Google Pixel 6a so last year was massive steam and pile of doggy dump for many reasons. Just one of which is that Google didn’t actually bother to release its affordable Pixel, the Pixel 5a, here in the UK. But in 2022, Google is making amends. The Pixel 6a here is hit and blighty for 399 quid. Forced to NOSUM tends as smart as the Pixel 6 flagship but in a more compact 6.1-inch form factor.

But of course, to reach that lower price point, some sacrifices have been made. But anyway, enough banging on. Let’s rip the Pixel 6a out of the box, test out the game, and chops the camera.

What’s In The Box?

So, first up, what do you actually get in this delightfully dinky box? I’m guessing not too much, and indeed it’s very tidily packed, that’s for sure. You get one Pixel 6a, type C to type C USB cable, as usual, a USB type C to type A adapter, and you got a quick start guide, which basically tells you how to power the phone on if you’ve never actually used the smartphone before, and a very cute weeporky pin to actually get your SIM in there.

And that is it. No adapters. You will have to actually provide your own, as usual, but for the environment age apps.

Pixel 6a Design

So here in all of its splendor is the Google Pixel 6a. And I got to say, I really missed these A series smartphones because they are so pleasingly dinky.

Here’s Pixel 6a side by side with the original pixel six. And it may not look like a massive difference, 6.1 inches versus 6.4 inches, but believe me, when you’ve got it in your mitts, it does make a difference to the comfort. One-handed use is so much easier. And although I still struggle to reach up to the top end of this form because I’ve got tiny stubby fingers, at least you’ve got that one-handed mode if you really need it.

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Because 6.1 inches is a lot, it satisfies people and is also comfortable to hold. For now, Google is offering the Pixel 6a and a choice of three different colors. You’ve got charcoal, chalk, or sage.

I just love the clean, crisp finish of this chalk model here – it’s my favorite of the trio. You’ve got a two-tone finish with a gray strip up top, just like the original Pixel 6 series. The new Kia Niro EV kind of reminds me of something. Just a random car reference there for you. Once again, you’ve got a 3D, thermoformed composite back end, all very posh.

So I’m expecting the Pixel 6a here to be pretty rugged and hardy as well. Just like the original Pixel 6. Just a simple bit of Google Brandon right there in the middle. Apart from that, nice clean design, and at least the camera bump isn’t quite as sticky outy as with the previous Pixels, so hopefully, it should be easier to remove any cake that gets embedded in these sharp corners.

Meanwhile, upfront it is, the older Gorilla Glass 3, and you don’t get a preinstalled screen protector on there, but all the same, I’m hoping the Pixel 6a display will remain scratch free for the foreseeable.

I’ll certainly be abusing the roddy echo of it for my in-depth review, so stay tuned to see more on that. And in better durability news, the Pixel 6a is also IP 67 water and dust resistant, quite rare at this price point. There’s just a handful of other phones like the iPhone Se 2022, Spit, Spit, Spit, but also for that sort of level of protection.

Pixel 6a Software And Features

So onto the software and unsurprisingly, the Pixel 6a here is running Google’s latest freshest Android 12, It will be one of the very first smartphones to get a bit of Android 13 action later in 2022. You’ve got the added bonus of at least five years of guaranteed security updates on top of that, because of course it’s a Google-branded blower.

It certainly helps that Google doesn’t spawn out dozens of new smartphones every single year, therefore it can keep the older ones bang up to date much more easily. So you got all those great Android 12 phone features, including quite a few Pixel exclusives like that, at a Glance up top, and I was never really a fan of at a Glance back in the day, but certainly, in recent times it’s become a lot more useful.

This can display all kinds of pertinent information, including any upcoming events you’ve got particularly handy if you’re about to take a flight or anything, At a Glance, you can see your board and passes. If you’ve got a Nest doorbell, then you’ll love the latest edition as well. You can actually get a little notification pop up on at a Glance when somebody rings your doorbell.

Give that a tap and you get a live feed direct from that camera so you can see who’s lurking outside. You can even get Earthquake Alerts for magnitude 4.5 and above, though it may be slightly less useful for the UK. I don’t even think that one that hit Wolframpton and knocked a few chimney pots off reached that sort of level.

The Pixel 6a basically comes with all the great features found in the Pixel 6, like a fantastic call screening feature. You can get live transcriptions on the go, you can also get live subtitles on the go for pretty much any video that you watch here on the Pixel 6a.

Potentially, Andy, if you’re trying to watch a tech video from someone with a Northern accent who speaks a little bit too fast, for his own good. And of course, those fantastic privacy tools, including the ability to knock off the camera and the mic for all apps just for a quick flick like so.

And on the subject of privacy and security, the Google Pixel 6a here once again packs in that Titan M two-core processor which securely stores all of your confidential data. This helps to prevent any nasty types from hacking into your smartphone and nicking it all. The fresh new Pixel exclusive feature is projected wait times as well.

