 The iPhone XR has been topping sales charts ever since its launch last fall, which makes perfect sense. It still has most of the things you love about a flagship iPhone built in, but for $250 cheaper, who wouldn't buy an iPhone XR? Android fans. But we love the idea, which is why it's so cool that Google just announced the mid-range Pixel 3a and the 3a XL with a killer value proposition. Same great camera, an OLED screen, Apple, and a fricking headphone jack. Maybe the only bad news here is for Google, because if this is as good as it sounds, there might not be much reason to buy the flagship Pixel anymore. Let's find out. Right after we find out about our sponsor, Pulseway. With Pulseway, you can remotely monitor, manage, and control all your Windows, Mac, and Linux machines from one app. Create your free account today at the link below. The first thing I noticed about the 3a is how much it feels like a full-on Pixel device. And I'm a Pixel 3 user myself. It has the same two-tone finish available in just black, clearly white, and a new color, purple-ish. The same Titan M security chip and all the Pixel only features like summoning Google assistant with a squeeze, storing unlimited pictures and videos at high quality in Google Photos, and filtering calls with Google's new call screen feature. With call screen, your Google assistant will help you screen your call so you know who's calling and why. Look, it's a prince. He wants to make me super rich. But if we're comparing it to the more expensive flagship Pixel 3 devices, just about everything else about this phone is kind of same same, but different. The phones are close to the same size and weight as their flagship counterparts, but they feel different. And that's because the body is polycarbonate plastic instead of aluminum and glass. They still have stereo speakers, but one of them fires downward instead of both of them being front firing. And while they have OLED always-on displays, which is a huge bonus that I wasn't expecting since even Apple's budget 10R uses an LCD, these use Dragon Trail glass from a Japanese company instead of Gorilla Glass 5 from Corning. From what we know, it's just as scratch resistant, but not as resistant to drops. But we have to assume that the Dragon Trail glass is one of Google's cost saving measures for this mid-range device. One area that Google did not cut costs on was the resolution and pixel density of the displays, which is fantastic, at least on the smaller Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a. Unfortunately, we did not get similar parity on the XL devices where the 3a XL's pixel density is quite a bit lower. The thing though is that some users might not even notice the difference because the 3a XL's pixel density is still higher than that of the iPhone 10R, a device that's explicitly branded as Retina. Spec wise, the 3a devices have four gigabytes of RAM and base storage capacity of 64 gigabytes, just like the flagships. However, there are no 128 gig variants of the 3a. Same, same, but different. And under the hood, the pattern continues. The SoC has been downgraded from the Snapdragon 845 used on the flagships to a Snapdragon 670. But as different as those two sound, the two actually have a lot in common. Both are manufactured on the same 10 nanometer process and both have eight Cairo 360 cores, with some performance cores clocked at two gigahertz and some efficiency cores clocked at 1.7. The big difference is that the Pixel 3 has a 50-50 split between efficiency and performance cores, while the 3a gets six efficiency cores and only two performance ones. Its integrated GPU is an Adreno 615 with half the graphics memory, but it was still able to convince PUBG to choose high settings by default and ran the game really smoothly in our tests. But I don't think that most people buy Pixels for the gaming experience. They buy them for the OS, which is the same great Google customized clean Android Pie experience on the new models, and for the camera. And it looks like that's not changing anytime soon. You're gonna get all the great Pixel camera features like night sight, super res zoom, and even a new time-lapse feature. And for the most part, the experience is gonna be pretty darn close. The Pixel 3a has nearly the same rear camera as the flagship models. So the 12.2 megapixel dual pixel Sony IMX363 sensor is back, but, and this is actually contrary to the leaks that came up before launch, is that the 3a does not use the Pixel visual core, which is a Google designed image processor that's separate from the CPU. This is something that I thought was really gonna differentiate this phone and give Google an advantage because they can downgrade the phone's CPU to a mid tier one and still have this awesome silicon that's specialized in helping the camera outperform the competition, but it's not here. So I guess buy the good Pixel if you want that. If you're a selfie fiend though, you might be bummed out about the front camera. While the flagships have both wide angles and telephoto cameras for selfies, the 3a has a single camera that kind of splits the difference spec wise. As for video, all Pixel devices so far are limited to 4K 30 on the rear and 10 80 30 on the front. Whereas the iPhone 10 R can do 60 FPS at either of those resolutions. And the 10 R clearly pulled ahead when we ran our quick video stabilization challenge. It kept the footage smooth, but without making it unnatural. Whereas the pixels introduced some jitter and our Huawei P30 Pro looked like it was mounted on the hood of a car on a gravel road. Not good enough. So should you buy this phone? Well, I can't believe it took me this long to mention it, but it's kind of a big selling point. Both the Pixel 3a and the 3a XL are notchless phones. They both have headphone jacks and thanks to the reduction in performance cores, along with actually bigger batteries than the flagship Pixel threes, they should get you better battery life too. All of that with a very capable camera and for $400 less than the flagship. To me, they both look like some of the strongest mid-range options since the Nexus 5X. And that is some grade A goodness. Did you get that one? 3a, grade A, did you get, you didn't get, you get it now, he hates it. But he doesn't hate dbrand. Our sponsor dbrand is your source for awesome texture vinyl skins. 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