Getting the Most Use of the Google Pixel 7 A: Is It Really The Perfect Phone? No. It’s The Right Phone, Not The Evil One
The past week has been one of the busiest I’ve ever had. 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. This is a $499 phone, and it’s just more evidence that you really don’t need to spend much more than that to get a good experience these days.
Is it the perfect phone? No. The features missing are something that many people would want. The price has been increased and the battery life is okay. To remedy this, Google is continuing to sell last year’s Pixel 6A at a lower price—$349—though you can routinely find it for sale at $299. It’s a good phone, but should you need to spend more, the Pixel 7 A is a great choice.
The Pixel 7A mimics the design of the Pixel 7 and Pixel 6 series that came before. It’s clean and unique, which makes it easy to spot if you want to feel different. It comes in Charcoal (black), Sea (baby blue), Snow (white), and Coral (orangey pink), the latter of which is exclusive to the Google Store. The Coral is drop-dead beautiful, despite being a little too faint for me. I love a flashy phone.
The phone’s frame is made of recycled aluminum, and the back is a plastic composite that by no means feels cheap. (It’s also one less spot for cracked glass in case you drop the phone!) The front is made with a product that is several years old and isn’t as scratch- and crack- resistant as a more modern one from the company that makes the glass. Older Gorilla Glass can be used to bring down the price of a phone. It’s worth getting a case, even if the back isn’t as easy to crack. The drop in the pool won’t destroy the device because it’s been rated for water and dust resistance.
The 6.1-inch screen hasn’t shown any weaknesses even when I looked at it while walking in Austin, which has 94 degree heat and disgusting levels of humidity. Is it as bright as the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G, the Pixel’s closest competitor? No, I usually didn’t have to squint to read the display. A 90-Hz refresh rate means your screen will give you more time to scroll and play games, as the frame rate 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 so much nicer to plop your phone on a stand instead of hunting for a cable. It’s true that the 7A doesn’t have any niceties you might have liked like a mic in the box or a wall charging device. The phone can only hold 128 gigs of internal storage, which isn’t very large, and it would be nice if the company started offering more storage.
ThePixel 7A follows in the footsteps of the previous model, which failed to impress with the in-display fingerprint sensor. On my first day of use, I used my thumb a few times to get the sensor to open. I still needed to be a lot more careful with my fingers than I was on other phones such as the A54. It’s just not a great sensor.
No More Than $250 for a Really Capable Phone, or Why you don’t need to spend more than $250 on them? The Case of Google Pixels
I discovered this simple and compelling truth with the A-series and I bet you don’t, either: you don’t have to pay more than $250 for a really capable phone.
I am hoping you like them and that they don’t bend when you store them in your pockets, even if they are fancy, expensive phones. I’m convinced that smartphones are now a commoditized category due to the tradition of delivery more than enough phone for an entirely reasonable price with the Pixel A-series.
I moved to the Pixel series for a host of reasons. I used to be able to reply to text messages on a Windows PC, but I never had the pleasure of doing so on my phone. Innovation! And second, after becoming a parent, I realized the most important thing my phone can do is take good pictures at a moment’s notice and store them securely — two things Google’s Pixel line excels at.
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 of the Apple Care didn’t help when my phone bent. A trip to the Apple Store was rewarded with the suggestion that I not carry the phone in my front pocket… the sizable deformation was not covered by AppleCare. It was not covered, and my phone had lousy reception. Come to think of it, nearly all of my iPhones had some meaningful issues (vanishing battery life!) Their price went up even though they weren’t covered by insurance. I haven’t spent more than $250 on my A-Series phones, which are affordable. — but they’ve also proven to be quite resilient.
I have actually lived by this rule in the past. The 16Gig variant of the Apple iPhone 3G costs $299 on a two-year contract, and is the same version that I purchased in 2008. I spent over $250 on phones before the iPhone and Palm-powered models, including my Danger Hiptop which had a $20 monthly service charge. Even my first Android phone, the Pixel 3, was considerably more than that.