I own a Pixel 9a. It's the first phone I used that made me question how many of the pixels going out of the camera app are actually coming the sensor and how many from some AI model.

Don't get me wrong. It will take front-cover magazine quality pics of that favorite turist hot spot, even in terrible light.

But as soon as there's something in the frame that your average insta influencer won't typically shoot the results are weird.

A green PCB on my workbench I want to document? Colors all wrong, can hardly pick out the traces. My 20 year Canon does a better job.

A black-and-white hand drawn charcoal portrait? The face on the jpeg will have tan skin and pinkish cheeks.

And there's no setting to turn this sort of processing off, unless you want to deal with the hassle of raw files.

Here’s a comparison between the Pixel 10a and the Pixel 7: https://store.google.com/us/magazine/compare_pixel?hl=en-US&...

The one thing that wasn’t clear from the comparison was if USB display output is supported on the Pixel 10a. If it is, then I’m sold.

https://grapheneos.org/releases

Unless I'm missing something, 9a→10a seems even more incremental than 8a→9a was. The price reduction is the most interesting thing about the 10a to me; if that ends up being permanent (instead of just a pre-order promotion), then once GrapheneOS support lands I could see this being handy with a prepaid SIM as a burner phone for international travel or music festivals or attending/documenting protests or something else where if it gets lost or stolen or confiscated as “evidence” or whatever then it wouldn't hurt quite as bad if I never saw it again. Otherwise, at the “normal” $499 pricetag I'm struggling to see much of a point v. its predecessor (or even its predecessor's predecessor).

But it's a pity that they've stopped making them smaller than the base model. I believe that ended with the 7/7a and, in this case, the 10a is actually 1 mm taller and wider than the 10, and 0.4 mm deeper. Hardly noticeable, but I'd still rather they produced a more compact variant.

then I upgraded to a 6a - overheating, battery exploded - google refused to change it coz it was bought in the uk - while I'm now in the US - as if I didn't trade my US bought 3a for a pixel 6a in the UK - some android version brought 2 photo apps - so I recovered some via the cloud - lost others

finally gave up and moved back to using an iPhone - transition was easy - I recovered everything that was left intact on my iPhone SE before switching to a Pixel 3a

so yeah f*k google phones

Funny to see that on their marketing page. The fact that they decided to drop support for the pixel 3a ~3 years after its release was fucked up. One of the reasons I stopped buying android devices.