PC World - USA (2020-10)

38 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020

REVIEWS GOOGLE PIXEL 4A

with an in-display sensor, and it makes me

wonder why phone makers moved away from

them in the first place. If Google can fit one on

a phone this size, then Samsung and OnePlus

can certainly fit one on their larger phones,

not to mention a headphone jack, which the

Pixel 4a also has.

IT’S NOT FAST BUT 

IT’LL LAST

With a Snapdragon 730G and 6GB of

RAM, the Pixel 4a isn’t going to win any

speed or performance awards. But Google

makes the best of a slower chip with a finely

tuned Android 10 that feels more capable

than it should.

But for a processor that produced some of

the lowest benchmark scores I’ve seen in

years, the Pixel 4a really isn’t bad. It can’t

hold a candle to the A13 chip in the iPhone

SE, but it’s also not nearly as slow as its

benchmarks indicate:

Geekbench 5

Single: 552

Multi: 1646

Compute: 1027

PCMark

Work 2.0: 8225

Those numbers are somewhat comparable to

the Snapdragon 845 in the Pixel 3, and the

performance is roughly in line with a two-year-

old flagship phone. That is to say, it’s not

terrible, but you can feel it struggle when

running games and intensive apps, and

animations and transitions were visibly laggy

at times.

But thanks to Google’s Android

optimizations, the Pixel 4a

belies its processor’s

capabilities. It’s still

nowhere near as fast as the

iPhone SE’s top-of-the-line

A13 processor, but the

Pixel 4a occasionally felt as

fast as my Pixel 4 XL. Even

without a high refresh rate,

scrolling is very smooth,

and the Snapdragon 730G

rarely feels frustratingly

slow, even as someone

who regularly uses the

The G logo on the back means you’ll get a smooth-as-silk Android

experience, even with a Snapdragon 730G processor.