How good is the Google Pixel 3a’s performance?

• Performance on the Pixel 3a is good, if not standout.
• There’s 4GB of RAM on all versions and a single storage option of 64GB.
• The mid-range Snapdragon 670 handles most tasks well, apart from high-end gaming.

For a phone such as this to reach such a low price point, sacrifices had to be made – and with the Pixel 3a, performance appears to be the area that’s been hit the hardest. This is by no means a slow phone, with out-of-the-box regular tasks such as web-browsing, light gaming and scrolling through Instagram done with ease.

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However, if you’re someone who regularly enjoys high-end mobile gaming then this isn’t the phone for you. You’d be better off paying an extra £100 and opting for either a Xiaomi Mi 9 or OnePlus 7 since both include better internals and faster GPUs.

Surprisingly, the 4GB of RAM here is the same amount that features in the Pixel 3 XL – which costs double the price – and it enables snappy multitasking. It should also help the phone stay fast over a longer period.

A headphone jack sitting along the top edge of the Pixel 3a is a welcome addition; however, the speaker isn’t very good.

Google Pixel 3a: Geekbench 4

Geekbench is a CPU-focused benchmark and is arguably the most well-known and commonly used benchmarking tool. It gives a general performance score for the phone tested. We run it on all the handsets we review, regardless of their cost.

The results comprise of scores for single-core and multi-core performance. Single-core scores used to be the most important metric of a phone’s performance, since most Android apps are optimised to use only a single thread. However, advances in Android mean more and more processes are multi-thread.

The Pixel 3a scores put it in line with similarly priced phones.

Google Pixel 3a: AnTuTu

AnTuTu is a generalist benchmark that synthetically tests everything from theoretical gaming performance to picture editing and basic web browsing. As is the case with Geekbench, the Pixel 3a doesn’t impress greatly but neither does it have a poor score for the price.

Trusted Score