Google Pixel 7a review: More compact, more value, more AI

Note: This review was first published on 11 May 2023.

Artificial Intelligence in your pocket at S$749

Are you in the market for a new mid-range smartphone, but don't want it to be boring? Enter the new Google Pixel 7a.

The company’s most affordable Pixel phone series is so full of features, to a point where differences seemed trivial between the Pixel 7a and its mainline flagship Pixel 7, which was a Tech Awards 2023 winner. 

The TLDR version: 



If your main focus is Material You and Google's most updated AI features at its lowest possible price, the Pixel 7a might be a better pick than the Pixel 7. But make no mistake, it's still a midrange handset in other areas.

The Pixel 7a makes an intriguing offer at S$749 with some hardware and software that match its more expensive cousin. For one, it packs the same processor, security chip (Google Tensor G2 and Titan M2), and LPDRR5 RAM just like the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. Second, it has a 90Hz refresh rate for its Full HD (1080p) display, which is on par with regular Pixel 7's resolution and refresh rates. Finally, it has the most updated version of Android 13's Material You out of the box, which also includes some of the software perks that Pixel 7 and 7 Pro users had to wait four to six months via Pixel Feature Drops updates.

That's not even forgetting it has other basic features that nearly match flagship handsets. Sure, it has a pretty low wireless charging rate at 7.5W, but wireless charging is hard to find on budget handsets. So is waterproofing, and the Pixel 7a has a slightly lower but still plenty sufficient IP67 rating to cover your wet weather contingencies. It also has 5G network support, so the Pixel 7a's network capabilities won't be obsolete anytime soon.

Does the phone really offer great value for money? What did Google sacrifice to bring us the Pixel 7a at S$749? Can you get better features at an even lower price point? We'll share more later in this review. Let's also not forget that the new Pixel 7a is being offered at the same suggested retail price when the Pixel 6a debuted; so you're getting a lot more on this new a-class Pixel device.

Lighter, more compact, and better for smaller hands

We received one Pixel 7a unit in the new Sea colour, which is a soothing, pale blue that’s easy on the eyes. Externally speaking, the main difference between the Pixel 7a and the Pixel 7  is the phones' sizes. Pixel 7a is slightly smaller with a 6.1-inch gOLED display (compared to the Pixel 7’s 6.3-inch AMOLED display).

Adding to that are Pixel 7a's flat edges that are more compact and allows for better one-handed use of the phone. It’s also ever-so-slightly lighter than the Pixel 7 (193g vs 197g). People with smaller hands will definitely appreciate all of this. 

The display also now supports a 90Hz refresh rate on top of the standard 60Hz, so that’s a nice trickle-down from the Pixel 7 seeing how older A-series models did not have 90Hz. 

Unfortunately, you still get relatively thick bezels on the side of the phone, at around 3mm on the top and sides, with a 4mm bezel on the bottom. The phone itself is also thicker than most handsets at 9mm.

Pixel 7a also adopted a pretty similar Camera Bar design on its back, but we noticed that the material for the Camera Bar is colour-matched to the phone. That's unlike the silver-, gold-, or grey-tinted options on the Pixel 7 series. Also, instead of a glass back, we have polycarbonate plating which doesn’t feel as premium (even if it looks perfectly fine). That doesn't matter if you plan to use a case and hide the back. Our official silicone case in Jade worked fine to protect the Pixel 7a, although I prefer the phone's default Sea colourisation.

The IP rating has been downgraded slightly to IP67 from IP68 on the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, but as long as you’re not planning to submerge your phone in water deeper than 1m for more than 30 minutes, this is pretty much a non-issue. 

Clean Android interface with practical new features

For people who enjoy a pure stock Android experience, the Google Pixel phones are some of the best options, and the Pixel 7a is running on Android 13. We’ve covered most of the new features in our Pixel 7 and 7 Pro review, along with Google’s Material You customisation which allows for changing colour schemes, Themed Icons and the like. 

