Is the Pixel 7a the absolute best budget 5G phone you can get right now at a generous discount with or without upfront carrier activation? Not so fast, as Best Buy is also selling Google’s “standard” Pixel 7 at awesome prices at the time of this writing after massive new markdowns, making it virtually impossible for cash-strapped Android purists to choose the right device for their needs between the two.
The fall 2022-released 6.3-inch Pixel 7 is still slightly costlier than the newer 6.1-inch Pixel 7a, which happens to be a bit humbler from a number of important standpoints. At $399 with activation and $499 sans strings attached, the older model is as cheap as it’s ever been and arguably more appealing than back at launch.
You don’t need a My Best Buy membership to take advantage of this special “Black Friday in July” offer, mind you, and even though we obviously can’t see the future, we highly doubt Amazon will be able to improve these killer discounts (especially the one with activation) during its big subscriber-only Prime Day blowout on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Fairly generous in the screen real estate department but far from cumbersome and powered by a good but not quite great Google Tensor G2 processor, the non-Pro Pixel 7 is an extremely well-balanced handset that also scores points as far as build quality, camera performance, battery life, and charging speeds are concerned.
Above all, of course, this bad boy is unrivaled in its (new) price bracket in terms of software support, receiving stable Android 13 goodies before all of the best phones out there and being guaranteed to do the same when Android 14 will be deemed ready for primetime.
We’re not going to lie to you, the Pixel 7 does have… problems and flaws, but what $399 device doesn’t? And when all is said and done, the strong points undeniably outweigh the weaknesses here, whether or not you’re willing to activate the phone on a specific carrier to maximize your savings and whether you feel like settling for an entry-level 128GB storage configuration or want to pay $499 and up to double that local digital hoarding room.
