Gen X and Boomer Guide to Pixel 8a
- Jul 13, 2024
- 15 min read
Updated: Mar 23
There are a lot of reviews out there for all the latest phones but the vast majority are in the form of YouTube videos, created by Millennials and members of Gen Z, who are already well versed in the latest versions of iOS and Android and are very heavily focused on the technical specifications, rather than the basic functions of the phone.
I therefore wanted to share my perhaps more unusual experience of helping my 81-year-old Dad migrate from a 5-year-old Huawei P, stuck on Android 9, to the Google Pixel 8a, running Android 14.
So here you have it: a Gen X and Boomer Guide to the Google Pixel 8a.
Looking for a TLDR (too long, don't read) summary or short of time? Jump to the section you want:
Having been born in 1943, my Dad isn't technically a Boomer but, given that there are probably very few smartphone owners from the wartime generation out there, this review is primarily for the benefit of Boomers and members of Gen X who, like us, bought perfectly good phones 5 or so years ago (in my case a Blackview BV6300 Pro for under £250!) and haven’t had any reason to change them; but are now being forced to upgrade due to an increasing number of apps, including essential but security-critical banking apps, withdrawing support for older versions of Android.
Declaration of interest: I have no affiliation with any of the manufacturers or products mentioned in this review and have not received any incentive or inducement to write it.
So, on with the review.
How does the Pixel 8a compare with other phones on the market?
My Dad's requirements were pretty simple in that he just wanted a basic smartphone for texting, emails, web browsing, checking the weather, health & fitness monitoring and banking. I was open to all options, except iPhones, primarily because my Dad is used to Android, but also due to their over-inflated prices, proprietary ecosystem, and anti right-to-repair stance.
My Husband sent me details of some of the lesser known models that I may not have heard of, so I first looked at the CMF Phone 1 by Nothing and the FairPhone 5 .
At £179.99 at the time of writing, the Nothing seems like great value, but it only comes with 2 years’ major OS and 3 years’ security updates and I was wary of getting an off-brand phone, like my own Blackview, which would quickly become outdated and stuck on an old version of Android. I also noted that it runs on its own Nothing OS 2.6, which is powered by Android 14. In my past experience with HTC models, I've found there can be quite a lag between Google releasing an update and it being rolled out to other manufacturers' Android-based operating systems because they have to update and test their own software to ensure compatibility. The magnetic add-on accessories are cool but I couldn't see my Dad having a need for them that couldn't be fulfilled by a more mainstream phone, for which accessories are usually readily available at a low cost.
By contrast, the modular and reputedly easily repairable FairPhone 5 offers a 5-year warranty and guarantees operating system and security updates until 2031, or at least 5 updates after Android 13, but the £649 price tag at the time of writing put it on par with mainstream manufacturers Samsung and Google, both of whom are now also promising 7 years' OS and security updates for their latest models. The review by Linus Tech Tips, whose opinion I usually rate, also highlighted some areas of concern, such as the fingerprint sensor being on the power button and easy to confuse with the volume buttons, to which I feared Dad would find even more difficult to adjust than the change from rear to in-display sensor now adopted by most phones. I ultimately decided that £649 was too big a gamble for a slightly quirky phone that might not suit my Dad, so it was probably better to stick with the "devil you know" at a similar or possibly lower price point.
I was however reluctant to suggest a Samsung, due to their custom software that overlays and in my view over-complicates the stock Android experience, creating duplicate apps and features that my Dad wouldn't want or need. I lost count of how many times I had to tell "My Huawei" to get lost when persistently trying to sign him up for their own health and fitness app, when he already has My Fitness Pal and Fitbit. The Samsung price tag is also hard to justify for a basic smartphone, seeing as he doesn't need a high spec camera or gaming level performance!
I had feared the same would be true of Google, who were quick to follow Apple in ramping up the cost of their previously reasonably priced own-brand phones from £599, when I bought the first ever Pixel in 2017, to £700-£1,000 for their latest models. It was only when I was comparing the Pixel 7 and 8 that I noticed the "new" 8a for £499: £200 cheaper than the Pixel 8, at £699 at the time of writing and only £50 more than last year's Pixel 7 and 7a (both £449 at the time of writing), for which updates and OS support will end much earlier.
When I looked at the differences between the 8a and the 8 (summary table below) they were mainly in the minutiae of the camera specifications and back-plate material. The Pixel 8 can share its charge with other wireless charging devices, which the 8a can't and the 8 has 3 microphones, vs. 2 on the 8a; but, since my Dad rarely uses the camera, would be putting the phone in a case, so wouldn't notice the back-plate, doesn't own any other wireless devices and has more difficulty hearing that being heard on the phone, none of these factors mattered to him a jot. The size difference between the Pixel models is also infinitesimal, with none varying by more than half a centimetre than the 8a in any direction: just enough to ensure that cases and screen protectors can't be shared across the range, but unlikely to be detectable by a human hand or naked eye.
