Here’s a closer look at Google’s new budget Pixel phones, the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL

Google has just announced two new additions to its lineup of Pixel phones at its annual Google I/O event in California.

The Pixel 3a and the Pixel 3a XL will start at the relatively piddling sum of £399 (compared to £739 for the Pixel 3) and are positioned as a pair of wallet-friendly, value-for-money alternatives to the company’s two premium flagship Pixel devices. With the launch of two mid-range Android phones, Google is taking aim at the widening chasm in the market created as the most expensive handsets from Apple and Samsung sail past the £1,000 mark.

Hands-on impressions are of a phone that looks and feels remarkably similar to the high-end Pixel 3, with the same unibody design and glassy two-tone finish round the back. In fact, it’s tricky to spot which corners Google has cut to drive down the price this much. Luxuries like wireless charging have been stripped out, and the front-facing dual speakers have been replaced with a single speaker, but much of what makes the Pixel 3 such a great phone is tied up in Google’s software rather than in the phone’s physical hardware. And here on the Pixel 3a, the software has been optimised to within an inch of its life to run smoothly on bargain basement specs.

That means the single-lens camera of the Pixel 3a can rely on the same array of image processing algorithms and machine learning wizardry to produce the kind of photography you’d expect of a phone costing twice as much. It retains features like Night Sight, which produces impressively clear and colourful photographs in low light environments, as well as Portrait mode, which uses software to differentiate between the foreground and background, and so doesn’t require a second lens.  As with the Pixel 3 before it, you’re given unlimited online storage for pictures and video with Google Photos.

Other software features passed down to this sub-£400 phone include Adaptive Battery, which tracks and predicts app usage to divert power to where it’s needed most, and dials down battery usage when your phone is idle. Google Assistant, the virtual helper now ubiquitous in every Google product, is along for the ride as expected. And Google has finally found a practical use for augmented reality tech, that goes beyond making it look like Iron Man is standing in your kitchen. Walking directions in Google Maps can now be overlaid on to the camera, placing giant hovering arrows over the real world to show you which way down the street you should be going, and where your next turn is. It’s a genuinely helpful feature for those moments of brief disorientation when leaving an unfamiliar tube station, and will also be eventually rolled out to existing Pixel phones.

There’s also a headphone jack, which feels about as retro as a vinyl deck in 2019, and enterprise-grade data encryption with the same dedicated Titan M security chip found in the top-end Pixel 3.

Taken as a whole, Google’s new Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL represent the best budget phones you can currently buy. Stripped down to brass tacks and obviously less powerful than the Pixel 3, but without feeling compromised, they make the strongest case yet for not dropping a grand on the latest and best phones around.