Google Pixel 8a review

Display

The Google Pixel 8a has a lightly smaller OLED screen compared to the Pixel 8 - it's a 6.1-inch OLED of 1,080 x 2,400 pixels. There is support for 120Hz refresh rate, HDR10, and Google promises up to 2,000nits of peak brightness.

The screen is protected with a flat sheet of Gorilla Glass 3.

Let's start with our display measurements. We measured 755 nits of maximum brightness when controlling it manually. The Auto Brightness option allows for a stable boost up to 1,508 nits, which is great!

The minimum brightness at point white was just 1.8 nit.

Unfortunately, Google needs to tune its brightness slider better. At 80% brightness, the phone offers 200 nits; at 90%, we are still below 300 nits, and the last 10% are responsible for the steps to 755 nits. This is far from practical.

The color options include Natural and Adaptive colors. And the Pixel 8a consistently offers great accuracy to sRGB and DCI-P3 targets.

Refresh rate

The upgrade to 120Hz from 90Hz on last year's Pixel 7a was a welcome change, although Google still ships the phone set to 60Hz out of the box. Google doesn't offer much flexibility with how the high refresh rate can be used compared to other Android manufacturers, who have started offering per-app refresh rate settings. However, unlike other manufacturers, Google also doesn't limit random apps to 60Hz and the phone usually just runs at 120Hz all the time.

The Pixel 8a is also supposed to support high refresh rates in games, but none of the games we tried ran higher than 60fps. The phone doesn't seem to support 90Hz per our tests - just 60Hz and 120Hz.

HDR

The Pixel 8a supports Widevine L1 DRM and HDR10 streaming. And all popular streaming apps offer 1080p HDR10 streaming when available.

Battery life

The Pixel 8a is powered by a 4,492mAh battery, a hair smaller capacity than the Pixel 8's 4,575mAh cell. It also features a whisker tinier display with a 6.1-inch diagonal instead of 6.2".

And that is why it was no surprise the Pixel 8a scored a similar Active Use Score as the OG Pixel 8 - 11 hours and 25 minutes. It offers 23 hours of call time, over 10 hours of web browsing, over 13 hours of video streaming and over 7 hours of gaming. Not bad for a compact phone.

Charging speed

The Pixel 8a supports up to 18W USB-PD fast charging and up to 7.5W wireless charging. This is noticeably slower than the Pixel 8's 27W wired and 18W wireless charging.

Quite expectedly, 18W is nowhere near competitive. The Pixel 8a went from 0% to 18% of charge in 15 mins when hooked up to a 30W USB-PD charger. We clocked 33% of charge in 30 mins, and 60% in 60 mins. A full charge took a whopping 2 hours and 9 minutes.

The Pixel 8a also supports up to 7.5W of wireless charging.

Speakers - loudness and quality

The Pixel 8a has a stereo speaker system with the earpiece doubling as a speaker. The speakers are balanced very well even if their loudness and quality appear to differ.

The speakers scored a Good mark on our loudness test. The audio quality is very good - there is good bass, excellent vocals, and well-presented high-frequencies, though the Pixel 8 has a richer range here.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.