Pixel 9a Review
I've had my Pixel 9a for a few days now, and while I don't have a complete picture of it as a phone, my initial impressions of it have settled into a pretty solid opinion on it as a device I use every day.
I won't bury the lede, I don't love it.
Upgrading from a 7a - what I considered to be all the phone a person could ever need when new - was a disappointment. The 7a was pitched as a premium Pixel phone but with some compromises to build materials and screen, and some reduced camera features at a 25% discount. In my opinion, it obsoleted the Pixel 7 and made a mockery of the concept of "premium phones" costing £600+.
If I hadn't got my 9a for 75% off, I would be considering myself quite hard done by.
The reasons I dislike it are a bit weird, but I think most of it comes down to the whole enshittification debacle facing all technology now. While that's a concept more readily applied to platforms and disruptive services, it's a neat encapsulation of the techno-capitalist tendency to squeeze every revenue-stream dry.
Where the 7a felt like a premium phone with some smart compromises, the 9a feels like a compromised phone with some premium features.
The Feel
Something will take some getting used to is just how much less enjoyable the 9a is to hold.
The Pixel 7 phones replaced the camera bump with a camera band, a whole raised metal bar across the whole back of the phone, and I loved that. The phone laid flat against a desk or "hooked" onto the edge, I could rest the bar on my finger for a bit of extra purchase, and instantly orient the phone in my hand without looking.
The 9 phones just have a camera bump again, but its really flat. The phone still rocks on a surface and makes an ungodly noise when it vibrates though.
The back of the 7a was a shiny plastic as opposed to the sheer glass of the mainline 7, and I was super happy with this - it's no less a fingerprint magnet, but glass has so much less friction than plastic, and I got so sick of my Pixel 4 sliding off of the slightest sloped surface. You couldn't trust it on any kind of sofa arm. The 7a would stay planted, especially if you angled it to take advantage of the camera bar.
The 9a has gone for a "composite" back - idk what that means, but it seems fine for the most part. It does well enough on sofas but it does feel weirdly slippery in the hand - worse than the 7a for sure.
It also feels weirdly light - apparently it's only 11g lighter but it feels oddly distributed - just a strange tactile experience tbh.
Assistant
I was vaguely aware that the old Google Assistant was away, but I didn't realise it was in the state it is now - you can still use it, but it can no longer interact with apps, it can only interact with a Google search.
This is... mostly fine?
I used the voice assistant (activated by holding the power button or saying "Hey Google") for exactly 3 things - setting timers, setting reminders, and asking very basic questions like how to spell things or what country places are in.
This wasn't because the Assistant was holding me back though - I just didn't want it to do any more than this. This could become a whole aside about AI overpromotion but suffice to say the old app was fine, and all I needed from it was voice recognition and the ability to perform basic tasks with Google's own built-in apps - that's not an AI job, that's a software job.
I don't fully know what was going on under old Assistant's hood - from it's provenance, I assume some many layered stack of interconnected machine learning algorithms and heuristics. It predates the LLM definition of AIs by a year or two.
I find that kind of tech very interesting because of its inherently limited scope, and Google are generally pretty good at developing strong versions of those ideas before killing them.
Anyway Assistant is dead now and my phone is all full of Gemini now.
Hold the power button? Gemini. Hit the wrong part of the Search widget? Gemini. Want to look at your photos? You actually wanna look less like shit with the help of our AI.
They're clearly so scared as well - every time I hit one of these it flashes up with a screen asking me to opt-in to giving their AI access to my data. I see that screen like 4 times a day just by accidentally activating it.
I'll look into removing it.
Apparently you can install the old Assistant separately, but I'm sure they'll just break it at some point so I'm probably just going to go back to setting alarms by hand like a caveman.
The Day-to-Day
I kind of consider this section to be broadly how the software looks and feels.
It's better, mostly.
I like the screen a decent amount - it's basically the same size and resolution, but a tad brighter than the old one and will do 120Hz over the 90Hz of the 7a. It's fundamentally the same experience, but with rounder corners.
Using software has been mostly "better" - my 7a has battery issues so I'm not sure if it's really firing on all cylinders these days, but the 9a is clearly just a bit better.
There are fewer minor pauses between thought and action, which I think is the general "new phone" experience. My 7a has a couple years of use and abuse and planned obsolescence slowing it down, and the 9a runs rings around it in that way.
Final Thoughts
This is the first time I've ever bought a new phone and not immediately felt like something fundamental has improved.
It's also the longest I've ever waited between new phones, typically replacing them every 2 years or so like a good consumer.
I got my 9a for £130, a fucking steal, due to the 7a's battery problems. I'm not sure I'd want one otherwise.
Hell, I'm already planning to attempt a battery replacement with a £50 iFixit kit on my old 7a, so if that takes I'll have a second phone... I was planning to add it to the janky homelab setup, but now I should at least consider switching back and punting the 9a for a profit, right?
I'd probably be worse off overall than if I just took Google's initial offer of £200 in my pocket rather than the £300 Google Store voucher, but if I did it I'd be able to do it with confidence that the 9a wasn't for me.
More likely though, I'll settle with the 9a. It is faster, it does have some cool camera features I haven't used, it will still be in warranty for a couple of years.
That's why it feels like enshittification - what am I gonna do, go back? They obsoleted back, didn't you hear?