Google Pixel 10A review: Just buy the 9A

I’m not entirely sure why the Pixel 10A exists.

Google hasn’t upgraded the chipset, cameras, or battery in the new phone, and the tweaks it’s made elsewhere are minimal at best. The flatter camera island is good, I guess! In one sense this isn’t a big problem: The Pixel 9A is an excellent device, and for the last year was easily the best phone you could buy for $500 in the US. The new 10A is available to buy now at that same great price ($499 for 128GB of storage or $100 more for 256GB), but with the 9A still on sale, and dropping in price, there’s one big question: Why not just buy the 9A — which is almost the same phone — for $50 less?

When Google first showed me the 10A I struggled to get a good sense of what exactly had changed, so I pored over the spec sheets to lay out every hardware change Google has made, no matter how small. Here they are:

That’s not a whole lot, and none of these features feel individually like game-changers, except perhaps the introduction of Satellite SOS, which allows you to contact emergency services even when you’re outside of cell coverage. If that, or maybe the slightly faster charging, is enough to sway you to the 10A, great! I think you might be in the minority.

The exterior updates are subtle, but welcome. Last year’s 9A dropped Google’s usual camera bar in favor of a smaller camera that just barely rose out of the phone’s back. In the 10A Google has pushed this design further, making the phone very slightly thicker so that the camera is now not only flush with the body, but ever-so-slightly recessed inside.

It’s a welcome counterpoint to the bulging cameras on other phones with bigger ambitions. Those justify their designs with cutting-edge camera hardware, but since Google decided to instead stick with older, smaller sensors and focus its photography efforts on software, I applaud the decision to repay that with the least obtrusive camera design on any smartphone right now.

The phone as a whole looks great, even if the design isn’t especially novel. It’s simple, sleek, and comfortable to hold in one hand. It’s slightly larger than the $799 Pixel 10, despite using a similar 6.3-inch display, but the 10A is noticeably lighter, which more than makes up for the extra size. My black model — sorry, obsidian — feels a little conservative, but the berry and lavender versions look fantastic if you want a pop of color.

The 10A has the same 5,100mAh battery as the 9A, though Google claims the phone can last an extra 20 hours in its Extreme Battery Mode. That’s presumably thanks to software optimization, though in a press briefing Google declined to comment on whether the 9A would receive, or already had, those same optimizations. Either way, this is a big enough battery to last one day, but not two, which is basically fine. The slightly faster charging speeds are welcome, though still slower than many Android alternatives — and Google didn’t extend the Pixel 10 line’s Qi2 magnets down to the 10A, which really would have felt like a worthwhile upgrade.

The phone also runs on the same Tensor G4 chipset as last year’s 9A. It’s absolutely fast enough for all the day-to-day phone stuff, even if it falls short of the most powerful chipsets on the market. Google’s decision not to upgrade the chip a year on feels a little stingy, but it’s only really likely to cause headaches if you’re hoping for a powerhouse gaming phone (which this isn’t), or are planning to hold onto it for the duration of the seven years of OS updates, by which point the G4 will be nine years old and feeling a little long in the tooth.

The cameras are the same between the phones too, which was inevitable in retrospect: A quirk of Google’s lineup means that the Pixel 10 has the same 48-megapixel main and 13-megapixel ultrawide cameras as the 9A, and so this phone gets them too. These cameras felt just about good enough in the 10, but for a $499 phone I can’t complain much. I’m a fan of Google’s fairly natural processing, especially at night, when it mostly resists the temptation to over-brighten everything. The sensors are small though, so you’ll run into limits fairly quickly in low light, with noisy details and blown-out lights, especially on the ultrawide. There aren’t many better cameras at this price however, and none in the US, where you’d need to spend at least a few hundred bucks more for a meaningful upgrade.

The camera is also where you’ll find the whopping two software features found on the 10A but not the 9A: Camera Coach and Auto Best Take. Camera Coach is an AI feature that will give you step-by-step instructions on how to frame a photo, most of which boil down to “zoom in to focus on the subject.” It throws up an error message and refuses to work most of the time when I try it anyway. Auto Best Take is pretty much what it sounds like: an automatic version of the existing Best Take feature, which merges photos of groups to get the best expression from each person into the same shot. Neither is much of a reason to spend more on the 10A over the 9A, and in a press briefing Google wouldn’t confirm whether they would remain exclusive anyway, or simply roll out to the 9A in a future software update.

We’ve had a few exceedingly iterative phone updates recently: Samsung’s Galaxy S26 flagships feel like routine spec refreshes, Apple’s iPhone 17E mostly just adds MagSafe and more storage. But both those releases put the Pixel 10A to shame — at least they changed something.

The funny thing is, the Pixel 10A is still the best midrange phone in the US right now, and one of the better options worldwide too, which is mostly an indictment of what the rest of the industry is doing at this price point. In six months’ time, when the Pixel 9A has sold out its remaining stock, the 10A will be the best way to spend $500 on a phone. But while last year’s phone is still around, Google’s biggest competitor is Google.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge

Update, March 13th: Changed the score from a 6 to a 7.