The Google Pixel 8a may not be a flagship phone, but it's very nicely made and offers good cameras, a colourful OLED screen, and enough AI power to be genuinely useful.
For
OLED screen
Good cameras
Excellent battery life
Against
Not a flagship
No tele lens
Plastic construction
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A phone may not be an essential creative tool in the same way as a laptop or a mirrorless camera, but something like the Google Pixel 8a can be an important part of your workflow, especially in the early stages (and a contender for the best budget camera phone). Not only does it allow constant communication with colleagues and clients, but you can use it and its AI tools as a notebook for inspiration and its battery lasts a long time.
Key specifications
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Chipset
Tensor G3
Memory:
8 GB LPDDR5
OS
Android 14 (at launch, seven years of updates)
Storage:
128 GB/256 GB
Screen size:
6.1in
Screen type:
OLED touchscreen
Resolution:
1080 x 2400
Refresh rate:
Max 120Hz
Peak brightness
2,000 nits
Rear camera
64MP f/1.9 main, 13MP f/2.2 ultrawide
Front camera
13MP f2/2
Ports:
1x USB 3.2 Type-C
Wireless connectivity:
Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, 5G
Dimensions:
152x73x9mm
Weight:
189g
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Design, build and display
Before we start on this, we’re all keeping our phones in cases, right? Still, an uncased Pixel 8a is a nice thing to hold in your hand. The plastic back - made of 76% recycled plastic - has a slight texture to it, still smooth, but enough to differentiate it from the glass or ceramic materials in more expensive models. There's more recycled materials in the aluminium used for the sides and the camera bar, for a total of 24% across the whole phone.
That camera bar is thinner than it’s been on previous models, and the metal rectangle rising up from the plastic backdrop looks great, as they’re the same colour. Our review model is blue (or ‘bay’), but green, black and white versions are available too. It’s a good looking phone that you’ll be putting in a case anyway, and the aluminium sides feel good under the fingers, while the corners are more rounded on this model than on previous ones, giving it a softer profile. The edges of the buttons can be a little harsh, however.
The touchscreen is covered in Gorilla Glass 3 rather than the Gorilla Glass Victus that’s on premium models, though this is unlikely to make a difference in practice. There's a fingerprint reader under the screen right where your thumb can get to it, and the front-facing camera can carry out face-recognition unlocking too.
• Very nice to hold • Screen is bright and well saturated
Design score: 5/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Features
The Pixel 8a ships with Android 14 but almost immediately updates itself to Android 15, and you can expect seven years of software updates which takes us to 2031 and Android 21. This means you get AI features in the camera app, such as the Magic Editor and Magic Eraser, plus astrophotography and unblurring, though it doesn’t seem to have the Add Me feature from the Pixel 9 series that allows you to add yourself into a group photo by merging two shots taken in the same place. This is the sort of thing that may trickle down in an upcoming software update, especially once the Pixel 9a is released. There is Best Take, which takes a burst of photos and then selects what it considers the best expressions from the shots.
Other AI usage comes in Circle to Search, in which you draw a ring around part of an image to perform a reverse image search of just that item - it’s great for spotting something, snapping a picture, and being able to search to find out what it is. There's the ability to generate background images for your home screen, and the Gemini chatbot too. A lot of these tools rely on the cloud rather than on-device processing, as the 8a isn’t up there with the Pixel 9 Pro in the power stakes, but it’s nice to have them all the same.
The camera may sport 64MP, but you won’t get an image file of that size out of it. It bins down to a 16MP image, and there's no option in the settings to change that. Tiny sensors like this benefit from the improvements in image noise that come from pixel binning, and 16MP should be good enough for an A4-sized print. Going any bigger isn’t really what phone cameras are for, though it would have been nice to have a dedicated tele lens on the 8a instead of a 2x crop into the main camera's image. You get 4K video at 60fps on the rear camera, and 30fps from the front, with slow-mo video all the way up to 240fps and digital stabilisation. There's also the option to save video as HEVC, to save on storage space.
• Lots of Google AI tools • Better cameras elsewhere
Feature score: 4/5
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Benchmark scores
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Header Cell - Column 0
Header Cell - Column 1
Google Pixel 8a
Header Cell - Column 3
GEEKBENCH 6
CPU Single-core:
1739
Row 0 - Cell 3
Row 1 - Cell 0
CPU Multi-core:
4463
Row 1 - Cell 3
Row 2 - Cell 0
GPU OpenCL:
6471
Row 2 - Cell 3
PC MARK WORK 3.0
Score
Row 3 - Cell 2
Row 3 - Cell 3
Row 4 - Cell 0
Battery life
17h 19m to 20%
Row 4 - Cell 3
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Performance
The Google Pixel 8a doesn’t beat the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Sony Xperia 1V, Apple iPhone SE (2022) or Pixel 9 Pro in the benchmark tests, but then we didn’t expect it to. It does, however, come surprisingly close to Google’s current flagship phone, and certainly doesn’t feel sluggish in use. It scores somewhere in the region of the iPhone 11 Pro Max from 2019, though as that’s not a phone you can buy today that’s an unhelpful comparison.
The reason the Pixel 9 Pro appears underpowered next to other flagships isn’t because it’s lacking in the power department, but it’s been tuned for efficiency and battery life. The Pixel 8a, despite coming from a generation earlier, can probably make the same claim: Google’s claim that the battery can last for more than 24 hours is probably not entirely wrong, as while our battery life figure of 17h and 19m (which represents 100% to 20%, so with a bit of maths we can assume 21h to 0%) involves leaving the screen on and making it do work, if you let it shut off and sleep between bursts of usage you’ll get much more out of it.
• Excellent battery life • Efficiency, not overwhelming power
Performance score: 4/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Price
From £499/$499
As you might expect from Google’s budget offering - though it’s really a mid-range phone - the Pixel 8a is keenly priced. You can even pick it up at a discount, as the Pixel 9 range has already launched, and this makes it cheaper than rivals such as the Nothing Phone (2) and the OnePlus Nord 4 in its 16/512GB guise. It’s also slightly cheaper than the 2022 iPhone SE, which at the time of writing is just about to be replaced, and the new iPhone 16e may prove a more dangerous competitor if it remains at the SE’s price point.
Value score: 4/5
Who is it for?
• General use
A well-priced mid-range phone like this is a good choice for everyone, but with its quality cameras and gateway into Google’s AI tools, the Pixel 8a makes an excellent visual notebook and search tool for creatives out looking for inspiration. It’s a compact and sustainable design from one of the titans of the smartphone world, and with a potential seven-year lifespan makes a good long-term investment.
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Google Pixel 8a score card
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Design:
Nicely built with plenty of recycled materials
5/5
Features:
Two cameras, Google AI, and general Android cleverness
4/5
Performance:
Falsl behind the flagships, but very good for the money
4/5
Value:
Keenly priced, even more so if you can find it at a discount
One of the best smartphone cameras out there, but twice as expensive as the Pixel 8a.
The Verdict
9
out of 10
Google Pixel 8a review: all the AI, for less
The Google Pixel 8a may not be a flagship phone, but it's very nicely made and offers good cameras, a colourful OLED screen, and enough AI power to be genuinely useful.
Ian Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years, starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5. He now mainly works in Creative Cloud and Google Docs, but can always find a use for a powerful laptop or two. When not sweating over page layout or photo editing, you can find him peering at the stars or growing vegetables.
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