Key feature Comparison Summary
Pixel 8a | Pixel 8 | Pixel 7 | Pixel 7a | CMF 1 | Fairphone 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
OS Updates | May 2031 | Oct 2030 | Oct 2025 | May 2026 | 2026 | 2031 |
Security Updates | May 2031 | Oct 2030 | Oct 2027 | May 2028 | 2027 | 2031 |
Display | 6.1" | 6.2" (+2.54 mm) | 6.3" (+5 mm) | 6.1" (same) | 6.67" (+14.5 mm) | 6.46" (+9.14 mm) |
Height | 152.1 mm | 150.5 mm (-1.6 mm) | 155.6 mm (+3.5 mm) | 152 mm (-0.1 mm) | 164 mm (+11.9 mm) | 161.6 mm (+9.5 mm) |
Width | 72.7 mm | 70.8 mm (-1.9 mm) | 73.2 mm (+0.5 mm) | 72.9 mm (+0.2 mm) | 77 mm (+4.3 mm) | 75.83 mm (+3.13 mm) |
Depth | 8.9 mm | 8.9 mm | 8.7 mm (-0.2 mm) | 9 mm (+0.1 mm) | 8 mm (-0.9 mm) | 8 mm (-0.9 mm) |
Weight | 189 g | 187 g | 197 g | 193.5 g | 197 g | 212 g |
Rear Camera | 64 MP | 50 MP | 50 MP | 64 MP | 50 MP | 50 MP |
Front Camera | 13 MP | 12 MP | 13 MP | 13 MP | 16 MP | 50 MP |
Back | Scratch-resistant Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3 | Edgeless Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus® with matt aluminium frame | Edgeless Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus® with matt aluminium frame | 3D thermo-formed composite with alloy frame and visor | Vegan Leather interchan-geable casing | Corning® Gorilla® Glass 5 with laminated oleopho-bic coating |
67 (bath) | 68 (pool) | 68 | 67 | 52 | 55 | |
Charging | Wireless & fast wired | Wireless & fast wired | Fast wireless and fast wired | Wireless and fast wired | Wired only | Wired only |
Battery Share | No | Yes | Yes | No | N/A | N/A |
Mics | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | ||
Spatial Audio | No | Yes | Yes | No |
Summary of differences between Pixel 8a vs. 7, 7a and 8, plus CMF Phone 1 & Fairphone 5 for comparison. *IP rating = dust and water resistance. The 1st number (1-6) relates to dust and the 2nd (1-8) to water. IP67 is resistant to all dust and up to 1 m of water for up to 30 mins. IP68 is resistant to all dust and up to 4m of water for up to 30 mins. In short, you can drop the 7a and 8a in the bath but the 7 and 8 should be able to survive a dip in a swimming pool!
I therefore recommended he get the Pixel 8a, as £499 for a phone that should get the latest OS and security updates as soon as they become available for the next 7 years didn’t seem at all bad.
The only thing deterring me from getting one for myself was the reputedly flaky fingerprint sensor, which many reviewers claim doesn't work well if the user has damp, greasy or very dry digits, all of which I'm prone to because I do have dry hands and therefore often use hand cream, which then makes them greasy! I also tend to use my phone for recipes and music when cooking and like taking pictures while I'm gardening, often resulting in me using my phone with wet, dirty or even sticky fingers! My Dad however doesn’t suffer from any of these concerns, so I thought he could ‘pilot’ it and see how the sensor fairs for him, before making a final decision on my upgrade.
Initial set-up
The first thing that pleasantly surprised me was the seamless transition from the old Huawei. Last time I switched Android phone manufacturers, I remember having to at least enter the WiFi password and log into my Google account on the new phone but Dad had to do neither. He just tapped a button on his old phone, which eerily seemed to detect it was about to be replaced and all the apps, WiFi passwords and even his home screen wallpaper were ported over to the Pixel. All in all, this took about 15 minutes, plus a bit longer to finish downloading all his apps, but it required no manual intervention and gave Dad time for a cuppa.
Next came the set up steps, which were pretty easy to follow, with the exception of a tutorial on how to swipe left for back, right for forward and up for home, followed by an ostensibly intuitive but in reality very hard to master sequence of dragging and pausing halfway up the screen to view your currently open apps. After a few failed attempts, I told Dad to skip that step, reassuring him they were just "gestures" that he would probably never need to use.
