Photos reported to be from the forthcoming Google Pixel 4a suggest that it's going to have a great smartphone camera, despite being a single lens system.

Rumours of the Pixel 4a have been circulating for some time, with rumours that the device was due to be announced at the now-cancelled Google I/O, with a new date of 22 May circulating now.

So far we've only seen limited details about this phone, but these new images, compared with another device, might get some people excited. The success of the Pixel 3a hinged very much on two factors - first that it will highly affordable, second that it had an excellent camera, outperforming many of the multi-lens high-resolution cameras on rival devices.

Google's focus isn't on competing on the spec sheet with numbers with the Pixel devices. The recent Pixel 4 has two cameras and neither have high resolutions like the latest Samsung phone, but in many cases, they offer better portrait performance, better low light performance and better consistency, thanks to computational photograph - using AI.

That's likely to be the focus for the Pixel 4a too. The source of these images says that it's a 12-megapixel camera and that's likely to be the same sensor as the Pixel 4, as well as running the same computational software behind it. 

Against the 48-megapixel of the Redmi Note 7, the Pixel 4a is clearly better. We've long been cautious of the freshly-restarted megapixel race in smartphones, because the best results come from a quality sensor and quality software, working together, rather than big number components just thrown into a phone to look good on the spec sheet. 

Of course, there's nothing to verify the source, but we know from the experience of the Pixel 3a that photo performance will be high on the agenda for Google's new affordable phone. We're hoping to hear more concrete details during May.