The Google Pixel 6A: A Mid-Range Marvel?

When it comes to smartphones, one thing is certain - every manufacturer wants a piece of the action. Google, in particular, has been making waves with its Pixel series, known for its impressive camera capabilities and timely software updates. The latest addition to this family is the Pixel 6A, a mid-range phone that promises to deliver top-notch performance at an affordable price.

As you zoom in on the pixelated image, you'll notice that it's pretty decent for a 12.2-megapixel camera. While it may not compare to the 50-megapixel cameras found in some other flagship phones, Google's software magic has done its job well. The resulting photos are crisp and clear, making this phone a great option for those who want a reliable camera without breaking the bank.

However, when it comes to more advanced features like the "magic eraser" tool, things get a bit tricky. It seems that this feature is only available on Google's One service, which adds an extra layer of complexity to the overall experience. And, if you're using a non-One account, you'll be limited in what you can do.

One thing that sets the Pixel 6A apart from its competitors is the absence of a headphone jack. This was a major selling point for many users in the past, but Google has decided to move on and abandon this feature altogether. It's a bold move, and one that may not sit well with some users.

Despite these drawbacks, the Pixel 6A still manages to pack some impressive features into its mid-range frame. The phone boasts an IP67 rating, which means it can withstand a certain amount of water and dust without sustaining damage. This is a significant improvement over its predecessor, which had an IP3x rating. Additionally, the phone's battery life is claimed to be up to 72 hours with the extreme Battery Saver feature.

However, when compared to other mid-range phones on the market, the Pixel 6A starts to lose its appeal. The Samsung Galaxy A53, for example, offers a more comprehensive set of features at a similar price point. The A53 has a larger battery, better camera software, and a higher-end processor, making it a stronger contender in this crowded field.

And then there's the Nothing Phone, which is currently available in Europe for €3.99 (approximately $4.50 USD). This phone offers impressive specs at an even lower price point, making it a compelling option for those on a budget.

For me, the biggest question mark surrounding the Pixel 6A is its pricing strategy. At $449, it's certainly a competitive price point, but when compared to the A53 and Nothing Phone, I'm not sure if it offers enough value to justify the expense. Additionally, the fact that Google's warranty for this phone is limited to only two years raises some concerns about durability and repairability.

Ultimately, whether or not the Pixel 6A is worth considering depends on your individual needs and preferences. If you're looking for a reliable camera and timely software updates, it may be the perfect choice. However, if you're looking for more bang for your buck, there are other options available that offer similar features at a lower price point.