I then took the phone from him to set up his widgets and put his icons where he's used to having them and it was at this point that I got a bit stuck…
FFS Moments
I needed to access the app drawer to drag the icons to their desired locations but the app drawer button wasn't there. In fact none of the buttons were there and I was totally flummoxed. No doubt in deference to their rivals at Apple, who famously only ever had one physical button and even that became a sensor in 2022, Google had evidently decided in their wisdom to do away with the three on-screen buttons and replace them with an irritating little bar that just sat there smugly but silently admonishing me for skipping the tutorial.
No problem, I thought. I'm sure there's a way to get the buttons back, I just needed to know how. So I did what every Millennial would tell me to do and Googled it. Sure enough, all I needed to do was go into Interaction Controls > System Controls > Navigation Mode and tick 3-button Navigation. Perfect! My reputation as the "Daughter that's good with technology because she works in IT" was no longer in the balance! Except it was, because that's when I encountered my second FFS moment. First Find the Settings!
This presented a whole new challenge because, instead of being in the top right hand corner of the notifications drawer, where I expected it to be, the elusive little cog was also nowhere to be seen.
After furiously tapping, dragging, swiping and swearing at the little white bar in what must have eventually been the right combination (I subsequently discovered you can actually swipe up from anywhere on the home screen), I somehow got into the app drawer and managed to search for settings, as if it were any other app. Except it's not like other apps! It's settings that you want to be able to access easily when you're in the middle of another task and realise something isn't quite right and want to change it! Anyway, I quickly dragged and dropped the Settings icon to a temporary location on the home screen before I could lose it again and typed "Interaction controls" into the search bar. Lo and behold, there it was: 3-button Navigation. Hurrah! I was saved.
I then found the setting to increase the grid on the home screen from 4×5 to 5×5 to accommodate my Dad's top 10 apps, like he had them on the Huawei and then set about adding his widgets, at which juncture I encountered another problem.
The Smooth Calendar widget, which had worked perfectly on the old Huawei, was now refusing to access my Dad's Google calendar. I checked and double-checked the permissions but it just wasn't showing up in the list of available calendars from which to show events [edit: it evidently just took some time to sync because it magically started working the very next day].
At a Glance won't Go Away
I then turned my attention to the Transparent Weather widget, which my Dad finds useful because it tells him the date, time and weather forecast for the next 5 days, so he can plan his walks and tell the Gardener whether or not it's worth her making a visit.
I tried to add the widget in the usual way but it kept saying there was no room on the home screen, evidently because there was a seemingly immovable date widget getting in the way! I tapped the obstruction and it gave me the option to disable it, which I did, but it still refused to budge!
"At a Glance" is apparently the renamed Google Now, which earlier versions of Android allowed you to switch off completely, just have sit silently in your notification drawer to refer to at your leisure, or choose to display as a widget. While Android 14 allows you to enable or disable certain suggestions, it appears that it isn't currently possible to remove it and the date stubbornly persists in taking up two whole lines of the home screen. According to Reddit, where this is apparently a very frequently asked question, the only way to remove it is to install a 3rd party launcher, which is frankly ridiculous! I've used Nova Launcher for many years on my own phones, just because I like to customise the look of my icons, but I had hoped Dad wouldn't need this extra layer of complexity.
While I'm sure At a Glance has its own clock, weather and calendar widgets, they don't seem to have a 5-day forecast and Google Calendar's own widget takes up a disproportionate amount of space relative to the amount of information it contains, unlike the compact Smooth Calendar.
Although not a total deal-breaker because you can install a launcher, it seems to be deliberately designed purely to p*** people off and/or force them to install a 3rd party launcher, which seems ironic, given that its intention is presumably to encourage or even force people to use theirs! If it was possible to just move it to another position, my Dad may have used it and might even have found it useful but, for now, I have installed Nova Launcher and sent At a Glance packing altogether. This did of course mean positioning the icons and widgets on the home screen all over again but, fortunately for me, Dad doesn't have that many and I can now backup his screen layout and preferences in Nova Launcher, should he need to change phones again in the future.
So what's it like to use?
Once the phone was up and running, both Dad and I commented on how nice it is to hold, either with or without the official case, which surprisingly wasn't exorbitantly priced, at only £29.99 at the time of writing, on top of which Dad got a £10 discount for buying it with the phone. There are of course cheaper and more rugged cases available online but the official one seemed sufficient for my Dad's needs and saved any angst about anything not fitting perfectly or accidentally ordering the wrong one. The official case does however seem to be quite prone to static and therefore also to picking up dust and any crumbs from the dining table, but this is relatively a minor issue that could easily be resolved by a case made of a different texture or material.
