What’s better than one of the best budget 5G phones out there with the cleanest and smoothest Android experience possible, pretty much unrivaled software support, excellent camera performance, and respectable Google Tensor G3 processing power? The same extraordinary mid-range handset sold alongside a nice and always handy $50 Amazon gift card.
If this hot new Pixel 8a deal happens to sound oddly familiar, let us tell you it’s actually not identical with the Best Buy promotion we brought to your attention earlier this week. The distinguishing element is fairly obvious, but we’ll point it out anyway: here you can get 50 free bucks to spend on a future Amazon.com purchase, and there you’re allowed to save $50 on something that Best Buy sells.
So, yes, if you’re both a devoted Amazon shopper and hardcore Google fan on a (relatively) tight budget, now’s the time to pull the trigger. Together with a $50 voucher, the Pixel 8a would normally cost $549 in an entry-level 128GB variant and $609 with 256 gigs of internal storage space, and if you hurry, you can spend $50 less than that on your favorite of the two configurations.
Neither one comes with a microSD card slot, of course, but both are equipped with a beautiful 6.1-inch OLED display capable of playing content in full HD resolution with up to 120Hz refresh rate support. Although it’s technically a mid-ranger, the recently released Pixel 8a is in many ways equal to or even better than the high-end Pixel 8 from last year.
Google’s “vanilla” Pixel 8, which just so happens to be sold at a very special price of its own right now, packs the same Tensor G3 SoC as its a-branded cousin, as well as an identical 8GB RAM count. The battery capacity and camera capabilities are also extremely similar between the two devices, making it pretty hard to recommend the costlier non-a Pixel 8 (without a gift card or any other freebies included in its currently reduced price).
Make no mistake, the Pixel 8a is just as impressive in real-life use as it is on paper, which we found out when we comprehensively reviewed the 6.1-inch phone only a couple of weeks back and deemed it a Pixel 8 killer with a lot of cool AI tricks up its sleeve and solid overall performance. Can you do better at a comparable price if you don’t insist on buying a Google-made device? Well, the OnePlus 12R, for instance, is certainly a phenomenal alternative… from a hardware standpoint, but perhaps less so as far as long-term software support is concerned.