jackpot city casino Pixel 7A Review: We’re Running Out of Reasons to Splurge on a ‘Pro’ Phone
Not long ago, there were plenty of compelling reasons to spend upward of $900 on a smartphone. Nowadays, you’ll have to come up with an excuse to pay that much.
I ran out of reasons to splurge and stopped buying fancier phones with the “Pro” moniker over the past two years. That’s not just because I’m frugal. Cheaper phones have increasingly become indistinguishable from high-end ones, and the few features that set them apart rarely justify the extra cost.
Google’s new budget phone that arrives in stores this week, the Pixel 7A, is the latest testament to the maturation of the smartphone market, and it presents an opportunity to save money. The entry-level handset, priced at $500, is in many ways on par with its premium counterpart, the Pixel 7 Pro, which cost $900. And based on my testing for a week, I would recommend the budget model for most Android users.
Bear with me as I break from the tradition of reviewing a phone’s features. Putting the Pixel 7A’s value into perspective requires a history lesson on smartphones.
For most of the last decade, the biggest disadvantage to buying Android phones instead of Apple’s iPhones was that they were short lived. Most Android phones received software updates for roughly two years, at which point they became less safe to use because they lacked security protections against the latest vulnerabilities. In contrast, iPhones got updates for about six years.
Many Android phone makers struggled to keep up with software updates because they relied on chips and components from an array of different manufacturers, and it was difficult to make new operating systems continue to work with all those parts.
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