Pixel 7a arrived almost half a year after the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, but being late to the party has its perks. The phone supports plenty of new features right out of the box that the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro owners had to wait months for (via occasional Pixel Feature Drops firmware updates).

Some of these features include Clear Calling, which helps reduce background noise on the other end of the call while enhancing the speaker’s voice so you’ll hear the other person more clearly. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t work with VOIP calls, but for normal voice calls, I did notice that even with the other person in a noisy environment, it didn’t leak over into the call much. 

Another such feature is the addition of transcripted speaker labels to the phone’s Recorder app. Do note that you will have to turn on the Back up & Sync feature for this option to show up, so if you’re uncomfortable with uploading your recordings to the cloud, you won’t be able to use this.

Anyway, we tried this out by playing two different videos with varying intervals of time between each play and pause. When given enough time between people speaking, the phone does a decent job assigning each segment to an individual speaker. However, if the second person starts talking too quickly after the first person, the first few sentences might be attributed to the first person instead. 

We also tested this feature with various challenging accents, ranging from Irish, American, Singaporean and more. While the overall accuracy wasn’t too bad for American speakers, we found more errors when testing with a Singaporean accent. We noticed this accent inconsistency previously in our Pixel 7 and 7 Pro review, so there’s certainly still space for Google to improve here. 

To seal the deal, some features from the mainline Pixel 7 series managed to make their way into the Pixel 7a. One of the biggest ones would be the option for Face Unlock, offering you facial recognition phone unlocking as an alternative to the under-display fingerprint sensor.

Face unlocking is obscenely fast, with the Pixel 7a unlocking in less than half a second once the phone is lifted up to a registered face. It won’t work if you have a mask on, but that’s where the fingerprint unlock comes in, which is also speedy (although neither as fast nor as convenient as Face Unlock).

Another quality-of-life addition to the Pixel 7a is wireless charging. While we can debate endlessly about the efficiency of using wireless chargers, it remains a fact that plopping your phone onto a wireless charger in the dark is more convenient than having to fumble around with a cable. 

The 8GB LPDDR5 RAM in the Pixel 7a also played a significant role in making the Pixel 7a run smoothly and without any hiccups. 

Something that mid-range phones don’t typically get is a hardware-based secure element. We’ve seen them in flagship phones, like Samsung’s Knox Vault, Apple’s Secure Enclave and Google’s own Titan M2 security co-processor.

But this Titan M2 chip is also available in the Pixel 7a, so you don’t have to compromise on your digital security even if you’re not paying extra for a flagship. It’s a very nice move on Google’s part, and doubly so when not many phone makers offer added security right out of the box without nickeling-or-diming its customers.

Imaging Performance

Google has updated the camera lens array in the Pixel 7a, with a new 64MP main lens and 13MP ultrawide lens with a 120° FOV, packed away in a slightly thinner Camera Bar compared to the mainline Pixel 7 duo.

If you’re wondering why the Pixel 7a’s main camera has a higher megapixel count compared to the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro (50MP), it’s because the Pixel 7a’s 64MP camera has a lower light sensitivity at 100% compared to 154% on the Pixel 7 and 206% on the Pixel 7 Pro.

This means that the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro can capture more light per pixel, which can affect both photo quality and ease of capture. The Pixel phones utilise pixel-binning (a process of combining data from multiple pixels into a larger pixel to capture more light per pixel), so don’t be surprised if you notice that the resulting photos out of the Pixel 7a are 16.1MP by default. 

Even though the camera hardware might feel like a slight downgrade from the Pixel 7, Google has kept most of the existing software features like the Magic Eraser, which uses AI to detect unwanted elements in a photo and removes them. 

As always, the Magic Eraser feature is best used with small objects in the background rather than with larger humans that might be blocking a good chunk of the frame. It worked well in the first example, removing people who were at the top of the stairs without any obvious marks. In the second example though, you can see clear smudges where the people were.

