Pixel 9a Lacks Pixel Screenshots, Call Notes Due To RAM

Due to only 8GB of RAM, the Pixel 9a will not have Pixel Screenshots or Call Notes in the Phone app.

Google says (via Ars Technica) that the Pixel 9a runs “Gemini Nano 1.0 XXS” (extra extra small). Debuting on the Pixel 8 and 8a last year, this model does not continuously run in the background — it’s only loaded into RAM as needed — and only accepts text input.

This lack of multimodal capabilities means that the Pixel 9a cannot process images (for Pixel Screenshots) or audio (Call Notes in the Phone by Google app).

Pixel Screenshots processes captures to generate summaries and make them searchable. While those are core capabilities of the app, I’d argue the app’s ability to manually add notes to screenshots and sort them into collections, as well as assign reminders, are pretty useful in their own right, especially from the bottom-left corner screenshot preview. Similarly, many people would be happy with any call recording capability in the dialer.

Like on the Pixel 8, you do get features like Summarize in Recorder, with Gemini Nano 1.0 XXS only coming into play after the existing speech-to-text solution outputs a transcript.

For comparison, the Pixel 9 series, which ranges from 12 to 16GB of RAM, runs “Gemini Nano XS” (extra small).

Another Pixel 9 feature you do get on the 9a, as advertised on the product listing, is Pixel Studio. Last year, Google said the “image generator [is] powered by an on-device diffusion model running on Tensor G4 and our Imagen 3 text-to-image model in the cloud.” There’s also Add Me in the Pixel Camera that uses the Tensor G4 chip and its TPU.