I had the Pixel 4a for a month in late 2020, and I generally liked the phone. The most important part that makes this phone great is the price, $350. It's not going to get you any top-tier iPhone 12 Pro Max or Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, but it gives you everything the general user would possibly need - a decently fast Snapdragon 730G SOC, 6GB RAM, and 128GB storage. That's something that not even the $830 base configuration of iPhone 12 gets you.Of course, being $350 there are a few things that it misses out on compared to higher-tier phones. One of those things would be the plastic unibody build over something like a metal and glass sandwich. On a phone of this price point it's fine, though I did have a bit of plastic creaking near the SIM slot. It was just an annoyance at worst, because the rest of the plastic build felt fine.Wireless charging is also not present, this may disappoint some that used it but it didn't bother me cause I never used wireless charging on my iPhone 8.There's no water resistance either, which did raise my eyebrows a bit before I bought the phone but I don't submerge my phone in water or take it to very dusty places.One thing this does have that the $700 Pixel 5 doesn't have is a headphone jack. So if you still use anything with a 3.5mm plug, this phone has you covered with no need for adapters! The speakers are also quite good, with one speaker on the bottom next to the USB-C port and one built into the earpiece.As for the software, it's got three years of updates which is better than many Android manufactures, but it still won't top Apple's software support. I did notice a few software bugs when I used it, mainly with YouTube Vanced's PIP mode after a certain amount of time. Restarting fixed the issue but it was an annoyance. Hopefully that was just Android 11 and that gets fixed with a future update.Battery life is also pretty decent, better than the aging battery on my iPhone 8 since I could comfortably leave it off the charger for one night. Given that it's a small phone by today's standards it's not going to be a battery life king, but it's better than the $400 iPhone SE.The size is something I loved about this phone, my hands are relatively small and I like my phone to be pocketable, which is something that I'm not a fan of with most new phones being over 6 inches in size. The 5.81-inch edge-to-edge screen Is of a similar size to my iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, thus I could easily use it with one hand and it fit well in my pockets. This is something I'm sure is greatly appreciated by those who also like smaller phones.The camera has been the definition of the Pixel phones since the first ones launched in 2016. This phone has an amazing single 12MP lens, mostly made great by Google's computational photography software. Night mode was very nice to use, as in the scenarios I used it in it helped out take better photos at night. I'm no expert with cameras so I don't know much about white balance, dynamic range, etc. I do like how this phone gives you one great camera as opposed to other manufacturers which give you like seven different pretty-much-useless camera sensors.Overall, this is the phone to buy if you're on a budget of less than $500 and you want something that will fulfill all the general needs. I would suggest going for the Pixel 4a 5G version if you can afford a $500 phone as that has a second ultrawide camera lens, a faster Snapdragon 765G SOC, and as the name says, 5G connectivity. That phone will overall will give you a very very close experience to the Pixel 5, but if you don't have that much to put down for a phone, and if you like the standard 4a's smaller size, this phone is the way to go. I highly recommend it and I would personally pick this any day of the week over a similarly priced phone from a China brand like Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE, Vivo, etc.