22 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 62
GOOGLE I/O 2019
With a £400 price difference between the two
phones, Google has had to cut costs somewhere,
so there’s no waterproofing here. Otherwise, it’s
just smaller tweaks, such as the lower speaker being
mounted to the side of the USB-C port instead of
forward facing.
The pressure sensitive Active Edge sensors remain
though, and the Pixel 3a even has a headphone jack,
which is something you don’t get at the flagship level.
Alongside Just Black and Clearly White is a new
colour. ‘Purple-ish’ has a light subtle tone complete
with a lime green power button.Hardware
Unlike the 3a, the 3a XL’s display isn’t actually bigger
than its predecessor’s: it has a 6in panel rather than
a 6.3in one. It’s still OLED and has a decent Full HD+
resolution of 2,160x1,080. A pixel density of 402ppi is
good and the screen has various always-on features.
What Google has also done to keep costs down
is install a lower-grade processor with a Qualcomm
Snapdragon 670 instead of an 845. This is backed up
by 4GB of RAM and just one option when it comes to
storage – 64GB. That’s not bad, but it’s worth bearing
in mind that Google doesn’t offer a microSD card slot
to add more storage here. You can make use of cloud
storage, though, with all photos and video uploaded
at High Quality without any limits. That means photos
are full resolution since they’re below the 16Mp cap,
and videos will be 1080p.
Those specifications are still decent, and the
most important thing for many buyers is that Google