In any case, I'll have to stick with my trusty old Pixel 3, which has been serving me well despite its quirks and limitations. Maybe it's time to upgrade, but I'm not sure if the Pixel 6A is the right choice for me.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enpixel pixel pixel google pixels they think they're so pixel perfect but though it's the pure android experience but guess what i got something to tell you pixels have been far from perfect these past couple years all right the 3a was nice the 4a is okay 5a great five a with 5g pretty good six comes out i don't know i feel about this is a tensor cool that's got it's cool that they got their new chip but really what's happening here is we see potentially the downfall of the pixel a series the pixel 6a as i as i implied there i've been a big fan of pixels i have a pixel 3 i'm still rocking it this was a great phone until it started dying so i was really excited that you know the pixel there was going to be an a series version of the six uh version of the pixels and here we are to find out whether it's good or not get out of here i have two phones look at that do you know what color this is called colton we got oh wait sage hold on sage and probably some variation of white i'm going to guess chalk the pixel 6a comes in sage chalk and charcoal colorways thank you voice room over there want me to take the stage you're doing safe i'm doing sage see you even though even though i think that the color of your phone does not matter because you should just put a case on it anyways or a skin so this is a 6.1 inch display the thing about the 6a series is that you know they promise to kind of like bring it back to the sort of one handable design not too bad of a hand feel once you put a case on there that's going to be annoying i think for me very nice uh feel in the hand the weight's good on the back we got this glass situation which is interesting because this phone does not have wireless charging which is unfortunately yeah that's one of the features that they said they had to cut to get down the price from 599 for the pixel 6 to 449 for the pixel 6a um and there's a a few features like that that they cut down but we'll get to that first the exterior of the phone on the right side we've got the power button and the volume rocker on the bottom we got type c connector and down facing speakers um yes okay so on the pixel on the six pro they also have the technically downward facing speakers and then the earpiece counts as the other speaker so okay that's what they're they're calling that front-facing speakers fine on this side we got the sim card slot on the top we just got a mic and on the back we have that camera strip that made its debut in the pixel 6 and 6 pro originally this camera bar looks significantly flatter right yeah that's quite a bit flatter here look get that shot the camera bump is significantly smaller and that's partially because of the downgraded camera specs for the 6a they're going back to the same camera that they were using in the previous pixels which is kind of disappointing to see it's kind of been the deal with the a series that you know the point of getting the a series is that you get mostly the good stuff from the non-a pixel and it you know they they take out some of the unnecessary stuff and they cut down the price a little bit but for this one they kind of they significantly downgraded like the main reason why a lot of people get pixel phones which is the camera maybe everything's fine and we don't need to worry about anything ever oh no this is better which is like that makes sense oh yeah okay so unsurprisingly the pixel 6 pro speakers are better than the pixel 6a speakers is that what you wanted they're both uh pretty good i gotta say so i was talking in the beginning a little bit about how the pixels have been kind of disappointing for me they have this promise of being the you know the one true android phone the the default stock android experience that's like pure without all the bloat and the bells and whistles that you don't need from the fancy other things like samsung and motorola there's basically there's samsung and then all the chinese manufacturers oppo xiaomi you know they all have their extra things that they add and the pixel line is supposed to be like this is the real thing there's been a number of things where they've just kind of been dropping the ball for one the camera quality uh used to be kind of like pixels are the best android cameras you can get and now samsung has caught up a number of other phone manufacturers also make really great phone cameras and one of the big things about the six period series in particular is that they took away this amazing rear mounted fingerprint reader that was on my pixel 3. i think the the 5a had it the 4a had it i think they could still have it on the back i don't know why they didn't put it on the back i mean glass they want the glass back i guess so they did the under screen fingerprint reader like the other phone companies are doing but it was a bit slower i set up my fingerprint on both the 6 pro and the 6a let's see how she does so this is the 6 pro wow okay yeah that is a little bit slow i'd say is this a little bit faster that felt about the same to me but we are gonna learn other stuff in this video including who's sponsoring it vulture vulture provides high performance cloud servers bare metal storage and managed kubernetes at a fraction of the cost of bigtech in less than 60 seconds you can bring your own iso or deploy windows or linux from over 25 server locations worldwide for low latency infrastructure wherever needed also there's vulture talon cloud gpu allowing devs to deploy fractions of virtualized nvidia a100s to handle even the most advanced workloads try vulture today and receive an exclusive 30-day 150 code for new signups at the link below so as far as i'm aware there's not really any more uh ui customizations that google has made for the pixel 6a i mean it's using the pixel 6 launcher which is also used on the 6 and 6 pro but you know as an avowed pixel aficionado i can say it's one of my favorites although i am leaning more and more into thinking that like the fact that it's a stock android experience is