Google can’t make a move in 2025 without veering into the realm of generative AI, and the release of the Pixel 9a is no exception. Curiously, the AI experience on this phone may not match what you’ve seen from the company’s high-end smartphones. Google has confirmed to Ars that the phone’s lower memory prevented it from implementing the full suite of Pixel AI features. You can still talk to Gemini by holding the power button or opening the Gemini app, but the on-device Gemini Nano model has seen a downgrade on the 9a.
The stagnant ram/storage situation weirds me out. Dont get me wrong 6/8GB ram and 128GB rom served, serves and will serve me well. But damn i bought a phone in 2019 for 300€ with the same specs and 6 years later i’m expected to pay almost double the price for the same. Doesnt make any sense to me from a consumer perspective. Yeah the SOC is faster, the cameras a bit better and the screen gets brighter. But there is no reason for me to upgrade unless support ends for my current phone or it just breaks.
The only compelling feature i see in the forseeable future is the whole desktopmode and virtualization thing. If done competently i would pay for that since i dabbled with the idea a lot in the last few years. It just was shit from the software stack standpoint. But then give me 12-16gb of ram and atleast 512gb of storage for lets say 600€ or less.
Oh yeah, this article was about gemini ai. Well i dont give a shit.
I want proper use of swap/cache by default, not something I have to root to get.
Why is my browser reloading pages because I switched apps, on a 6gb phone?
I could prevent this on a 2gb phone in 2017 with root by configuring it properly.
You’d think they’d just spend the extra few bucks on ram instead of spending probably countless hours making this new tiny model.
Economies of scale can make the math seem really wild at the higher end.
Well, they probably want a leaner version for lower end phones anyway, along the lines of the Go versions of many of their apps. Luckily I won’t have to worry about this shit running Graphene, with no intention of running an LLM, so 8GB would be fine if I had any need to move on from my Pixel 8 prematurely.
Hey, maybe it’ll cause some fairly quick, large discounts. My Pixel 5 backup with a rather shattered screen could use a replacement.
Makes me more likely to consider it, honestly. I don’t need much RAM on my phone, and I would be turning off/avoiding Gemini usage anyway
How many GB of RAM should I have on my phone to ensure Gemini never runs?
You’d think these companies forcing all this ai bullshit would also ensure their hardware could actually run all the data harvesting crap without making their devices trash
