Panoramas of the sky at night now a Google Pixel 4a phone user’s delight

Google’s latest mid-market phone has one unusual feature — it can capture the night sky.

The Google Pixel 4a astrophotography feature can capture shots of the night sky.

Google’s latest mid-market phone has an unusual feature — it can capture the night sky. The Pixel 4a smartphone can be used for astrophotography. Just attach it to a tripod and it’ll take a long exposure for a perfect night snap.

Google may dominate the search market but it isn’t a frontrunner in selling phones when compared with Apple and Samsung. Yet, as in this case, it likes to show off novel features in its new phones that better-selling manufacturers might adopt later.

In 2018, when it released the Pixel 3, Google included a “top shot” photo feature, where the camera started to silently take frames before you hit the shutter button. If you were a fraction late to snap a stellar sport’s moment or lightning in the sky, you could go back and save the perfect frame captured before you took the photo.

Google has added astrophotography to the camera capability of the Pixel 4a smartphone.

At $599, the Google Pixel 4a is just over half the price of its more expensive big sibling, the Pixel 4 announced in October last year.

And it does more than take photos of the sky. In the US, the Google Assistant on the 4a answers the phone, asks who’s calling and why, and sends you a transcript so you can screen calls.

The 4a not only takes portrait shots with blurred backgrounds, you can select a photo taken years ago stored in your Google Photos and the Pixel 4a will blur the background and store that. This is achieved using a “blur” slider in the Photos app.

Google’s personal assistant is smarter; you can ask it to read out this week’s calendar appointments and it will; you can ask it to open apps, make calls and manage the phone, such as “turn on flashlight”.

Perhaps the biggest innovation is its use of voice-to-text conversion with artificial intelligence. You can use the recorder app to transcribe a conversation in real time as you record it, review and search the recording by keyword and save the transcript to Google Drive.

(Images taken with the Pixel 4a. Click to enlarge.)

Photo taken with the Google Pixel 4a.

Photo taken with the Google Pixel 4a.

A “night site” (night shot) photo with the Pixel 4a.

Google is not the first to do this — the app Otter.ai does it very well — but Google is the first phone-maker to include it by default.

When playing video, you can opt for the phone to display captions as you go, even though no captions were previously generated or supplied. This is available only in English for now.

In Australia, as well as in Britain and the US, Google says the phone will detect if you have been in a car crash (by the impact) and dial emergency services. Again, this is available only in English.

There’s also a safety check ­feature. If you go for a walk or a run alone, the phone can later check that you made it home and alert your designated emergency contacts. The personal safety app will also send you alerts about natural disasters and other emergencies.

The phone has an “adaptive battery” feature which learns which apps you use infrequently and limits the time they run in the background.

The Google Pixel 4a smartphone will sell in Australia in September.

Pixel 4a is a compact phone with a smallish 5.81-inch display with screen resolution a little up from full HD. It has six gigabytes of memory and 128GB of internal storage that can’t be expanded using a microSD card.

The phone supports both a plastic Nano SIM and electronic SIM for calling, has 12.2MP and 8MP single camera lenses on the rear and front, and can capture 4K video. The single lenses limit the camera when taking zoomed, wide-angle and close-up shots but the quality is good. Colours look accurate and natural. There’s a dedicate night shot mode, as found on some previous Pixel models.

It does not, however, support 5G calling. Other models, the Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5, will offer 5G when released later this year. Pre-orders for the Pixel 4a begin now and it goes on sale on September 10.