The things that initially most impressed my Dad though were the smooth transitions between apps, which was obviously a big improvement on his ageing Huawaei, but more importantly how easy it is to answer. It literally tells you what to do, with a nice clear green icon to drag upwards. For some reason, this proved very difficult on the Huawei, with red and green buttons that in fact weren't buttons at all and you had to drag the circle over the one you wanted; something my Dad and my late Mother before him really struggled to fathom.
Something else I liked, which may have been an Android feature for some time, but was highlighted during the set-up, is that you can store useful information in the phone that can be accessed in an emergency without having to unlock it. I added my Husband and I as emergency contacts, as well as Dad's current medication and blood type. I would however advise disabling the trigger to contact the Emergency Services by pressing the power button 5 times. In my opinion, the person that designed that for a device where the power button is just above the volume ‘up’ control needs shooting! It is already possible to make emergency calls from the lock screen, so why make it so easy to do so accidentally? Incidentally, I did tell my Dad I had disabled the feature (which he didn’t even know existed) and he does have a button on his Acticheck to call for help in an emergency.
So far, the fingerprint sensor seems to be behaving well and in fact Dad says it works more reliably than the Huawei P Smart. One thing that is quite annoying though is that if, for whatever reason, you do need to enter the PIN, you also have to tap the enter key after entering the PIN before the phone will unlock. This is really annoying when all previous devices either of us have used in the past have unlocked immediately upon entry of the correct code. This is no doubt a security feature but one where the irritation factor seems to outweigh any conceivable benefit. Hopefully Dad won't have to use it too often if the biometric sensor continues to work and it is probably something he will get used to, as it's only like adding an extra digit on the end of the PIN.
Something that I found harder to get used to was that it doesn't seem possible to disable the gesture of swiping down from anywhere on the home screen to access the notifications drawer. This was a real pest when I was trying to move icons around the home screen because, as soon as I appeared to be swiping down (if I didn't press hard enough to select the icon to register a 'drag'), the notification drawer came down and got in my way. Worse, the drawer seems to be unnecessarily protracted by a big white block, even if you don't have any notifications.
Having performed a Google search, the swipe down gesture can be switched off on Samsung Galaxy phones but the setting described in the video just doesn't seem to exist on the Pixel. Again, this may be something I can resolve with Nova Launcher but you have to buy the paid version of the app to change gestures. I should research Google's financial interests in Nova Launcher, because they certainly seem to be pushing users toward their products!
Ironically, when taking the above screenshot, I happened to pull the notification drawer right down to its fullest extent and found the settings cog hiding in the bottom right-hand corner! Another FFS moment for sure!
Gen X and Boomer Guide to Pixel 8a Conclusion:
If you’re used to an older version of Android, not having 3-button navigation by default is a huge pain point in the set-up process and I feel Google should have left it how it was, as it’s much easier for an “advanced” user to swap the buttons out for the gestures than the other way around. I have since seen that the steps to change it are explained in one of the "Quick Tips" linked to from the "Welcome" email, under "Get around on your Pixel phone", but you'd have to know to look for it, which I didn't until after I'd been through the process! The fact that they've included it does however suggest that it's been a source of negative feedback from a number of users, but apparently not enough to make them want to change the default setting.
I find the immovable at-a-glance "widget" much harder to forgive and it detracts from one of the many reasons I prefer Android to Apple, which is that I like total control over the screen(s). It also dilutes Google's "Stock Android" advantage over other Android phones that come with their own UI if you're going to have to install a 3rd party launcher anyway. This and not being able to disable the swipe down from anywhere gesture that accidentally pulls down the mahusive notification drawer, are probably what will tip the balance for me personally in favour of the more expensive Samsung Galaxy S24 (£799 at the time of writing).
If you are however looking for a cheap(er) basic smartphone with a decent period of software and security updates, or specifically want a Pixel, I would definitely recommend the 8a over their other models. The negligible differences between it and the 8 are certainly not worth an extra £200, but the promise of software and security updates for the next 7 years do in my view justify the additional £50 cost over the also very similar 7 or 7a. If you don't have many icons or widgets on your home screen, you may not even mind the at-a-glance widget, but installing a 3rd party launcher is a decent workaround. Incidentally, Dad hasn't actually had an issue with the swipe gestures, since he says he isn't an "habitual swiper" and doesn't try to move icons around either.
Since Dad also doesn't really use the camera, I will have to try it myself and maybe make it the subject of a separate review but, as a basic smartphone, it does do the job. It's a sensible size, it's easy to answer calls, transitions are smooth and obviously much quicker than on older devices. It gets the Boomer if not the Gen X seal of approval!
Watch this space for a comparison of the Pixel 8a and Galaxy S24!
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