actually maybe not good maybe i want all of the cool features that samsung has like innovated and put into their phones i mean they're keeping up with apple i want to talk about the actual specs inside the 6a is supposed to have the same tensor chip that is found in the 6 and 6 pro so you are going to get you know those those cool new features like the magic eraser for the photos and stuff that i looked at in my initial short circuit for the 6 pro which was actually really cool but since then samsung has added their own object remover feature or whatever to their phones so what is tensor getting us i don't know also only six gigs of ram in this compared to the eight gigs in the six non-pro you can get 128 gigs of storage on the 6a no expansion options and when it comes to displays i'm actually pretty surprised to see the downgrade here because the 6 has a 90 hertz uh display ammo led hdr 10 plus and in this one we got 6.1 inch to the 6.4 and the other pixel only 60 hertz oled not amoled and it's got gorilla glass 3 instead of victus it also can only do 18 watts fast charging as opposed to 30 watts fast charging on the 6. there's a lot of things missing but let's take a look at the cameras to see whether you know i'm freaking out over nothing um okay interesting so we have the wide camera here it says point six times zoom to go to with the the wide which is weird i can zoom into the two times i'm definitely seeing a lot of grain there the the 12 megapixel sensor is uh is struggling am i gonna use the magic eraser again okay there's a photo you know so as much as i talk about now i feel bad now i feel bad because as much as i talk about you know how uh pixel cameras haven't really kept up and uh you know they're not as as jaw-dropping as they used to be it still takes great photos i mean don't get me wrong like the pixel you know you're not gonna look at the photos and be like throw that in the garbage but at the same time you know it's more that the rest of the industry has caught up i think the colors are there the sharpness is pretty good i mean i can see that like google's machine learning is doing its stuff i can definitely tell you i've seen much worse processing and artifacts on uh on photos from other phones when you zoom all the way in like this and this is like pretty pretty decent for you know a 12.2 megapixel instead of like the 50 megapixel that you see in a lot of other phones now selfie cam okay all right i mean hey that's looking nice pixel okay fine pixel you still take pretty good photos tools magic eraser oh that was close because they've been doing this thing where they take away these like the the more advanced tools unless you pay for google one and that's a whole thing i want to get into that circle the plant wait what did i not complete the circle do i have to like do this to the whole thing oh there we go oh did you see that it just like selected it was like yeah that whole squiggly hole did you just need to like tap it okay let's take the whole shelf away okay i mean honestly that that looks similar to the result i got last time oh i didn't want it whoops okay sure whatever okay magic eraser performance seems to be on par using my extremely non-uh empirical test i just made up just now the the 6a is the first a series phone from google to not have a headphone jack it used to be one of the main reasons why you would consider this is because you know not everyone had made the switch to the bluetooth earbuds yet so there's no headphone jack they decided all right the the game is up no more no more that i you know at 4 49 i just don't know because i've been looking at that galaxy a53 and that's looking pretty nice that the 853 with 5g just came out in march i think it also has ip67 so it's like okay you know not quite there yet but it has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery compared to the 4400 milliamp hour battery in the 6a it's got gorilla glass 5 on the front instead of gorilla glass 3 and it's got an sd card slot so you can add extra storage if you want to oh and i didn't even see that its main camera is 64 megapixels instead of 12.2 megapixels and of course megapixels aren't everything but samsung's camera software has been like i said keeping up with with uh with the pixel so the pixel 6a still is an option for people who don't want to spend the 5.99 for the full 6 or the 8.99 for the six pro and if you you know if you're in that pixel family and you want to stay there the 6a is here and it's you know it's not horrible i we have obviously haven't done like full tests on it apparently the battery is okay it can last up to 72 hours with extreme battery saver uh is what is what they claim but considering the state of the market and what else is out there i'm not sure whether 449 is a you know compelling enough price just so you can say that you have a pixel when the a535g exists and when a ton of other mid-range phones with flagship specs the nothing phone just came out and it's 3.99 euros which is right now is the same as on par with the usd so the nothing phone is out and it's got killer like well i don't know but the price to performance is there it's 50 cheaper it's at least got a cool back on it and this one is what is a sage i don't know i'm just you know i'm just i'm in this place where i need to buy a new phone my pixel 3 has the back cameras messed up and they're not really fixing that under warranty anymore i looked on i fix it they don't have the screen i could grab for it it's not charging i'm looking for an upgrade and i'm looking at the 6a and i'm just kind of like why would i go for you when i can get the a535g that does a lot of the same things uh for the same price and more it has better specs i don't know i just always get confused about what google is trying to do with their pixel project they say that they wanted it to be sort of like this gold standard for android you know especially you know especially given the news about pixel phones suffering from hardware uh issues i don't know if i want to take the gamble on the 6a whether it's sage or chalk you're gonna it's gonna crack it's go it's only gorilla glass three it's not invictus you need victus and you should also subscribe to short circuit the channel