So if you dial a toll-free number here in the UK, in other words, anything beginning at 800, you’ll be given an estimated wait time right now and projected wait times for the rest of the day. If you decide you can’t be bothered, you’re going to do it later on.

And if you do find that you are stuck on hold at any point, well, there’s going to be a new hold for my feature on the Pixel 6a as well. Just give that a little tap and then you can get on with your date. And then when an actual human being picks up, the phone will vibrate and buzz and make all kinds of a fuss just to alert you to the fact.

Unfortunately, these features do not seem to be active right now as I’m unboxing this Pixel 6a ahead of the official release. I hope they come in soon so I can include them in my in-depth review. And to actually unlock the Pixel 6a here, you once again have a row and end display fingerprint sensor. It’s just your basic optical effort. And of course, anyone who has used the Pixel Six for a Pixel Six pro has probably grappled with the in-display fingerprint sensor on that thing.

It wasn’t the most responsive and it did bark up pretty often, but thankfully touch words. After a few years of use here on the Pixel 6a, this split fingerprint sensor seems to be an improvement. Even when my hands are a bit moist or a bit dry, the device doesn’t seem to struggle to actually figure out who I am. The big question is whether it will continue to not s*ck.

For your storage, you’ve got 128 gigs of space packed into the Pixel 6a, and only about 14 gigs of that are used by system files or plenty of space. This thing has space for your media, your apps, and anything else you want to cram onto it.

Unfortunately, that’s not expandable via my Questing memory cards as usual. And there’s space in the Pixel 6a Sim tray for just a single SIM. But you can also download an eSIM if you want to go that way.

If your SIM is not supported in the country you are traveling to, that is particularly handy. You can just get a temporary SIM for a few days till last year now.

Pixel 6a Display And Audio

Not exactly much shock and surprise when it comes to the Pixel 6a 6.1 inch OLED display. It’s an absolute cracker as usual. Got a full HD plus resolution here, 2400 x 1080, and that, coupled with the fact that it’s quite a dinky display compared with a lot of modern smartphones, means that those visuals are super sharp.

You have super wide viewing angles and nice sharp contrast. Those blacks are perfectly black. Of course, you got full HDR support when you’re streaming a bit of video. And on the default adaptive color mode, visuals are really poppy and bright and punchy as well. It’s just pure eye candy.

The fact that the selfie cam orifice isn’t exactly super tiny, so it does slightly intrude in the action when you go full screen. It’s pretty much the only negative thing I can say about this panel. The auto-brightness seems up to snuff and on the maximum brightness level, this thing is powerful enough so I could clearly see what was going on even when I was out and about on a day that was really bright and sunny.

We do actually have one more complaint, and that is the fact that it is only a 60 Hz display, which really peels in comparison to most rivals at this price point, which is at least 90 Hz. Some of them are even 120 Hz.

So that lovely, silky smooth flicking about the player’s experience. In supported apps, everything looks nice and fluid. You don’t quite get that here on the Pixel 6a. The Pixel 6a also supports a stereo speaker center. But is it any good?

And considering the smaller stature of the Pixel 6a, that’s really not bad at all. Its slightly imbalanced stereo output is more than adequate and this bottom speaker definitely pumps out a lot more audio than the top speaker, which is slightly tinnier. However, on that top volume, the top speaker is definitely more than adequate.

Certainly do the job. If you are caught in a pinch, your Bluetooth buds have died or whatever, because of course you don’t have a 3.5 mm headphone jack on this thing. Booher. There are certainly no complaints about the Bluetooth 5.2 streaming situation either. It seems absolutely fine or crackles or breakups at all do the job, even when you’re in quite a congested area like central London.

It’s a situation that’s probably helped by Google’s dual antenna setup. So, yeah, definitely, if you do a lot of streaming then job done.

Pixel 6a Performance And Gaming

As well as a more budget-friendly ask and price, the Pixel 6a is still powered by the Tensor chipset created by Google, which was also powering the flagship smartphones. And in this reblow that is backed by 6 gigs of DDR 5 Ram benchmarking was blocked on this prerelease handset, unfortunately. But the everyday experience is as smooth as you like. Certainly loading up apps super fast, you can have tons of them buzzing away in the background and it doesn’t seem to slow down proceedings at all.

If, on the other hand, you’re a hardcore gamer, well, that’s where things kind of fall down on their arse a bit, because the Pixel 6a here’s tensor chipset does crumble under pressure. You can play a more intensive fail-like gentle impact on this block, but you’ll have to keep the graphics set to low to medium.

If you try and bump them up any higher, well, the performance is going to really start to struggle, that’s for sure. The frame rate is going to drop and it’s not going to be a very nice experience. And also, the Pixel 6a does heat up rather fast as well, which is a bit of a concern.

