Pixel 10a

> Best-in-class camera

I own a Pixel 9a. It's the first phone I used that made me question how many of the pixels going out of the camera app are actually coming the sensor and how many from some AI model.

Don't get me wrong. It will take front-cover magazine quality pics of that favorite turist hot spot, even in terrible light.

But as soon as there's something in the frame that your average insta influencer won't typically shoot the results are weird.

A green PCB on my workbench I want to document? Colors all wrong, can hardly pick out the traces. My 20 year Canon does a better job.

A black-and-white hand drawn charcoal portrait? The face on the jpeg will have tan skin and pinkish cheeks.

And there's no setting to turn this sort of processing off, unless you want to deal with the hassle of raw files.

I appreciate the Google store making it relatively easy to compare the specs between current phones and end-of-sale phones.

Here’s a comparison between the Pixel 10a and the Pixel 7: https://store.google.com/us/magazine/compare_pixel?hl=en-US&...

The one thing that wasn’t clear from the comparison was if USB display output is supported on the Pixel 10a. If it is, then I’m sold.

I'll only look at a 10a seriously when GrapheneOS is ready for it:

https://grapheneos.org/releases

I love the lack of a camera bump. I hope there is a large enough market for that to keep the design around; I'm not the target audience but I hear laments for the days when a phone would lie flat all the time.

So compared to the 9a: slight weight reduction, lightly better screen (better brightness and contrast, newer iteration of Gorilla Glass), Android 16 instead of 15, some slight battery life and camera improvements that are probably from shipping with a newer Android version (and that the 9a therefore probably already has, since upgrading to Android 16 is an option). Seems to be using the same Tensor G4 CPU as the 9a, instead of the newer Tensor G5 of the rest of its generation.

Unless I'm missing something, 9a→10a seems even more incremental than 8a→9a was. The price reduction is the most interesting thing about the 10a to me; if that ends up being permanent (instead of just a pre-order promotion), then once GrapheneOS support lands I could see this being handy with a prepaid SIM as a burner phone for international travel or music festivals or attending/documenting protests or something else where if it gets lost or stolen or confiscated as “evidence” or whatever then it wouldn't hurt quite as bad if I never saw it again. Otherwise, at the “normal” $499 pricetag I'm struggling to see much of a point v. its predecessor (or even its predecessor's predecessor).

I'm a fan of the 'a' series - not least because of the composite back, which makes so much more sense than glass.

But it's a pity that they've stopped making them smaller than the base model. I believe that ended with the 7/7a and, in this case, the 10a is actually 1 mm taller and wider than the 10, and 0.4 mm deeper. Hardly noticeable, but I'd still rather they produced a more compact variant.

Blog post: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/devices/pixel/goo...

I loved my pixel 3a - it did the work

then I upgraded to a 6a - overheating, battery exploded - google refused to change it coz it was bought in the uk - while I'm now in the US - as if I didn't trade my US bought 3a for a pixel 6a in the UK - some android version brought 2 photo apps - so I recovered some via the cloud - lost others

finally gave up and moved back to using an iPhone - transition was easy - I recovered everything that was left intact on my iPhone SE before switching to a Pixel 3a

so yeah f*k google phones

> 7 year support

Funny to see that on their marketing page. The fact that they decided to drop support for the pixel 3a ~3 years after its release was fucked up. One of the reasons I stopped buying android devices.