4a will apparently be noticeably underpowered compared to the regular Pixel 4. Not sure if that's how it was with the 3a?
Hm, depends on your definition of
noticeably. Side by side with a Pixel 3, the 3a definitely performs worse, but I mean, you don't shave 50% off the price of something without scaling a few pieces back.
Pixel 3a vs. Pixel 3:
+ Has a 3.5mm headphone jack
+ Has the same image sensor and back camera as the Pixel 3 (but no Visual Core, but that
surprisingly wasn't used by the Google Camera app anyways...)
+ Larger battery (+85 mAh on the smaller model, +270 mAh on XL)
+/- Plastic frame instead of glass (more durable, but less premium)
+/- Same amount and type of RAM in both (4GB LPDDR4X)
- Dragontrail Glass screen material instead of Gorilla Glass 5
- Lower PPI and much lower resolution between the XL's (3a: 441 PPI, 3a XL: 402 PPI, 3: 443 PPI, 3 XL: 523 PPI)
- No wireless charging because of plastic frame
- Snapdragon 670 instead of 845 (think of the 6xx line as Qualcomm's "Celeron" line, decent performance at much lower draws)
- 3a has fixed 64GB storage -- no 128GB (or other) variations
Overall I'd say they were very smart about where to compromise and where not to. I haven't used one myself so I can't directly comment on performance, but I think like three posters here have a Pixel 3a so they can probably speak to it.
The 4a will likely:
- Be plastic (no wireless charging)
- Still have the headphone jack
- Still have the fingerprint sensor (despite the Pixel 4 ditching it)
- Use a Snapdragon 6xx chipset
- Have 6GB RAM like the Pixel 4
Would be really cool if they added waterproofing. That's kinda the only hardware feature left I could want.