Pixel 9a: Stunning photos, smart features, sustainable design

Transcript - Season 7 Episode 3 - Pixel 9a

Soniya 00:00:00 We know people love our camera, we know that they really want all those incredible Android features and all the AI powered helpfulness that we've been delivering with Gemini and we wanted to do all of that for less than $500 and that was the big goal when we set out with Pixel 9a

Voiceover 00:00:16 Welcome to the Made by Google podcast, where we meet the people who work on the Google products you love. Here's your host Rachid Finge.

Rachid 00:00:24 If you're looking for a phone that's less than $500 with all the AI you need and also has wireless charging and two cameras on the back, then today's brand new Pixel phone is perfect for you. Let's welcome back Director of Product Management, Soniya Jobanputra.

Voiceover 00:00:38 This is the Made by Google podcast.

Rachid 00:00:41 Sonya, if you had to pick iris, peony, obsidian or porcelain, which one will it be?

Soniya 00:00:48 Oh, you're making this way too hard to start with. I am absolutely in love with the iris color and truth be told, it tugs up my heartstrings because it is very close to the color of Pixel 3a, which was the first a series device that we did and it gives me memories of launching the very first A series. So that one definitely stands out for me.

Rachid 00:01:10 What a journey it's been since 3a now all the way to 9a. Of course, you know avid listeners of the podcast know you've been here last year for Pixel 8a. I'm wondering, when we were talking about 8a was like 9a in your mind already somewhere a little bit.

Soniya 00:01:25 Yeah, so our average development cycle from when we kind of have a concept of the phone to when you see it on shelf, it's kind of approximately 20 months give or take, right? And so we had a pretty good idea when we were chatting last year about exactly what was about to come in the next following year and how big of an improvement 9a was gonna be and how much it was gonna really change the way we perceive I think our A series devices.

Rachid 00:01:53 Okay, so let's jump in Pixel 9a. What's the big idea?

Soniya 00:01:56 Yeah, there's a lot going on with this device and I think we're super excited that we're able to bring what we consider the core Pixel experience to our most accessible price point in our portfolio. We know people love our camera, we know that they really want all those incredible Android features and all the AI powered helpfulness that we've been delivering with Gemini and we wanted to do all of that for less than $500 and that was the big goal when we set out with Pixel 9a.

Rachid 00:02:26 Alright, so let's break down the 9a a little bit. Maybe we can start at the outside, uh, with the design, one striking change I guess on the backside for people who've seen Pixel 8a and 7a and and 6a as well. You know, we have sort of a visor like design for the camera now I think we call it. Well something else like a pill shape I guess for the camera. Tell us more about that and why we made the change.

Soniya 00:02:48 Yeah, so I'm gonna start with, I love this new design. I am a middle minimalist at heart and this is right in my zone. So super proud of what our industrial design team created and I just love it. For the first time in all the history of A series, we've really departed from the design language that we have on our premium devices, giving A series its own unique personality. The Pixel 9a features what we are calling exactly what you said, a short pill design with a slight dome and it's quite reminiscent of our Pixel watches and it creates this really smooth flat design inspired by water droplets. Our industrial design team, they just did a tremendous job delivering this design and it is simple, it is beautiful and it's still, at least for me, really is iconically Pixel, you know, it's part of that family and working hand in hand with our industrial design team is the color and material and finishes team, which always does a great job of identifying colors and channeling that inspiration from the real world into beautiful shades that compliment the design With Pixel 9a, you said we have four colors, our iris, our peony and our neutral colors, obsidian and porcelain and each of these work harmoniously together.

Rachid 00:04:06 It's really cool to hear that the A series now gets to stand on its own feet sort of when it comes to design, right? Has that been on the team's mind for a little bit longer then?

Soniya 00:04:15 It has been. We've always wanted to ensure that A series could take full advantage of the halo from our premium devices. As in any company, we spend a lot of our energy and marketing and messaging around our premium phone, so we wanted to make sure that the association of A series to the quality and the capabilities of that device was secure in the minds of consumers before we created this departure. But A series in itself is just a different offering. It is about the core experience and we wanted an ID that reflected what the device offered and I feel like this was the right time and place after six generations we were ready to kind of break out from that design language and give it its own identity.

Rachid 00:05:01 It makes me wonder, Sonia, the new design, is it just as sustainable as the other phones in the Pixel line?

