Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsInferior to my 6-year old Essential PH-1 in nearly every way
Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2023
This is a decent phone in a lot of ways. The processor is powerful, the battery life is fine, the screen is okay, etc. Unfortunately, the software experience is absolutely awful. It often feels like a beta product.
I must preface this with the caveat that I only used it for about 2 weeks before I was offered to upgrade to Android 14. I didn't much care for the UI of Android 13, so I accepted. This is supposed to be one of the advantages of having a Pixel, getting the latest versions of Android as soon as they're available. It's too bad then that Android 14 is hot garbage.
Before I get into that, I'd like to discuss the issues I have with the hardware, specifically as it compares to the Essential PH-1. Here's a quick list of cons:
1. The buttons on the side of the phone. This is not a huge issue, but it took me a while to get used to. I much prefer the button layout on the PH-1. Volume up, volume down, power, in 3 separate buttons, in that order. When I first got the 7a, I kept pressing volume down instead of power.
2. The fingerprint sensor is awful. I cannot stress how much I hate the in-screen fingerprint sensor, which is not a convenient implementation. The sensor on the PH-1 is on the back, so I can operate it without looking at the screen and as I'm pulling it out of my pocket, using any available finger. It's just so easy and natural, and... it actually WORKS 99% of the time, unlike the garbage sensor in the 7a, which fails to recognize my thumb at least 50% of the time.
3. Aluminum construction is flimsy and easily scratched. My phone hasn't yet gotten bent from living in my pocket, but I suspect that it's inevitable. Apple demonstrated this problem 9 years ago with the iPhone 6. The Pixel 7a is likely even less sturdy due to its plastic back. The PH-1 is built like a tank, and feels like a massively higher quality phone just sitting in my hand.
4. It doesn't lay flat. Most phones don't. Still, this is one of my favorite aspects of the PH-1, as it never slides itself off a surface. At least the 7a DOES have the camera bar so that it doesn't sit crooked like other phones. (This can be solved by using a case, but I don't like to embiggen my phone with a case, so I don't use them.)
5. The cutouts at the bottom of the phone are not beveled at all, so when I rest the phone on my pinky finger, they dig into it.
6. The screen's aspect ratio is 20:9. I know super tall phones are a common trend in smartphones, but I don't get it at all. The last thing I need is a taller, skinnier screen. The PH-1's aspect ratio of 19.5:10 is far more usable. Not only for ease of touch input, but also for things like viewing maps while driving. The 7a is actually taller and slightly wider than the PH-1, but the usable screen space is significantly smaller.
7. Speaking of the screen, it has a lower resolution and therefore lower pixel density compared to the PH-1. The OLED looks good, but the bright colors have a tendency to wash out text when I'm trying to read something in low light conditions. The IPS screen on the PH-1 doesn't visually pop quite like the Pixel screen, but it's noticeably sharper and easier to read in the dark, which is a tradeoff I'll take any day.
8. Charging is MUCH slower. I can charge the PH-1 from dead to full in less than an hour. That means if I start to run low on juice, I can pause what I'm doing for 5-10 minutes and get a meaningful charge out of it. It charges so fast that I actually got used to NOT leaving it on the charger for any significant amount of time. The 7a seems to charge at about half the speed. It's not slow by any means, but compared to the PH-1, it's agonizing.
9. Battery life is okay, but I feel like it's not significantly better than the PH-1. That wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the slower charging, and the fact that you'd expect better battery life out of a phone that is 6 years newer. Maybe part of the problem is the silly always-on screen feature, the point of which I still haven't figured out yet.
10. It doesn't seem THAT much faster than the PH-1 despite the much newer silicon. It definitely loads ads better, but general app performance is only marginally more snappy in most of my use cases.
11. No headphone jack, although the PH-1 lacks this as well. A headphone jack would have gone a long way towards redeeming this phone for me.
12. It doesn't work with at least half of my existing phone chargers, including every cable I've tried in my car. I simply can't get it to charge in my car, no matter what I try.
What's good about the phone?
1. The screen is vibrant, though with the caveats of what I mentioned above. I honestly don't really care how the screen looks, I'm far more interested in how easy it is to read.
2. The camera is very good. The camera on the PH-1 is terrible. That said, I'm not a photographer and I don't take pictures on my phone that often, so I don't really care about camera quality that much. Additionally, the software processing that the 7a does on photos tends to make them look artificial, which I don't care for. I do like the responsiveness of the camera and I'll take my 7a cat pictures over my PH-1 cat pictures any day of the week, but it's not really a meaningful benefit for me personally. I think most people care a lot more about camera quality than I do.
3. The silicon inside this phone seems very good. It does get quite hot sometimes though. The PH-1 sometimes gets pretty hot, but it's far more predictable. The 7a seems to randomly get hot while doing normal things. I suspect this is due to background tasks in addition to whatever app I happen to be using.
4. It's generally an attractive, minimalistic phone, although I would have much preferred a matte black back rather than the glossy grey, which looks cheap and collects fingerprints and grime.
5. Superior haptic feedback. The vibration on the PH-1 is weird, it has a sort of "ring" to it when it does a quick pulse. Think of hitting a metal drum, how it has a long decay, as opposed to hitting something solid, which just makes a thud. The 7a vibration is tight and responsive.
6. It can run GrapheneOS. I haven't made the switch yet out of laziness, but the more I use this phone, the more I want to de-Google it.
Now it's time to talk about the software. Oh boy. Where do we start?
1. "Modern" Android has far too much Google bloat. The PH-1 runs vanilla Android 10, and while there are Google apps included that I don't use, it's about half as many apps as what is included with Android 14. Aside from that, it's just blatantly obvious how much more data collection is now happening in Android, with the phone constantly prompting me to re-enable features such as location so that Google can better track me.
2. UI bloat: things just take up more space or are organized in a less efficient manner for no apparent reason other than it looks different, I guess. The drop-down drawer at the top of the screen is the best example of this. It's so much more compact and easier to use in 10.
3. Needless restrictions, like the inability to run 32-bit apps in Android 14. This means I can't run Swype, which has been discontinued. Google actually owns the IP now, but they'd rather you use their own, terrible keyboard. I can't stress how terrible the Google keyboard is. I swear it was better when it was first introduced than how it operates currently.
4. Beta-quality OS experience. Basic UI features just plain don't work right. For instance, I unlock the phone, and I'm given the home screen background with nothing else on it. No dock icons, nothing. This is a FREQUENT occurrence. Sometimes, apps just close without giving a crash message. Earlier this morning, something happened which prompted me to write this review out of sheer frustration of the terrible user experience: the app-switching button, the one on the bottom right (which I use all the time), just stopped working altogether. I could press it and feel vibration feedback but nothing would happen. I had to reboot the phone to make it work again. There are more examples that I run into on a regular basis that I can't even recall right now. I've never had an Android phone with this many basic UI issues. It makes me wonder if Google is focusing solely on the Pixel 8 line of phones, and if I were a cynical person I might even suggest that they're doing it on purpose in order to encourage users to upgrade.
All of this makes me long for the experience I had with the Essential PH-1 and its vanilla Android 10. That experience is shockingly better given that it's a 6 year-old phone. I wouldn't have even bought the Pixel 7a if it weren't for the fact that my PH-1's battery just stopped charging one day and I needed a working phone fast, and didn't feel like changing the battery again. It's really too bad the PH-1 didn't use a replaceable battery, because I'd be happily still using it if that were the case. I will not bother with a battery replacement on the 7a when it dies. Maybe the phone will work better with GrapheneOS and the removal of all of the Google spyware. It certainly cannot work any worse.
