The new midrange standard is the topic of the 7A review
The New Google Pixel 7A: Is it the Perfect Phone? Yes. It is definitely the perfect phone for google I/O 2023
One of the busiest days I’ve had in my life is the past week. I flew to Dallas, Texas, for a friend’s wedding, drove to Austin to visit an in-law, drove back for the wedding festivities, then flew back to New York, only to head out to San Francisco the next day for Google I/O 2023. The good news is that the new Google Pixel 7A has been in my pocket all the while, through every leg and layover, and it’s never felt limited in any deal-breaking way. It’s more proof of the fact that you don’t really need to spend a lot of money to get a good experience these days.
Is it the perfect phone? No. There are features missing here that some folks would want. Also, battery life is just OK, and the price has been hiked up $50 from last year’s model. You can always find the price of the Pixel 6A for $299, but since it’s last year’s iteration, they’re continuing to sell it for less. It is still a good purchase, but if you want something more expensive, the Pixel 7A is the phone for you.
Performance is not an issue. The Pixel 7A packs Google’s Tensor G2 chipset with 8 gigabytes of RAM, the very same stack that powers its flagship Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. The 7A stutter has never appeared in my time with the phone. This chipset means you get access to many of the same G2-specific software features that debuted on the Pixel 7 series, such as Long Exposure in the camera app and Photo Unblur, which did effectively unblur some faces in my photos of the dance floor at the wedding.
The phone’s frame is made of recycled aluminum, and the back is a plastic composite that by no means feels cheap. It’s one less spot for cracked glass if you drop the phone. The front is made with an old product that isn’t as scratch and crack resistant as newer products from the company that creates the hardened glass. Using older Gorilla Glass is one of the easy ways to bring down the price of a handset. Safe to say, even if the back can’t crack as easily, it’s worth getting a case. Dropping in the pool won’t destroy the chip because it’s been rated for water and dust resistance.
The 6.1-inch screen doesn’t have a weakness even though it’s full of heat and humid air in Austin. The closest competitor to the Pixel is the A54 5G. No. but I rarely had to squint to read the display. You’re treated to a 90-Hz refresh rate as well, which means everything from playing games to scrolling Instagram feels more fluid, as the screen is outputting more frames per second than traditional 60-Hz screens. It’s a nice perk.
The Pixel 7A is one of the few sub-$500 phones to feature wireless charging, and it’s about damn time this started showing up in cheaper phones. It’s a lot nicer to put your phone on a stand than it is to look for a cable. That said, the 7A does skip some other niceties you might have liked to see, like a headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and a wall charger in the box (though you do get a USB-C to USB-C cable). The phone is also limited to 128 GB of internal storage; it’d be nice if Google took a page from Motorola and started offering 256 gigs.
It’s no secret that thePixel 7A follows the same path as the old one, with the lackluster in-display fingerprint sensor. On my first day, I had to put my thumb on the sensor several times in order for it to work. It got drastically better over time, but I still needed to be more conscious and deliberate about finger placement than I was on other phones such as the aforementioned A54. It is not a great sensor.
How much have I spent on a cell phone? Why I haven’t spend more than $250 on an iPhone, but I’m willing to give up
I won’t spend more than $250 on a phone. I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound like a lot of money considering how expensive some phones are these days. The price of the Pixel Fold is eye-watering, and it was yesterday.
I don’t want to make the people with fancy phones feel bad, but I want them to enjoy them and not have them bend in the pocket. For me, the Pixel A-series continues the tradition of delivering a lot of phones for a good price, even though I am more convinced that phones are becoming a commoditized category.
I moved to the Pixel series for a host of reasons. First, because I use a Windows PC and, until very recently, iPhone users hadn’t been afforded the pleasure of being able to reply to text messages on a Windows computer. I’m excited about innovation! After becoming a parent, I became aware that my phone is the most important thing I can do, and that its main benefit is taking good pictures at a moment’s notice.
The idea of carrying around many hundreds of dollars of mostly glass in my pocket has been the source of a not insignificant amount of anxiety for years. All the AppleCare in the world didn’t help when my iPhone 6 inexplicably bent. The Apple Store told me not to carry the phone in my front pocket as a reward for going to the store. The reception of my phone is not covered and it had a lousy one. Come to think of it, nearly all of my iPhones had some meaningful issues (vanishing battery life!) often not covered by insurance, but their price kept going up. But my A-series Pixel phones have not only been affordable — again, I haven’t spent more than $250! — but they’ve also proven to be quite resilient.
It’s not true I’ve lived by this rule for a long time. I bought my first iPhone in 2008, the iPhone 3G, whose 16GB variant cost me $299 on a two-year contract. I spent over $250 on cell phones, including the Danger Hiptop ($20 per month) and the Palm-powered Treo 650 (not that one), before smartphones were a thing. Even my first Android phone, the Pixel 3, was considerably more than that.
