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- The Google Pixel 9a is our favourite mid-range phone, thanks to its excellent cameras, impressive battery life and extensive software support
- In our 2025 review, we rated the Pixel 9a five stars out of five and gave it our Best Buy award
- Over the past 180 days, it has averaged £439 in price but this deal brings it down to just £347 – the cheapest it has ever been
Even if it wasn’t discounted for Black Friday, the Google Pixel 9a would likely remain my mid-range phone of choice. Between the phenomenal cameras, the flawless display, the long-lasting battery life and the unrivalled software, it’s simply an all-round level of quality that other phones around this price can’t match.
Luckily, however, it is included in the Black Friday sales, so you can snatch up that high-class mid-ranger for its lowest price yet. Over the past 180 days, the Pixel 9a has averaged £439 but this deal sees the price plummet down to a record-low of £347. Without question, this is the Black Friday phone deal that I would buy.
What’s so good about the Pixel 9a?
Let’s start with the software. Google also develops Android, so it’s little surprise that its own Pixel phones get the best version of the OS. The Pixel 9a’s software is slick, accessible and wonderfully customisable, and best of all, it is promised seven years of updates, security patches and Pixel drops with new features. There are plenty of phones two or three times this price that don’t get that level of support.
If you’re into the AI schtick, you also get access to Google’s Gemini assistant with the Pixel 9a. For my money, this is the most effective and useful AI around – though still take everything it says with a pinch of salt and double check before relying on the responses – and the new Gemini Live feature is particularly handy, letting you have a more free-flowing conversation with the bot, interrupting it and rephrasing on the fly.
I was also very impressed with the Pixel 9a’s battery life in my testing; it ran our standard looping video battery test for an incredible 34 hours before powering down, outlasting the vast majority of phones I’ve tested. For such a humble and affordable model, that kind of stamina is outstanding.
And then there are the cameras. Pixel cameras are consistently some of my favourites, thanks to excellent colour tuning and dynamic range, as well as the deep bench of editing features. The Pixel 9a is no different, with the main camera on the rear capturing incredibly detailed and beautifully lit shots in all light conditions and the front-facing lens producing excellent portraits with natural skin tones and a buttery background blur.
Finally, the 6.3in OLED display is worth mentioning, too. Put simply, this is a level of quality that I expect from phones that cost hundreds more. In particular, the peak brightness is far beyond anything else in this price range, hitting over 1,800 nits when displaying HDR content in my testing.
Equally, the colour accuracy was pin-perfect, with the average Delta E of 0.67 speaking to tremendous accuracy. This means that whether you’re streaming movies or playing mobile games (which the Pixel 9a proved very adept at as well) all of the colours will look how they are intended to, and even the brightest ray of sun won’t ruin your fun.
Any drawbacks?
Very few, which is quite the compliment in and of itself. The main issue I had when I reviewed the Pixel 9a was that the new design is far more generic and boring than the models that had come before it. It’s not aggressively ugly, it just lacks any identity of its own. Next to more exciting mid-rangers like the Nothing Phone (3a), the Pixel 9a feels rather dull by comparison.
Speaking of Nothing, several mid-range phones are now starting to add telephoto cameras – including the Phone (3a) – which the Pixel 9a lacks. The rest of the cameras are more than strong enough to compensate for this shortcoming but anyone who regularly reaches for that zoom slider may prefer a phone with dedicated magnification hardware.
And that’s it. This is what I mean when I say all-rounder, it hits all of the key points and then some. Battery life, performance, software, cameras – the Pixel 9a covers all the bases. If you have a budget that stretches to £347, I cannot recommend this deal enough. It’s an outstanding phone for an unbeatable price.
If you’d like to see what other phone deals I’ve scrounged up over the Black Friday period, head over to my roundup of the best Black Friday phone deals. Or, you can browse our main Black Friday deals hub for all the best offers on everything from mattresses to laptops to TVs.
