Pixel 9a battery life test vs Pixel 9: Is it really *that* good?

The new Pixel 9a might appear an unassuming mid-range phone at just $499, but it actually packs Google’s largest-ever battery into a 6.3-inch form factor. The 9a’s new 5,100mAh cell is a significant upgrade on last year’s 4,500mAh battery and even flies past the 4,700mAh cell packed into Google’s far more flagship Pixel 9 and 9 Pro handsets as well.

The Pixel 9a might not be fighting it out for the crown of the biggest battery in a smartphone ever, but this still represents a huge boost in capacity that surely has to be a boon for multi-day use. But what we really need to help us know for certain is some hard data. I’ve run the Pixel 9a through our suite of battery drain tests to see if this larger cell can live up to the hype.

I can’t say I’m too disappointed in the results here. The Pixel 9a clearly outperforms last year’s Pixel 8a, although the improvements don’t always match the 13.5% boost in battery size. Some tests show more meaningful improvements than others; 4K recording and web browsing record the most significant gains, but the phone will actually take fewer pictures before running down the battery than last year’s model. Most importantly, however, the phone offers around 10 hours of screen-on time for web-based tasks and over six hours of content capture on a single charge. That’s good in anyone’s book.

Of course, Google has changed much more than the battery in this generation. New camera hardware and a more efficient processor help explain why some results fall on either side of just the raw battery capacity boost. Here’s a breakdown of the test results by percentage change.

The general trend appears to be that the Pixel 9a lasts longer for typical daily workloads, such as web browsing and voice calls, than the 8a. That’s undoubtedly good news. However, the improvements are more mixed as far as multimedia is concerned, and gaming battery life appears essentially unchanged from last year’s model.

Anecdotally, our Pixel 9a review backs up these general improvements. Ryan easily made it through his days of typical use with a battery to spare, noting that the idle battery drain was greatly reduced and that the handset spent less time on the charger than last year’s model.

Compared to the higher-end Pixel 9, the Pixel 9a is much more of a mixed bag. The budget model’s bigger battery lends it an advantage for web browsing and camera capture times. It also lasts way longer for 4K playback, but we’ve seen this before with the A series. However, the 9a doesn’t last as long as Google’s flagship model when it comes to 4K recording, video calls, and gaming, with all these results scoring around 20% worse on the 9a.

OK, that seems odd, right? The phone has a bigger battery, after all, so why aren’t the battery test results leaps and bounds better than the Pixel 9?

Well, there are some caveats to the Pixel 9a’s budget design. It might have the same Tensor G4 processor as the Pixel 9, but it’s paired with an older Samsung Exynos 5300 modem, meaning everyday networking tasks aren’t quite as efficient. This could explain why data-heavy tasks, such as our Zoom call test, seem to run for longer on the Pixel 9 compared to the 9a, despite the differences in battery capacity.

Likewise, there are minor differences between the two models’ displays. The A series features a presumably cheaper P-OLED panel compared to the Samsung OLED in the flagship series. These panels probably have minor refresh rate and brightness power consumption differences. While small factors, they could add up throughout a day’s use, leading to some battery life differences depending on the use case, such as watching video or flicking through web pages. Software updates and patches since launch may also have influenced results.

In any case, the good news is that the Pixel 9a sports Google’s best-ever battery life for an A-series handset. While perhaps not quite offering the leap the raw battery capacity suggests over its flagship models, the Pixel 9a won’t struggle to take even the most demanding power users through a full day of use, possibly with a little juice left to spare as well.