Additionally, new software features from the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro have been introduced, such as Photo Unblur and Long Exposure, which weren’t available on last year’s Pixel 6a. We tried out the Photo Unblur with this mildly blurry group selfie, which fixed it by sharpening the image as needed. 

There’s no telephoto lens on the Pixel 7a, similar to how it’s missing from the Pixel 7. This means your digital zoom is capped at 8x, and it’s not particularly fantastic when it comes to capturing all the details with all that digital processing.

Google claims that the Pixel 7a’s Night Sight is faster and better than the Pixel 6a’s and that the Night Sight mode will also help to reduce blurry photos. It might be a minuscule difference that we’re unable to really feel. Still, Night Sight is a strong selling point of a Pixel phone, and low-light performance is fantastic with crisp and clear images, even if it's not the most vibrant among all night-capable shooters.

For general photos in normal lighting conditions though, the images you get out of the Pixel 7a are excellent. The colour rendition is accurate, there’s plenty of detail and the photos are vibrant and eye-catching. 

Pixel 7a photo samples

Benchmark Performance

The Pixel 7a inherits the same Google Tensor G2 that was introduced with the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, along with the Titan M2 security chip to keep biometric and security data safe on-device.

As with the Pixel 7 lineup, the Pixel 7a wasn’t compatible with most benchmarking apps at the time of publishing, so we had to sideload the apps. The scores below, therefore, may not reflect Google’s synthetic processing performance or real-world use.

JetStream 2.0

JetStream 2 is a combination of a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, including benchmarks that came before like SunSpider and Octane. It primarily tests for a system’s and browser’s ability in delivering a good web experience. It runs a total of 64 subtests, each weighted equally, with multiple iterations, and takes the geometric mean to compute the overall score. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 6

Our Geekbench 5 benchmarking will soon be replaced with Geekbench 6, the updated version that tests single-core and multi-core CPU performance. Geekbench 6 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 2500, which is the score of an Intel Core i7-12700. We’ll continue to populate this new benchmark with more scores from our review units before fully transitioning over.

3DMark Wild Life (Unlimited)

3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS for measuring GPU performance. Its graphics test consists of multiple scenes with variations in the amount of geometry, lights and post-processing effects, mirroring mobile games that are based on short bursts of intense activity. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal.

In Unlimited mode, the benchmark runs offscreen using a fixed time step between frames. Unlimited mode renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device, regardless of resolution scaling. The higher the score, the better.

PCMark for Android - Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0

PCMark for Android is a benchmark for testing the performance of Android phones and tablets. The Work 3.0 test checks how the device handles common productivity tasks such as browsing the web, editing videos, working with documents and data, and editing photos. Storage 2.0 checks write-in and read-out performance for internal storage, external storage (if applicable), and SQLite database management. Together, the benchmarks can clue us in on how capable a phone is at handling everyday use. Work 3.0 scores are above, while Storage 2.0 scores are immediately below for each device - the higher the score, the better.

Since this is a newly introduced benchmark in our reviews, we’re building up our database of PCMark scores for Android phones.

Benchmark Performance remarks

Overall, the results of our benchmark tests are mostly similar (and even slightly better in some tests) to how the Pixel 7 performed, and while these scores might not be as impressive as some other phones out there, Google has never really been a company to chase after the performance numbers, opting to focus on the software and experience instead.

In real-world use, we never encountered any lag or stuttering while gaming or browsing the web. The phone does heat up under more intense use with the temperature hitting 40°C during our benchmarking, although it typically hovered around 37°C during real-world use. 

Battery Life

Our new battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more. 

