Google Pixel 5A 5G Smart Phone 6 Inches, 6GB RAM, 128GB HDD

GREAT PHONE WHEN YOU UN-GOOGLE IT. I bought this phone for its processing speed and mainly for its compact size — I simply don’t care for the mega-sized phones. It is the smallest 5G you can get. The problem with the Google phones are, they are totally Google-ized. All the default settings have you shoveling all your data — virtually everything you do — up to your Google online account by default. Android users already have an account, but you’ll need to log in with a PC and roll through ALL of the online settings and start shutting things off unless you really enjoy sharing everything you do, from passwords to photos, other accounts you may have — with the biggest trolling site in the world.After that, it took me days to go through the phone and disable or uninstall all the Google bloatware and defaults. The default music player is YT Player (YouTube Player — YT is a Google company) so it’s constantly pitching you YT content online when all you want to do is play YOUR music stored on the phone. The camera app simply sucks. I grabbed a far better free one (ad-free) at the app store. Ditto the calendar.There is a crazy feature called Do Not Disturb (the default setting is “ON”) that detects when you’re driving and kills the audio from Android Auto! Listen to a podcast? Oh, no you don’t! Do Not Disturb requires several settings be toggled to make the Android Auto work correctly. I could go on… Some of the important default settings are hidden under a special “Developer” menu under the Settings “System” menu. After an online search, I found a secret 7-tap procedure to open it up and disable something else that Google was sure everyone would like.Once all this silliness was adjusted to make this a “normal” Android phone, it’s a seriously great phone that would otherwise earn 5-stars. I simply can’t understand why phone & computer manufacturers can’t send these units out “bare bones” and let the consumer add only what THEY want. Rant over. If you have the patience, buy one.

Not a short learning curve. This phone replaced my ancient Samsung galaxy S-6 which served me extremely well until it no longer supported apps and developed suspicious and periodic battery drain problems. Switching to Google operations is a challenge but not unpleasant. The major problems I have are swiping to receive a call, receiving voice mail, and receiving 5G. Most of the time I cannot open the call so I have to call the caller back. Voice mail gives me a message saying “it had a problem” after multiple open attempts, I finally get the voice mail. I do get 5G in some locations but not at home when my wife’s phone (Samsung Galaxy Z flip) does get 5G. I do like the camera and many other features.

Great phone. Worked perfectly fine out of the box and haven’t had a single issue with it in the few months I’ve been using it.

Terrible. This thing died after 13 months of normal use and no warranty so $500 wasted. Very dissatisfied.

Great phone until it broke 1 month after 1 year warranty expired. Loved the phone, but now it keeps getting stuck in an endless reboot cycle, which means I need to go a factory reset every week or so. If you get this phone make sure you back up your data as you go.