Soniya 00:05:07 Yeah, that's a great question. And sustainability and driving innovation and sustainability is a device and services priority within phones. We continuously strive to progress our sustainability story and the Pixel 9a is no different. It features a back cover that still has 81% recycled plastic. This is the highest percentage ever on an A series phone. We continue to use a hundred percent recycled aluminum frame on this device, giving it a premium feel, but also playing to that sustainability story and we use a hundred percent plastic free packaging, which this year is a little bit lighter. So we're really excited about all the progress we're able to make from a sustainability perspective.

Rachid 00:05:49 Amazing. Now let's go sort of literally inside 9a. I know that battery life is something that Pixel users care a lot about. There's a 5,100 mAh power battery in there. How do you translate that to the real world? What does that look like?

Soniya 00:06:02 Yeah, you know, you hit the nail on the head here. So battery life is a fundamental and when we ask our users what's the number one need you need, we hear battery life. And so with 9a, the aim was to eliminate battery anxiety by shipping the largest battery ever in an A series device resulting in a phone that lasts over 30 hours based on our Pixel day of use measurement. That's a 25% improvement vs 8a. Now I'll share an interesting little story and just because I feel like our engineering team reserves a little bit of a kudos for what they accomplished here. So we basically asked our engineering team go grow the battery to 5,000 milliamp hours, which is about 600 milliamp hours or 13% larger than it was on 8a. But we told them they had to keep the thickness, you can't change the Z, you gotta fit this battery in the same space you have today.

Soniya 00:07:00 That turned out to be not an easy problem and required the team to do two things. The first thing was a little bit of financial engineering 'cause they needed to find a way within the budget of an A series phone to support a major upgrade to what we call a plastic OLED display from our traditional much thicker glass OLED display. This plastic OLED display is very similar to the displays we use in our premium phones and so it's quite a bit more expensive. So it took a lot of work to be able to fund that. Second, they had to develop a whole new mechanical design internal on the phone that combined what they call a mid frame architecture, which we know is super durable with a new thin spine board layout which optimized for cost, reliability and space to fit that crazy big battery. It really was a simply amazing effort. Now in addition to growing the capacity 'cause capacity only gets you so far, we got the remaining of gains from incredible effort from our Pixel and Android teams coming together to drive power efficiency across major customer user journeys and the efficiency gains from our new tensor G4 processor.

Rachid 00:08:14 That is an amazing achievement. So you're saying we sort of made the screen a little bit thinner but then also had to compensate for the cost all just to fit in a 13% larger battery?

Soniya 00:08:24 That's right.

Rachid 00:08:26 That's really cool. Now of course it wouldn't be a Pixel without an amazing camera, you know, that goes all the way back to the first Pixel phone. Of course we talked about the short pill design just now, but what about the actual cameras and lenses in there and sensors?

Soniya 00:08:39 Yeah, once again, we are amazingly proud of our whole cross-functional camera team because they have been awarded the best camera under $500 once again, and it really offers our users the ability to shoot some of the most stunning photos and videos in any situation. We built Pixel 9a with an advanced rear camera system. It features a brand new 48 megaPixel main camera sensor, a 13 megaPixel ultra wide sensor with 8x super res zoom capabilities with computational photography features. Pixel 9a takes your photos and videos to the next level with features like Macro Focus, which is a first on Pixel 9a enabling users to capture incredible details in photos and videos even at close range features like Add Me, ensure that everyone is included in the group photos through the amalgamation of Google's augmented reality platform and 15 different on-device models all running on that Tensor G4 processor.

Soniya 00:09:44 And we also have Best Take, which intelligently blends faces from multiple shots to get the perfect group photo with no one blinking. Personally, this is a family staple for young kids and of course we have all of those editing features that are super amazing thanks to our collaboration with our photos team. And I guess the one other add-on I'll give is that we also have all those favorites that we've always had with our Pixel devices, which is that Magic Eraser, Audio Magic Eraser, Night Sight, and astrophotography. I have to also share a huge thanks to our camera team. They have been the most incredible partners supporting A series from day one in ensuring for the last four generations we have been the best camera available under $500. That is an absolutely incredible accomplishment in such a competitive field that they've been able to sustain that claim.

Rachid 00:10:41 Absolutely it is. It's been always a great camera on the A series. Never been any compromise there. That's really great. I can't help but ask of course, since you mentioned AI, we'll need to dive into that because I'm just wondering what kind of other AI powered features do we get on 9a?