where everyone's having fun all the time colton was here and he left i don't know why subscribe to there just movies podcast love youpixel pixel pixel google pixels they think they're so pixel perfect but though it's the pure android experience but guess what i got something to tell you pixels have been far from perfect these past couple years all right the 3a was nice the 4a is okay 5a great five a with 5g pretty good six comes out i don't know i feel about this is a tensor cool that's got it's cool that they got their new chip but really what's happening here is we see potentially the downfall of the pixel a series the pixel 6a as i as i implied there i've been a big fan of pixels i have a pixel 3 i'm still rocking it this was a great phone until it started dying so i was really excited that you know the pixel there was going to be an a series version of the six uh version of the pixels and here we are to find out whether it's good or not get out of here i have two phones look at that do you know what color this is called colton we got oh wait sage hold on sage and probably some variation of white i'm going to guess chalk the pixel 6a comes in sage chalk and charcoal colorways thank you voice room over there want me to take the stage you're doing safe i'm doing sage see you even though even though i think that the color of your phone does not matter because you should just put a case on it anyways or a skin so this is a 6.1 inch display the thing about the 6a series is that you know they promise to kind of like bring it back to the sort of one handable design not too bad of a hand feel once you put a case on there that's going to be annoying i think for me very nice uh feel in the hand the weight's good on the back we got this glass situation which is interesting because this phone does not have wireless charging which is unfortunately yeah that's one of the features that they said they had to cut to get down the price from 599 for the pixel 6 to 449 for the pixel 6a um and there's a a few features like that that they cut down but we'll get to that first the exterior of the phone on the right side we've got the power button and the volume rocker on the bottom we got type c connector and down facing speakers um yes okay so on the pixel on the six pro they also have the technically downward facing speakers and then the earpiece counts as the other speaker so okay that's what they're they're calling that front-facing speakers fine on this side we got the sim card slot on the top we just got a mic and on the back we have that camera strip that made its debut in the pixel 6 and 6 pro originally this camera bar looks significantly flatter right yeah that's quite a bit flatter here look get that shot the camera bump is significantly smaller and that's partially because of the downgraded camera specs for the 6a they're going back to the same camera that they were using in the previous pixels which is kind of disappointing to see it's kind of been the deal with the a series that you know the point of getting the a series is that you get mostly the good stuff from the non-a pixel and it you know they they take out some of the unnecessary stuff and they cut down the price a little bit but for this one they kind of they significantly downgraded like the main reason why a lot of people get pixel phones which is the camera maybe everything's fine and we don't need to worry about anything ever oh no this is better which is like that makes sense oh yeah okay so unsurprisingly the pixel 6 pro speakers are better than the pixel 6a speakers is that what you wanted they're both uh pretty good i gotta say so i was talking in the beginning a little bit about how the pixels have been kind of disappointing for me they have this promise of being the you know the one true android phone the the default stock android experience that's like pure without all the bloat and the bells and whistles that you don't need from the fancy other things like samsung and motorola there's basically there's samsung and then all the chinese manufacturers oppo xiaomi you know they all have their extra things that they add and the pixel line is supposed to be like this is the real thing there's been a number of things where they've just kind of been dropping the ball for one the camera quality uh used to be kind of like pixels are the best android cameras you can get and now samsung has caught up a number of other phone manufacturers also make really great phone cameras and one of the big things about the six period series in particular is that they took away this amazing rear mounted fingerprint reader that was on my pixel 3. i think the the 5a had it the 4a had it i think they could still have it on the back i don't know why they didn't put it on the back i mean glass they want the glass back i guess so they did the under screen fingerprint reader like the other phone companies are doing but it was a bit slower i set up my fingerprint on both the 6 pro and the 6a let's see how she does so this is the 6 pro wow okay yeah that is a little bit slow i'd say is this a little bit faster that felt about the same to me but we are gonna learn other stuff in this video including who's sponsoring it vulture vulture provides high performance cloud servers bare metal storage and managed kubernetes at a fraction of the cost of bigtech in less than 60 seconds you can bring your own iso or deploy windows or linux from over 25 server locations worldwide for low latency infrastructure wherever needed also there's vulture talon cloud gpu allowing devs to deploy fractions of virtualized nvidia a100s to handle even the most advanced workloads try vulture today and receive an exclusive 30-day 150 code for new signups at the link below so as far as i'm aware there's not really any more uh ui customizations that google has made for the pixel 6a i mean it's using the pixel 6 launcher which is also used on the 6 and 6 pro but you know as an avowed pixel aficionado i can say it's one of my favorites although i am leaning more and more into thinking that like the fact that it's a stock android experience is actually maybe not good maybe i want all of the cool features that samsung has like innovated and put into their phones i mean they're