Google Needs a Hit with the Pixel 4a (Premium)

Last year, the Pixel 3a family was a surprise hit for Google’s struggling smartphone business. Can it duplicate that success in 2020?

Possibly. Based on many, many leaks, the upcoming Pixel 4a does bring forward most of what customers liked about its predecessor, and it even offers a nice improvement in a key area that was a problem for the Pixel 3a. But Google is also making one big mistake with this release. And it means that I won’t be buying one. I suspect I’m not alone.

So let me get the bad news out of the way first. Thanks to a wellspring of leaks, we now know basically everything we need to know about the Pixel 4a, and its one step backward is glaringly obvious: Where the Pixel 3a came in two screen sizes, 5.6-inches (3a) and 6-inches (3a XL), the 4a will only come in one screen size, and it’s the wrong one. That is, there apparently won’t be a Pixel 4a XL, and Google will only ship this phone in the smaller size.

One might argue that Google knows its customer base, knows which versions of each handset have sold well, and where. Others might think the evidence points to the contrary: That Google’s smartphone business is a failure, and it’s a failure because Google simply hasn’t a clue about what works and what doesn’t.

I’m going to offer up a third option, however: I believe that the relative success of the Pixel 3a lineup triggered an understanding within Google that its smartphone business can’t effectively compete against market leaders like Samsung and Apple. And that positioning the Pixel lineup as a premium product line was a mistake. If the rumors are true, and I hope they are, Google’s next flagships---the Pixel 5 and 5 XL---will be mid-range handsets and will be priced accordingly.

And that, I believe, is what informed Google’s decision to not ship a larger Pixel 4a XL this spring. Instead, it will offer a single smaller version and offer up the larger display option as one of many advantages of the Pixel 5 series, which will be more expensive but should still undercut rivals flagships by a wide margin. Again, if those rumors are true.

Aside from the lack of an XL model, however, the Pixel 4a is all good news, and this handset meets or exceeds the capabilities of the Pixel 3a in every way.

According to all those leaks, the Pixel 4a will be powered by a mid-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 730, as opposed to the Snapdragon 855 found in the Pixel 4. This is an 8 nm octa-core design with six high-efficiency cores and two high-performance cores, and is a minor step up from the Snapdragon 670 in the Pixel 3a series. I suspect it will offer roughly the same level of performance, if not a small improvement.

The RAM story is interesting: The Pixel 4a will provide 6 GB of RAM, which is a huge improvement over the 4 GB of RAM in the Pixel 3a series; it also matches the 6 GB of RAM in Google’s current Pixel 4 flagships.

One of the big dings against the Pixel 3a line was that they could b...

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