Soniya 00:10:57 Yeah, Pixel 9a is equipped with our fastest, most efficient silicon yet Google Tensor G4, which was custom developed with Google, with the Google DeepMind team. This is the same chip, exactly the same chip that we have in our Pixel 9 Pro phones, which makes Pixel 9a, the only phone engineered by Google that brings Google AI in this price tier Pixel 9a supports many of the Google AI features, but let me call out just a few of them. The first one of course is Gemini, your personal AI assistant that can help you with tasks big and small. This includes access to Gemini Live video announced as part of our March Pixel drop that we just talked about yesterday. We also have access to you Pixel Studio. This is our AI image generator that lets you create unique images. You can use text to image prompts to generate images to people circle to search, which we launched about two years ago also on 8a, but now available on 9a. That allows you to search your screen without switching apps just by circling something that you see on the screen to search for it. And finally, our AI powered recorder, which can transcribe and summarize recordings and label different speakers in a transcript. What's super special about AI recorder is that it's using Gemini Nano, which is running on device. This is the only device in this tier that's running Gemini Nano locally on device.

Rachid 00:12:27 That is really cool and a lot of useful features will come from that I'm sure, using a Gemini Nano. Any other maybe safety features that we should know about 9a?

Soniya 00:12:36 Yeah, you know, all of our Pixel devices focus on offering our users both digital safety and personal safety. And I'll call out three of the features that we're talking about this year. And one of them is Car Crash Detection. Again, a feature we've supported for a long time but now uses AI to detect accidents and can automatically call for help for our users. We have theft protection, which we announced this year with Pixel 9, which secures your sensitive data if your phone is lost or stolen and VPN by Google built in for secure online browsing.

Rachid 00:13:12 You know, my kids are way too young to have a phone, but if they were a bit older, I think the 9a would be the sensible choice. Right, especially thanks to Family Link for me as a parent. I presume all the great Family Link features are a 9a as well, right?

Soniya 00:13:25 Yes. So as a proud parent of a tween who just got their phone, they are on an A series device and I'm looking forward to purchasing her Pixel 9a. 9a was developed with families in mind and it is a great first phone with its long battery life, amazing camera and an onboarding process that makes it easier for parents and guardians to set up a new phone for their little ones. It has Family Link which gives parents control over screen time, app usage and location sharing for their kids. And for the first time we now have school time, which helps minimize distraction during school hours and Google Wallet, which I have been asking for forever. And so I am so excited that this is coming to phones 'cause it gives our kids that financial freedom to, you know, start building that responsibility and so love that we're able to offer kids the opportunity to make payments with their own Google Wallet.

Rachid 00:14:24 You know something I'm thinking, so my kids are too young for a phone right now, but with seven years of software updates, you know, maybe they will get a 9a at some point, right? Because we still offer seven years of updates on 9a.

Soniya 00:14:36 We absolutely do. Yes. We offer seven years of drops and OS upgrades and security upgrades. So your Pixel will continuously get better.

Rachid 00:14:47 Maybe this question is even harder than the one at the top because you know, we always ask, uh, top tip for our listeners, something that they should try with, in this case a Pixel 9a. There's so much to choose from. What would you, what would you say they should choose and try?

Soniya 00:15:00 Yeah, the feature that I've been using the most as part of our testing has been Gemini Live video. And I encourage everyone whether if they have access or don't have access Gemini Advanced, take advantage of that one month offer on Gemini Advanced and test this feature out. It is absolutely incredible to be able to share what you're looking at and have a conversation with Gemini Live and be able to kind of plan out something. So I'll share a specific example. I need to replant my front yard and I've been having multiple conversations as we walk around my neighborhood and look at other people's gardens around what plants there are and when those plants work in my garden. And it's amazing the conversation, the depth, the learning that I get out of the conversations and so I encourage everyone to give it a try.

Rachid 00:15:53 That is a really cool feature. And later in the season of the Made by Google podcast, we will talk to the Gemini team about features like Gemini Live video. So if you're interested in the Pixel 9a, I'd say head over to the Google store, check out the new colors as well. Iris, I guess I'll have to agree with you. That is a really, really nice one. I guess it will be that one as well for me. Thank you so much for joining us Sonya. And uh, well if there's another A series phone, I guess we'll see you again.

Soniya 00:16:17 Yes. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure.

Voiceover 00:16:20 Thank you for listening to The Made by Google podcast. Don't miss out on new episodes. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to listen.