keeping up with apple i want to talk about the actual specs inside the 6a is supposed to have the same tensor chip that is found in the 6 and 6 pro so you are going to get you know those those cool new features like the magic eraser for the photos and stuff that i looked at in my initial short circuit for the 6 pro which was actually really cool but since then samsung has added their own object remover feature or whatever to their phones so what is tensor getting us i don't know also only six gigs of ram in this compared to the eight gigs in the six non-pro you can get 128 gigs of storage on the 6a no expansion options and when it comes to displays i'm actually pretty surprised to see the downgrade here because the 6 has a 90 hertz uh display ammo led hdr 10 plus and in this one we got 6.1 inch to the 6.4 and the other pixel only 60 hertz oled not amoled and it's got gorilla glass 3 instead of victus it also can only do 18 watts fast charging as opposed to 30 watts fast charging on the 6. there's a lot of things missing but let's take a look at the cameras to see whether you know i'm freaking out over nothing um okay interesting so we have the wide camera here it says point six times zoom to go to with the the wide which is weird i can zoom into the two times i'm definitely seeing a lot of grain there the the 12 megapixel sensor is uh is struggling am i gonna use the magic eraser again okay there's a photo you know so as much as i talk about now i feel bad now i feel bad because as much as i talk about you know how uh pixel cameras haven't really kept up and uh you know they're not as as jaw-dropping as they used to be it still takes great photos i mean don't get me wrong like the pixel you know you're not gonna look at the photos and be like throw that in the garbage but at the same time you know it's more that the rest of the industry has caught up i think the colors are there the sharpness is pretty good i mean i can see that like google's machine learning is doing its stuff i can definitely tell you i've seen much worse processing and artifacts on uh on photos from other phones when you zoom all the way in like this and this is like pretty pretty decent for you know a 12.2 megapixel instead of like the 50 megapixel that you see in a lot of other phones now selfie cam okay all right i mean hey that's looking nice pixel okay fine pixel you still take pretty good photos tools magic eraser oh that was close because they've been doing this thing where they take away these like the the more advanced tools unless you pay for google one and that's a whole thing i want to get into that circle the plant wait what did i not complete the circle do i have to like do this to the whole thing oh there we go oh did you see that it just like selected it was like yeah that whole squiggly hole did you just need to like tap it okay let's take the whole shelf away okay i mean honestly that that looks similar to the result i got last time oh i didn't want it whoops okay sure whatever okay magic eraser performance seems to be on par using my extremely non-uh empirical test i just made up just now the the 6a is the first a series phone from google to not have a headphone jack it used to be one of the main reasons why you would consider this is because you know not everyone had made the switch to the bluetooth earbuds yet so there's no headphone jack they decided all right the the game is up no more no more that i you know at 4 49 i just don't know because i've been looking at that galaxy a53 and that's looking pretty nice that the 853 with 5g just came out in march i think it also has ip67 so it's like okay you know not quite there yet but it has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery compared to the 4400 milliamp hour battery in the 6a it's got gorilla glass 5 on the front instead of gorilla glass 3 and it's got an sd card slot so you can add extra storage if you want to oh and i didn't even see that its main camera is 64 megapixels instead of 12.2 megapixels and of course megapixels aren't everything but samsung's camera software has been like i said keeping up with with uh with the pixel so the pixel 6a still is an option for people who don't want to spend the 5.99 for the full 6 or the 8.99 for the six pro and if you you know if you're in that pixel family and you want to stay there the 6a is here and it's you know it's not horrible i we have obviously haven't done like full tests on it apparently the battery is okay it can last up to 72 hours with extreme battery saver uh is what is what they claim but considering the state of the market and what else is out there i'm not sure whether 449 is a you know compelling enough price just so you can say that you have a pixel when the a535g exists and when a ton of other mid-range phones with flagship specs the nothing phone just came out and it's 3.99 euros which is right now is the same as on par with the usd so the nothing phone is out and it's got killer like well i don't know but the price to performance is there it's 50 cheaper it's at least got a cool back on it and this one is what is a sage i don't know i'm just you know i'm just i'm in this place where i need to buy a new phone my pixel 3 has the back cameras messed up and they're not really fixing that under warranty anymore i looked on i fix it they don't have the screen i could grab for it it's not charging i'm looking for an upgrade and i'm looking at the 6a and i'm just kind of like why would i go for you when i can get the a535g that does a lot of the same things uh for the same price and more it has better specs i don't know i just always get confused about what google is trying to do with their pixel project they say that they wanted it to be sort of like this gold standard for android you know especially you know especially given the news about pixel phones suffering from hardware uh issues i don't know if i want to take the gamble on the 6a whether it's sage or chalk you're gonna it's gonna crack it's go it's only gorilla glass three it's not invictus you need victus and you should also subscribe to short circuit the channel where everyone's having fun all the time colton was here and he left i don't know why subscribe to there just movies podcast love you\n"