I've been lucky enough to have the Pixel 4a in my pocket the last several weeks, and in that time I've developed a pretty good sense for its battery life. I won't make you read on to let you know my thoughts, either. If you're interested in the Pixel's battery life, their five-day battery guarantee, as well as how to get used to its minimal physical traits, my thoughts might indirectly, though not directly, reflect yours.
The Pixel 4's battery life is pretty damn interesting. It manages to outlast most of its competitors across the board – including Android Wear 2.0 – in many ways, ultimately serving to put it at the head of the pack. It also generates a surprising amount of juice, especially for the base model that's available now. Of course, with only a single display, there's less of a margin for making any sort of apples-to-apples comparison.
So, what about the next article in this series?
The first piece of hardware I reviewed with the Pixel 4 was the Essential Phone, which was quite the beast of a smartphone. It took a full day to completely drain the Pixel 4 X down almost to nothing and put it through some unusually rigorous stress testing, thanks to the high-end Snapdragon 828 chipset. That battery test runs at 4.5X the Pixel 4's well-disciplined 2.7GHZ DDR4, supporting the massive 4GB of RAM and 18MP f/1.7 / 20MP f/2.2 dual camera setup on offer even at maximum brightness. The test run also ran thousands of times in an altimeter-based real-acceleration mode, which beat out the a sample Galaxy S7+ I tested on Sunday. As expected, the device never cranks up the screen brightness as much as I've seen from other devices, and I couldn't detect any overheating or movement on the battery while running the tests.
That said, I'll be entirely honest: I probably wouldn't recommend running it for more than 30-minutes at a time on a single charge at all. There's no easy way to tinker with the build of the hardware fundamentally. It's running on top of a cynical, theoretically secure, but weaponized version of Android:
Which means that anyone who wants to dissect and see what's going on under the hood is going to find pretty quickly that the operating system isn't particularly friendly to everyday consumers. It's open-source, too, giving developers access to the files that provide the basis for just about all of the UI and its core services. Google continues to patch out bugs every single day; to put it in very simple terms, there isn't really any forgiveness
The Pixel 4's battery life is pretty damn interesting. It manages to outlast most of its competitors across the board – including Android Wear 2.0 – in many ways, ultimately serving to put it at the head of the pack. It also generates a surprising amount of juice, especially for the base model that's available now. Of course, with only a single display, there's less of a margin for making any sort of apples-to-apples comparison.
So, what about the next article in this series?
The first piece of hardware I reviewed with the Pixel 4 was the Essential Phone, which was quite the beast of a smartphone. It took a full day to completely drain the Pixel 4 X down almost to nothing and put it through some unusually rigorous stress testing, thanks to the high-end Snapdragon 828 chipset. That battery test runs at 4.5X the Pixel 4's well-disciplined 2.7GHZ DDR4, supporting the massive 4GB of RAM and 18MP f/1.7 / 20MP f/2.2 dual camera setup on offer even at maximum brightness. The test run also ran thousands of times in an altimeter-based real-acceleration mode, which beat out the a sample Galaxy S7+ I tested on Sunday. As expected, the device never cranks up the screen brightness as much as I've seen from other devices, and I couldn't detect any overheating or movement on the battery while running the tests.
That said, I'll be entirely honest: I probably wouldn't recommend running it for more than 30-minutes at a time on a single charge at all. There's no easy way to tinker with the build of the hardware fundamentally. It's running on top of a cynical, theoretically secure, but weaponized version of Android:
Which means that anyone who wants to dissect and see what's going on under the hood is going to find pretty quickly that the operating system isn't particularly friendly to everyday consumers. It's open-source, too, giving developers access to the files that provide the basis for just about all of the UI and its core services. Google continues to patch out bugs every single day; to put it in very simple terms, there isn't really any forgiveness
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