Review: Google Pixel 6a budget smartphone
Google’s budget Pixel 6a phone has come at the right time if you’re worried about rising cost of living pressures.
Cost of living pressures is likely to see more Australians opt for mid range phones than shell out for premium handsets costing thousands.
But that doesn’t have to be bad news in terms of a lack of features. Google has just released its Pixel 6a phone in Australia for $749, and it manages to offer many of the features as the premium Pixel 6 Pro costing $550 more.
While there are obvious compromises, you get the same Android 12 operating system, Google’s Tensor 5 nanometre chipset with the same 8-core CPU and graphics unit as on the 6 Pro, support for Wi-Fi 6e, and Bluetooth 5.2.
This allows the 6a to support many of the unique features that define modern Pixel phones, such as dictation support and the live translate feature available for different scenarios.
You can point the camera lens at street signs in foreign languages, and get chats translated in real time. This applies to Android Messages, WhatsApp, Snapchat and others. There’s translations of movie captions.
The caveat is the restricted number of languages each of these apply to. The language availability varies from feature to feature. Execution accuracy can vary too.
The Recorder app lets you record interviews in the street and have them transcribed as you go. You can dictate letters, memos, emails and the like and view the transcripts. Again there are language choice restrictions.
One notable feature is Hold For Me, where the phone will patiently wait for your call to be answered and will notify you once the call hold is over. When I tested this, the phone also prompted me when I had to enter menu selections. It types out what is being said so you don’t have to listen to infernal wait-on-hold music.
There are of course compromises such as the 6.1-inch display which supports HDR rather than the AMOLED 120Hz HDR10+ 6.71-inch display on the Pixel 6 Pro. Nevertheless the budget phone’s display manages to be OLED, a factor some manufacturers claim as a premium feature.
The biggest compromise is the camera system. You only get wide and ultrawide lenses and the wide lens is just 12.2MP, not 50MP as available with both the Pixel 6 Pro and another variant, the standard Pixel 6 which sits between the other two in the product range. It entirely misses out on the 48MP telephoto lens with 4x optical zoom found on the premium variant.
Nevertheless I managed some great day time shots and sunset images with the Pixel 6a on holiday last week in Townsville, North Queensland.
The camera system is easy to use. Press the image and up comes brightness, contrast and warm/cool sliders. Many phone cameras don’t do justice to the vivid red and orange colours of sunsets, so I had no qualms upping the warmth control to depict close to what I saw.
The Achilles’ heel is night photography. I could get decent shots outdoors at night if there was sufficient lighting around, but anything darker was lacklustre. It was hopeless when I tried to shoot the big caramel coloured full moon rise.
Shelling out another $250 for the standard Pixel 6 will get you a better camera with a 50 MP snapper. That’s if the extra photography capability matters.
The 6a comes with an 8MP selfie camera at front.
The Pixel 6a delivered solid battery life, surviving 16 hours 52 minutes continuously playing 1080p video at 200 nits brightness. That’s with a smaller 4410 milliampere hour battery compared to the other two models.
The 6a will be competing against Samsung’s excellent mid-range A series which punches above its weight starting with the A73 5G ($799). It has a 6.7-inch full HD AMOLED display, 128GB of storage, microSD card support, and four cameras – main (108MP), ultra wide (12MP), depth (5MP) macro (5MP) and a 32MP selfie camera. For a mid range phone it has been a runaway proposition in 2022 until at least now.
The Pixel 6a with its different set of features gives users a choice in the higher end of the mid range market. At $749 the Pixel 6a joins the Pixel 6 Pro ($1299) and Pixel 6 ($999).