OCTOBER 2020 PCWorld 39top-of-the-line
processors.
You’re getting a
robust 128GB of storage
with the Pixel 4a, more
than the 64GB you get
with the base iPhone SE
and the Pixel 4. The Pixel
4a’s battery is also
bigger—3,140mAh
versus 1,821mAh (iPhone
SE) and 2,800mAh (Pixel
4)—and Google
squeezes every bit of
juice from it. Benchmarks
topped 11 hours and I
comfortably made it
through a full day, with sometimes more than
50 percent of my battery remaining. Both
phones are doing a lot with a little, but I’ve
never made it through a full day with my
iPhone SE without at least a quick charge.
ONE CAMERA WITH A
TOOLBOX OF TRICKS
The Pixel line has always preached camera
processing over camera hardware, so as
expected the 4a doesn’t wow you with
lenses, It has a single rear 12.2MP dual-pixel
camera with an f/1.7 aperture and 77-degree
field of view. That’s very similar to the 12MP,
f/1.8 camera you get with the iPhone SE and
functionally identical to the main lens on the
Pixel 4 XL, which costs more than twice as
much, so Google isn’t cutting corners here.
You don’t get the secondary telephoto
lens that comes with the Pixel 4, but you do
get nearly all of the fringe benefits: Night Sight
with astrophotography, Top Shot, Portrait
Mode, HDR+, Dual exposure controls, Motion
Auto Focus, even Super Res Zoom, some of
which aren’t available on the Pixel 3. That’s an
impressive set of camera features for a $349
phone, but even more impressive is how well
they work on a $349 phone.
Even without the Pixel Visual Core ISP, the
Pixel 4a takes incredible low-light photos.
Photos that are otherwise unusable are nicely
brightened without being blown out, and the
results consistently challenged what I got
from the iPhone 11 and Pixel 4—and itIt might look big, but the camera array on the back of the Pixel 4a only
houses one lens.