Google Pixel 4a: Long-Term Review

We’ve had the Pixel 4a with us for a while now – it’s proven to be a great mid-range smartphone, with some terrific features at an affordable price compared to most flagship devices nowadays. How does it fare after some time though? Let’s take a look.

Build Quality

Let’s start off with how the phone has held up physically. The matte polycarbonate design of the Pixel 4a seems to contribute to its durability. After using it as my main phone for 100 days, there are hardly any scratches, which I really appreciate. The display, protected by Gorilla Glass 3, has also held up well. It has endured daily use, although I do take good care of my devices. If you’re generally careful with your phone and don’t drop it often, the Pixel 4a’s display should hold up nicely.

Media and Games

In terms of media consumption, the Pixel 4a is a quite an excellent smartphone, particularly if you enjoy music and movies, thanks to its vivid full-screen display and stereo speaker setup. When I’m without access to a bigger screen, it’s my go-to portable media center, and its 128GB of internal storage practically houses my whole music library.

I do wish that it came with an SD card slot though, but so far I haven’t used up all the storage yet. The fact that it also comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack also means that the Pixel 4a is a versatile device for music lovers, adding that special dash of flexibility if you’re ever in the mood for wired or Bluetooth headphones.

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In my experience, the Pixel 4a offers a good gaming experience due to its Snapdragon 730G SoC and 6GB of RAM, which can run almost any game on the PlayStore. After all this time, the 4a is still a very capable gadget in terms of performance. Here, latency and slowness issues are essentially nonexistent.

Camera

The excellent camera performance is, without a doubt, a major selling point for the Pixel 4a. Throughout my time with the device, Google has consistently improved its camera software, and it has stayed very constant from when I initially received it. Casual mobile photographers will adore the Pixel 4a’s picture handling, and the results are stunning. The phone’s camera has spoiled me; it handles things like dynamic range, saturation, and low-light performance with ease.  

Software Updates

If you have or are thinking about getting a Pixel device like this one, you may have heard that Google promises to keep its devices’ software up to date. I’m happy to say that the 4a has been getting updates every month, though Google does keep some features exclusive to its higher-end phones. We’ve had some nice updates, like the cinematic pan mode, and optimization features, like the adaptive charging feature in the settings menu. Google says this is meant to protect your battery life if you leave it charging overnight for long amounts of time.

There’s been also some UI updates like the way the launcher handles wallpaper customization – you get this neat preview of how your home screen will look depending on the wallpaper you choose. Now, these are just a few of the features that Google has provided for this phone, and as far as updates go, this is definitely the way.

Battery Life

If you intend to use a Pixel 4a for all these tasks, how does the battery hold up? I’ve noticed that with moderate use, and that involves mostly web browsing, social media apps, communication, and video streaming – the Pixel 4a can last me a day’s worth of charge which is probably around 7-8 hours of screen on-time if I stick to WiFi.

On the other hand, though, data usage and gaming can bring this down to 5-6 hours, but I’ve been pretty satisfied so far with how the battery performs on the Pixel 4a.

Closing

So, now that we’ve talked about all of this, how has the Pixel 4a kept up? Well, after everything we’ve talked about, I have to say that this phone has been great so far. I think that the fact that the hardware and apps work so well together makes this phone stand out from others in this price range, which is a good reason to buy it. This is an ideal way to get your feet wet in the Google pool.