm headphone port. Even though Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have improved significantly, many people still require a headphone jack, especially in automobiles where an auxiliary wire may be used to connect the phone.
The Pixel 5a has excellent sound quality owing to its stereo speakers. The Pixel 5a can get incredibly loud and powerful when combined with the bottom-firing speaker. The 5a has better sound than most other phones in this price range, yet it lacks the bass and warmth found in headphones (or higher-quality phones).
The Pixel 5a’s display is the largest ever on a bezel-less Pixel, according to Google, which also includes the Pixel 4a, 4a 5G, and 5. The Pixel 5a’s full-HD OLED screen is 6.34 inches and is brilliant and bright. Although it isn’t the most amazing panel we’ve ever seen, it is still extremely nice, especially at this price.
The Pixel 5a’s display, like the rest of the phone, does its job well. The screen is average in the best possible sense, neither bad nor good. The viewing angles are one area where the Pixel 4a has certainly improved. When viewing the phone from an off-angle with the 4a, you’d notice distortion quite immediately. With the Pixel 5a, We had no such issues. In fact, until you reach near 180 degrees, as you do with most phones, the display offers amazing viewing angles and minimal obvious distortion.
It’s difficult to go back to an LCD phone after using an OLED screen. That has to do with how dark the blacks grow, which creates a sense of gloom and dread in dark games like Limbo or contrasts starkly with the harsh orange landscapes in Blade Runner 2049. Even anime-style visuals in Genshin Impact and pixel art in Dead Cells look fantastic on the Pixel 5a. The quality is exactly right for nature shots to make you feel like you’re there, too. Even a simple YouTube video or sports clip looks fantastic on this panel.
The Pixel 5a, like most Android phones, can only attain maximum brightness when Adaptive Brightness is active. Adaptive Brightness utilizes artificial intelligence to determine how bright you want your display to be in different lighting conditions. That necessitates training the function, which We doubt most people do – It Usually simply let my phones adapt themselves.
The camera technology on the 5A doesn’t appear to be particularly interesting on paper, but it adds up to a lot more than the sum of its parts. Optical image stabilization is included in the 12.2-megapixel primary back camera, which is rare for a camera under $500. This type of lens-based stabilization ensures that more of your images remain sharp, which is particularly useful in low-light situations.
A 16-megapixel ultrawide camera and an 8-megapixel selfie camera are also available. In comparison to other phones’ triple- and quad-rear camera arrays, this may not seem like much, but those third and fourth cameras are generally low-quality macro and depth sensors that aren’t really helpful anyhow.
If those specifications seem familiar, it’s because they’re the same as the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4A 5G, which is acceptable for this model. The 5A still has the greatest photo quality in the midrange class. Even without new sensors or lenses, because of Google’s clever image processing. While many of the Pixel 5A’s competitors can capture decent images in strong outside light, Google remains the budget group’s low light winner.
What was true of the 4A and 5’s imaging capabilities is also true with the 5A. It does a good job with high-contrast scenes, and colors are presented more naturally than on a Samsung phone. Portrait and night mode photographs are among the best you can get from a midrange phone, while their limits are obvious in more difficult situations. Google will have its work cut out for it in equipping the Pixel 6 to compete with the world’s Samsung and Apple flagships. It can afford to hold stationary for another year in the budget class since it has such a positive start.
Google used the same midrange processor as the Pixel 5. The Snapdragon 765G is a 7nm-based processor that offers a good blend of performance and economy. The inbuilt X52 modem on this chipset supports 5G, although only at sub-6GHz speeds.
There are two core clusters in this chipset. The first is a performance cluster with twin ARM Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz, respectively. The other cluster consists of six smaller ARM Cortex-A55 cores with 1.8GHz clock rates. The Adreno 620 GPU is in charge of graphics.
The Pixel 5a, like its predecessors (4a and 4a with 5G), has 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB of UFS 2.1 internal storage. There is just one memory option, and the storage is not extensible with a microSD card. When we evaluated the Pixel 5, its performance looks like dull. The Snapdragon 765G seemed under-tuned to account for the increased battery demand that the 5G introduced.
We expect somewhat better results from these benchmarks now that the battery is bigger. Even so, the Pixel is noted for its day-to-day performance, which was also true of the prior generations with midrange chipsets.
This could be due to the Pixel 5a’s plastic and metal body structure, which makes heat transfer to the phone’s outside more difficult. While there were no significant performance dips, the Pixel 5a struggled to sustain peak performance over time, which should not have been a problem with this middling processor.
To summarise, the Pixel 5a isn’t one of the best performers, but it’s adequate. It will be enough for the ordinary user, with enough power to keep up with social media, emails, texting, and casual gaming. If you plan on using your smartphone for extended periods of time without taking a break, you should choose one with better thermal management.
The Pixel 5A has a larger battery than its predecessor, with a 4,680mAh cell compared to the 4A 5G’s 3,885mAh. That’s a lot closer to the 5,000mAh batteries that the competition uses. Google describes it as “all-day” performance, with up to 48 hours of battery life if an extreme battery saver is enabled.
Android 12 is officially out, and it includes the Pixel 5a. One of the advantages of buying a Google phone is that you receive Apple-level access to new Android versions the day they’re launched. If only the Pixel 5a had the same level of support as the iPhone.
With Google’s own system-on-chips launching for the Pixel 6, it’s possible that future Pixels may be upgraded as often as iPhones. Despite this, the Pixel 5a will receive three years of platform upgrades and at least three years of security patches.
The Pixel 5a comes with stock Android 11 right out of the box. Since Android 11 is a rather basic OS, there’s nothing new here. There’s an area where you can tweak some of the 5a’s motions, such as pulling down the notification shade by swiping on the fingerprint sensor. That’s pretty much it. If you’re coming from Samsung, OnePlus, or even Motorola, you could be disappointed by the lack of personalization and capabilities. That will, however, change with Android 12.
The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro bring more major updates to Google’s phone portfolio. But the Pixel 5a is a good option if you want Google’s software and photography experience at a lesser price. Despite the fact that the Pixel 5a is $100 more expensive than last year’s model. It offers practically all of the features of the $699 Pixel 5, excluding the 90Hz display, for $250 less.
The Pixel 5a’s claim to fame is its cameras, which deliver in spades. That’s a long way from the 5,000mAh batteries used by the competition. By no means is Apple’s cheap iPhone a terrible camera phone, but the 5a is just superior in every way. This should come as no surprise to anybody who knows how frequently Pixels appear in our top camera phone lists.
Despite the fact that the battery life isn’t stellar, But enjoy using the Pixel 5a. It accomplishes everything the Pixel 4a 5G did well for $50 cheaper, which is remarkable. While individuals in other countries may be disappointed that the Pixel 5a is only available in the United States and Japan, it is an excellent budget option. There are better phones that cost $1,000 or more, but none of them compare to the Pixel 5a in terms of value.
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