Built Clean, Lean And Cost-Efficient

As you can see above, there's a fair amount of top and bottom bezel on the Pixel 3a XL and at 6.3 inches tall it's a fairly large device. As such, under the hood is a 3700 mAh battery that powers Qualcomm's Snapdragon 670 Mobile Platform. This is a mid-range SoC designed to offer competent performance and 4G LTE connectivity, along with AI engines and support for the latest dual camera features with Qualcomm's Spectra 250. In addition, on-board is Qualcomm's Adreno 630 graphics engine which, as you might surmise, is a step down from Adreno 640 that's found in Qualcomm's current top-end Snapdragon 855 chip, though it is at least a current-gen derivative. More on this later.Also on board is 4GB of LPDDR4X DRAM and 64GB of Flash storage, along with Google's Android 9 (Pie) OS. And yes, boys and girls, that's a 3.5mm headphone jack you're looking at there. Huzzah! On the downside, however, Google doesn't specify an IP water resistance rating for their new Pixel 3a devices, so don't expect to go for an accidental dip with one. It may survive, but you're on your own here. Also, I don't know about you, but I personally appreciate the almost lime-green/yellow power and screen lock button on the side of the Purple-ish color of the Pixel 3 series. It makes finding that button all that much easier, whether in dimly lit situations or perhaps slightly happy hour impaired?Finally, with the Pixel 3a XL we get both a bottom-firing speaker and a top-firing speaker from the earpiece area. This stereo speaker setup offers surprising volume and decent fullness for a smartphone. We still get a faint bit of break-up at high volumes, but all in all, the Pixel 3a XL sounds better than the average smartphone on the market, whether it be in speakerphone mode or piping some music in a pinch, without a set of buds at your disposal.