Before we get into this, I’d like you to check something on your phone. Look through your app drawer. Look up your battery stats. If you use any kind of Digital Wellbeing tracking, look at the list of services used. I’d like you to look up what apps and services really get used on your phone. I’ll come back to this, but you probably already know where I’m going after reading the title of this editorial.

Quick flashback.

In 2016 I was in Germany covering IFA with Jaime for Pocketnow. We had just finished a Huawei presser, the company showing off a new pair of premium mid-range phones. This was a bit confusing between all the various lines of Huawei and Honor gear, but they sent us away with a Nova and a Nova Plus to demo and review.

I was extremely skeptical. This phone was going to be expensive for its internals, starting at €400. Pricing it above my precious Honor 8 felt “wrong”. I am a professional though, so I popped the smaller Nova out of its box, gave Jaime the larger phone, and we shot a first impressions video from our hotel.

Reading the specs, being concerned about price, and then using the phone, those concerns slowly evaporated.

We were just crawling out of the darkest days of the Snapdragon 808 and 810. That generation of chipset (almost literally) burned every manufacturer who was forced to use it. The mid-range wasn’t much better. Snapdragon 650’s in Sonys and Alcatels suffered many of the mediocre performance and thermal throttling issues of the “premium” phones.

Seeing a Snapdragon 625 inside the Nova at that launch price was a psychological hit. Would this phone feel more like a Moto G4, or would it run hot like an XPERIA X? Happily, the answer was “neither”.

The Nova was the first phone I had ever used where UI performance on mid-ranger hardware felt nearly identical to using a more expensive handset. There were precious few compromises to make. Digging into the camera app, expecting to be disappointed, but there was UHD video. The build quality was well refined, like holding a baby Nexus 6P. The battery life was fantastic for using more power efficient parts and a smaller screen.

The Nova was somewhat dismissed by the tech enthusiast scene, largely based on the “worth-it-ness for the price”. However, I genuinely believe that the folks who owned one never knew their phone was supposed to be “compromised”. They bought a non-glass back device, that ran very well, for a respectable price.

Back to today.

The Pixel 3a arrives at a perfect transition point in the smartphone industry.

Smartphone sales are plateauing. Consumers are holding onto phones longer. We’re all a bit burnt out on promises and gimmicks not living up to inflated price tags.

Even Google struggled with a premium priced phone strategy in this market. Uninspired hardware, even with good software, will face tremendous difficulty in separating a consumer from a brand they’re familiar with. It’s too much of a risk, spending “laptop money” on a mobile. Phones are mission critical daily companion devices. The idea of spending a lot to switch smartphone “teams” isn’t exciting. It’s exhausting.

What could be exciting though is saving some cash.

I’ve had two different kinds of interactions showing people my Pixel 3a. If I start by telling them the price, it’s automatically dismissed.

“Oh. That COULD be good for others I suppose. Cover the basics, save some money for POOR people, but I already use an iGalaxy McCash Phone, and I’ve grown accustomed to high end speks.”

If I hand someone the phone with NO information though, the initial reaction is often somewhat subdued. They page around my homescreen and apps. Maybe fire up the camera. They often kinda shrug.

“Cool. It’s another phone.”

Lots of other phones feel the same. Lots of other phone cameras perform well.

Then I tell them the Pixel 3a is a $400 phone at full retail, often found for less on a deal.

Using the delayed strategy, I’ve gotten some fun double takes. There’s suddenly a renewed interest in that camera performance. It has a headphone jack. The screen is surprisingly nice. The haptics feel pretty good. The speakers are punchy. Sliding around the interface AGAIN, they start probing for faults.

There has to be a catch, right?

There are a couple small blemishes.

The phone isn’t good for graphics intense gaming, especially PC and console ports, and 64GB of storage can be a bit tight if you use the phone’s camera a lot.

And that’s about it.