And I’m not talking around when you’re gaming here. I have noticed that if you’ve got a screen on for around half an hour to an hour, even just messaging, browsing the web, doing basic tasks like that, that RSN does get rather tasty. Again, just like it’s more expensive. Flagship brothers, you can even if you want to play like a PUBG Call of Duty mobile, those play absolutely fine even on the slightly higher details settings. No worries at all.

You have the gaming tools at your disposal once again. This exclusive Pixel feature allows you to quickly block all notifications. You can take a screenshot if you want, get a read on the current frame rate if you want to see just how bad it really gets in gentle impact, and then these handy little shortcuts pop up whenever you drag them out just from the side of the screen like so.

Unfortunately, the gaming dashboard is deactivated by default, and to activate it is an absolute friggin ball. I think you’ve got to go into like the notifications, then the system scheduling section.

It’s really hidden away and I don’t know why you do it. Google, it’s weird. No worries when it comes to jumping online either you’ve got up to WiFi 6e support and full 5g support as well. I had no issues streaming video out and about, or here on my home WiFi as well.

Pixel 6a Battery Life

Beautifully smooth blow, despite the fact that it’s pretty dinky, finds room in there for a 4410 mah capacity battery, which is pretty impressive stuff.

And a lot of compact smartphones like the previous ZenFone and the iPhone Se 2022 speed do suffer from roll pisspoor battery life. But thankfully that is the case here on the Pixel 6a. I’ve been using it as my full-time smartphone for about four years now and every single day it’s lasted me until I’ve been tucked up with Teddy. Every day has been a struggle recently. I’m down to my last reserves. We’re talking around 10 to 15%, but that is with around 6 to 7 hours of screen on time.

You know, lots of video stream and lots of camera play, all that good stuff. Despite Google’s insistence that this Pixel blower supports a fast charge, it usually takes a good hour and a half to charge up to full again. Additionally, there is no wireless charging support, unlike on more expensive Pixel models.

Pixel 6a Camera

So let’s finish up this Pixel 6a, article with a squint at that camera tech, and slapped here on the back end you’ll find a 12.2-megapixel primary sensor with optical image stabilization.

And if those specs happen to sound at all familiar, that’s because it’s the exact same primary camera sensor found on last year’s Pixel 5a. But don’t just chuck down your cheese and onion pasty in disgust and storm off to another article, because those are still some pretty solid optics. And of course, the tensor chipset’s ISP provides support for them here. So fingers crossed, that will make for superior photo and video quality. As you can see, the camera UI has not changed.

You can swap between the primary sensor and the secondary 12-megapixel ultra wide angle shooter with a quick tap like so. And of course, you’ve got various camera modes to play around with, including the obligatory portrait mode you’ve got the night sight for when it’s really dim light, and a couple of other bonus bits, including your Google Lens.

And if you fancy a proper eye fall of the photo and video results staffed out by the Pixel 6a, well, my full camera review should be going live around the same sort of time as it’s unboxing to go check that out, but here’s a few little teaser shots just to get you in the mood. On the video front, you can once again swap between the primary and the ultra-wide angle lenses like the saw, and you put your slow motion and time-lapse modes right there on the main screen. You do show 4K resolution at 30 FPS by default.

You can also increase the frame rate to 60 FPS for a more naturalistic feel. And then if we head back to the camera and hop onto that front face and shooter, it’s an 8-megapixel snapper. So I’d expect fairly standard results from this.

The Pixel 6a was never great when it came to the selfie shot, so fine as long as the lighting was good, but in dim light, not so hot. And if you want to shoot some video with that selfie snapper where you can shoot full HD resolution, there’s no 4K option here, sadly, but the audio pickup seems pretty strong and those virtuals ain’t too bad at all.

And that right there are kitty wings all wrapped up with a pretty pink ball. Is my Google Pixel 6a unboxing and tour. As I say, my in-depth camera review of the Pixel 6a should be going live at about the same sort of time. You’re reading this right now, so go check that out for an in-depth look at the optics, the photo, and the video quoting all the shenanigans.

Also want to do a full side-by-side with the Pixel Six and the Pixel Six Pro, if that will float your boat. I’m going to continue to use the Pixel 6a here as my full-time smartphone as well, so stay tuned for an in-depth review as well. But what do you guys reckon? This is what I’m very intrigued to hear. Are you tempted by the Pixel 6a?

Certainly, that 100-pound price point has a lot to offer. I’m impressed by the compact form factor and full IP rating for water and dust resistance. A couple of features that are hard to find at this sort of price point. Of course, you’ve got that slick camera tech, you’ve got gorgeous. All the displays, strong media chops, and that guaranteed software support, too.

On the flip side, not so hot when it comes to Gaming, certainly compared with some rivals, like the Poco F4 GT, for instance. And you’ve got the 60 Hz display, a few little areas where it doesn’t quite match up to its rivals.