Other upgrades include the Google Tensor G3 SoC, the same (with minor technicalities) flagship-class chip you get in the Pixel 8. That’s a 4 nm chip with one Arm Cortex X3, four Cortex A715 cores, four Cortex A510 cores, and a Mali G715 GPU. The battery is a bit bigger, too, at 4492 mAh compared to 4385 mAh last year. Other specs are in line with the Pixel 7a: 8GB of RAM, 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage, IP67 dust and water resistance, in-screen fingerprint reader, 18 W wired charging, and 5 W wireless charging. The camera loadout is also the same as the Pixel 7a: a 64 MP main camera, 13 MP ultrawide, and a 13 MP front camera.
The design has changed a little from the previous version. The corners are now a lot more rounded compared to the squared-off Pixel 7a. The bezels in renders do look a bit big, but it’s a budget phone. If you’re a fan of colors, Google has green and blue versions alongside the usual black and white.
All of Google’s AI features, like magic erasers, are in the Pixel 8a, of course. One challenge for the future, and those seven years of updates, will be the 8GB of RAM. Google is already calling devices with 8GB of RAM “hardware limited” when it comes to future AI features, so be prepared for that. It’s a budget phone, though, so you have to make some trade-offs. It’s not clear whether any of Google’s future AI features—so far they are niche things like “smart reply”—will actually be worth the extra expense.
Preorders for the phone start today, and it will ship on May 14.