No one I’ve handed the phone to has noticed the plastic back. Most people smirk or scoff at the idea of editing and rendering video from their phone (though the recent Power Director update did help for 1080p rendering). Fairly evaluating the compromises of the phone, no one seems to care about those compromises when they see how well the phone performs in the hand. Then they balance that performance against a price well under half of a Galaxy or iPhone.

When you let someone explore the phone first, and then hit them with the price, you see a much different reaction.

We’ve trained consumers to not only ignore tech marketing, but to outright distrust it. Very few devices have lived up to manufacturer claims of disrupting the high price/high performance paradigm. Shopping in the lower mid-range often meant dealing with noticeable performance deficits and a lack of software polish. If you tell someone the price first, they’re more likely to automatically disregard anything you say after. They’ve been burned (or know someone burned) by tech promises in the past.

This tech elitism has infiltrated enthusiast communities.

I find it odd, and frustrating, that tech reviews mostly seem to focus on a “covering the basics” style of use. We talk about launching apps or using a camera in full auto mode, but when it comes time to deliver a verdict, only premium popular phones get strong recommendations.

The Pixel 3a has been well received by the tech press, especially in North America where we’re starved for good options that cross over between “entry level” and “mid-range”. For all the kind words though, Pixel 3a reviews still regularly dog-whistle a few key phrases which are almost perfectly designed to scare consumers away.

“Covering the Basics”

This has become my least favorite qualifier of performance. I’m ranking this phrase almost as high as “it feels really nice in the hand” as a useless talking point. It’s something a reviewer says, when they want to sound like they’re adding commentary, but they don’t really have an informed opinion to share. Yet, we parrot this kind of talking point ad nauseam, and the phrase “covering the basics” has wormed its way into numerous Pixel 3a discussions.

That phrase means nothing, and worse, is very likely interpreted in a negative light. Phrases like “covering the basics” are perfect for not rocking the boat. You can say something nice about the Pixel 3a, while not upsetting people who bought more expensive phones. Tech reviews are far less about educating a potential consumer these days, more designed to reinforce the pre-conceived bias of a community who has already made a purchasing decision.

“The Pixel 3a is GREAT at cOveRiNg tHe bAsiCS!”, but what does that mean?

This brings me back to what I asked at the top of this editorial. How hard do you drive your phone? What services are really taxing your pocket computer?

Statistically, I’d be willing to wager a geek’s smartphone use isn’t much different than a general consumer’s. One major difference might be gaming, where geeks might be more likely to drive more graphics intense games (though during my Razer Phone review, numerous tech enthusiasts were happy to remind me that mobile gaming was “garbage”).

A tech enthusiast might be more sensitive to performance issues, but I don’t know how much I’d trust that assessment either. The people tripping over themselves to defend their purchase. Folks loudly proclaiming “MY PHONE NEVER LAGS”, when we rationally know that all computers stutter at some point.

So, what’s in your services list?

It’s my assertion that the Pixel 3a performs far better than just covering the basics. We’ve got hardware on tap that largely hangs with, and often edges out, the Pixel 2. That’s a ton of horsepower which apps still haven’t fully realized. We’ve been overpaying for incremental updates for years. I’ve been repeating like a broken record player, but most people would be well served by the power of a Snapdragon 821 today if they had software properly optimized for that power envelope. That chip was released in 2016. The Pixel 3a performs better than that, and with the added benefit of hardware improvements delivering better battery life.

I shot a video where I said the Pixel 3a was not for me, but it’s remained an oddly compelling phone. I keep picking it up. There are only a handful of situations where I need to put it down. When I need advanced camera and audio features I reach for an LG. When I play a game, I pick up my Razer or OnePlus. Two situations where folks crawl out of the woodwork to “remind” me that driving a phone that hard shouldn’t play a significant role in my reviews.

“rEgUlAr PeEpLe dOn’T dOo ThiNgS oN tHeyRe FoNeZ.”

What are you really doing on your phone? How much did you pay for that phone? Do you think you could fulfill that use and pay a little less?

Are you just covering the basics?