Google’s next midrange smartphone is the Pixel 5a, featuring a slightly bigger display than last year’s Pixel 4a, a considerably larger battery and IP67 water and dust resistance. It’s priced at $449, which is $100 more than the Pixel 4a, and is expected to be the last Google phone to include a charger in the box (sorry Pixel 6 fans). Ars Technica reports: Part of the reason for the price increase is that the Pixel 5a is a bigger phone, with a 6.34-inch display and 73.7 mm width compared to the Pixel 4a’s 5.8-inch display and 69.4 mm width. Another big change is the addition of IP67 dust and water resistance, which means the phone should survive submersion in 3 feet of water (1 meter) for 30 minutes. As with the Pixel 5, the Pixel 5a’s body is metal coated in plastic instead of the pure plastic body of the Pixel 4a. We didn’t see the appeal of this construction in the Pixel 5, but the new phone is presumably stronger now.
As usual, we’re getting a no-frills design that takes care of the basics. On the front, there’s a slim-bezel OLED display and a hole-punch camera in the top right, while there are two cameras (main and wide-angle) and a capacitive fingerprint reader on the back. Specs include a Snapdragon 765G (that’s a 7 nm chip with two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores), 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and the biggest battery of any Pixel: 4680 mAh. The main camera is 12.2 MP and looks like the same Sony IMX363 sensor that Google has used for the past four years. There’s a 16 MP wide-angle and an 8 MP front camera. Oh yeah, the headphone jack is sticking around for at least one more year. If there’s a disappointment with the Pixel 5a, it’s the 60 Hz display, which is looking pretty slow in a world where 90 Hz and 120 Hz are often the norm. Another important note is that the Pixel 5a will get three years of major updates and three years of security updates. It’s currently available for preorder now and starts shipping on August 26.
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