To enhance consistency in battery results, we start the test at: 

• 100% of the phone’s battery capacity until 20% left
• A fixed display brightness is calibrated at 200cd/m² (200-lux) with the help of a luminance meter 
• Max resolution
• Refresh rates unlocked
• 0% audio, or completely silenced where possible
• Full bars of Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth, and notifications enabled
• Only one other battery recording app opened in the background
• Scored in uptime minutes; the higher, the better

When it comes to real-world use, the Pixel 7a’s 4,385mAh battery is certainly enough for a full day of moderate usage texting, gaming and watching videos with around 20% left at the end of the day, so while there’s nothing to shout about, you won’t be left scrambling for a charger in the afternoon. The phone drained down by about 9% in an hour while taking photos and videos, and used up around 15% for an hour of 60-90Hz gaming. 

Unfortunately, charging is slow as it’s capped at 18W wired. It took 45 minutes for the phone to charge up to 50% from 0%, and a total of 1 hour 56 minutes from nothing to 100% using a third-party 65W wall charger. Google offers a 30W charger, but it’s not included in the box and will not provide faster speeds past the 18W cap. 

The new benchmark will succeed our outgoing Battery Life benchmarking, which has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email

Is the Google Pixel 7a the new Pixel 7?

With even more features coming to the A-series phone, the Google Pixel 7a does seem to be edging ever closer to the overall experience offered on the base Pixel 7. That may be a good or bad thing for Google, depending on which side of the fence you sit on.

At S$749, the Pixel 7a is also just S$250 more affordable than the Pixel 7, making it a good phone with an overall experience similar to its flagship counterpart. Pixel 7a's software and hardware are both decent, and it performs just as well as the Pixel 7 if you see the benchmarks.

Is the S$250 difference worth topping up for? To us, the trade-offs are Pixel 7a's slightly less premium build, a small difference in battery life, and lower camera performance. Choosing to save S$250 and getting the Pixel 7a over the Pixel 7 boils down to asking if those differences are your priorities or not. If you’re on a tight budget, Pixel 7a is one of the best mid-range Android phones currently available, given its excessive feature set and clean Android UI, on top of everything else we've said above.

The rumours about how this might be Google's last A-series phone make us a little sad; we certainly hope Google doesn’t discontinue the line. The A-series phones have offered some of the best bangs for your buck ever since they started with the Pixel 3a. Returning to the A-series roots of affordability might be a better option if Google doesn't want to make "lite" versions of its existing flagships. Thinking back to the Pixel 3a’s starting price of S$659 and then the even more affordable S$499 price tag of the subsequent Pixel 4a, it feels as if Google has gone in reverse by throwing in more and more flagship features while increasing the price to be closer to the base Pixel 7’s. 

If the Pixel 7a isn't your cup of tea, the next closest midrange alternative with impressive parts and software would be the Samsung Galaxy A54. It may not have Google's amazing UI and proprietary features, but comes with even better specifications on paper; a 120Hz refresh rate, a 5,000mAh battery that supports 25W wired fast charging, and expandable storage up to 1TB via a MicroSD card slot. But more than that, the Galaxy A54 starts at just S$588. With both Google and Samsung's offerings at play here, midrange buyers have decent options no matter where they look this year.

If we had to pick one area that we felt was lacking in the Pixel 7a, it would probably be the battery life and charging speeds. Bringing us wireless charging on a midrange handset is a nice start, but bumping the max wired charging speed up to 20 or 25W would be even better. But of course, that would then make the Pixel 7a even more like the Pixel 7. 

The Pixel 7a is a fantastic option if you want a more premium “midrange” phone; truly, the software drives the Pixel lineup. Features like the Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, fast security updates, and a stock Android experience are the main selling points of a Pixel phone, and to get almost the same Pixel 7 experience at S$250 less? That’s not too bad at all.

Moreover, the newer Pixel 8 phones are priced steeper than the Pixel 7 series. And while Pixel 8 is commendable for what it delivers, the higher price makes the Pixel 7a a reasonable priced-down version of what's core for anyone looking out for a Google Pixel phone.

In Singapore, the Google Pixel 7a officially retails at S$749 from 11 May 2023 in three colourways: Snow, Sea, and Charcoal.

You can find the Pixel 7a at Singapore’s Google Store, Amazon, Courts Online, Challenger Online, and Shopee.

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