Xiaomi Mi A1 review: A Pixel on a budget

Note: This review was first published on 7th October 2017.

Overview

When anyone talks about great value smartphones one name always tends to pop up: Xiaomi. And for good reason, for the past few years the Chinese brand has released phone after phone offering high-end design, features and specs at a fraction of the cost of other brands. 

The latest Xiaomi smartphone is the Mi A1. The Mi A1 is essentially a rebranded Mi 5X, which is only available in China and was released earlier this year, but with the added perk of running on pure Android OS. For people who dislike Xiaomi's iOS-like Mi UI interface, this could be the phone you've been waiting for.

The Mi A1 offers a full aluminum build, Full HD display, a dual rear camera setup and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor with 4GB RAM, all at a ridiculously low price of S$349.

Design

The Mi A1 is a sleek looking all-metal phone that looks a lot more premium than its price tag would suggest. If you're familiar with Xiaomi's other phones, it looks exactly like a smaller version of Xiaomi's Mi Max 2. Compared to Xiaomi's other entry-level smartphone, the Redmi Note 4, the Mi A1 is more refined, with cleaner lines and a more modern-looking aesthetic. 

On the rear of the phone there's a dual camera setup, with a similar configuration to the one we saw on the Xiaomi Mi 6 - one wide angle lens and one telephoto lens. However, as the A1 is a lot cheaper than the Mi 6, Xiaomi is using lower-end imaging sensors in the A1.

The positioning of the dual camera in the top left corner, coupled with the design of the antenna bands and the rounded aluminum frame running along the edge of the phone, means that the Mi A1 has more than a passing resemblance to the OnePlus 5, Oppo R11 and Apple iPhone 7 Plus. However a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, along with large Mi and Android One logos on the rear of the phone, help differentiate it from the pack of lookalikes. 

The phone is fairly svelte at just 7.3mm thick, the same as the OnePlus 5, and much thinner than the Redmi Note 4. At 165g it's exactly the same weight as the Redmi Note 4 and about 13g heavier than the OnePlus 5, but the extra weight wasn't really noticeable.

Beneath the display you'll find three backlit capacitive keys. The keys can't be customized and, annoyingly, despite running on pure Android, Xiaomi has opted to go for the 'Samsung' configuration, which puts the back button on the right and the menu button on the left, which is the opposite of the standard Android layout.

The back of the phone has tapered edges on all sides while the front has chamfered edges. I'm not particularly keen on this mis-match of design styles but it's a minor quibble. 

Both the power button and volume rocker can be found on the right-side of the phone while the dual Nano-SIM card slot can be found on the left. The second SIM slot doubles up as a microSD card slot that accepts cards up to 128GB in capacity.

On the bottom of the phone there's a USB 2.0 Type-C port, a single speaker and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Once again the design down here looks very similar to the OnePlus 5, Oppo R11 and iPhone 7 Plus.

On the top of the phone there's an IR blaster, which is a feature that's becoming quite rare these days. You can use the IR blaster in conjunction with Xiaomi's pre-installed Mi Remote app to control your TV, air con, Mi Box or pretty much anything else with an IR receiver.

The Mi A1 is available locally in two colors: Black and Gold. There's also a Rose Gold color, but it's only available overseas.

Display and Audio

The Mi A1 has a 5.5-inch 1,920 x 1,080 pixels resolution IPS LCD display (~401ppi). Brightness is pretty good at 450 nits at maximum on the Auto setting, and 550 nits at maximum in Standard setting. Contrast is also quite good for an LCD display, with surprisingly deep blacks. Color reproduction is fairly muted, although I did notice that the screen tends to favor blues, which look more vibrant than other colors.

Despite its low price the Mi A1 comes with some notable audio features, including a dedicated headphone amplifier that can drive high-impedance headphones of up to 600 ohms. The phone's single speaker is also quite impressive, featuring a dedicated 10V smart power amplifier paired with a Dirac HD Sound algorithm for higher sound quality. I won't say the sound quality from the Mi A1 was the best I've heard, and it still pales in comparison to front-facing stereo speakers like those found on the HTC U11 and iPhone 8, but it was excellent for a mono speaker setup. There's plenty of volume and the bass is surprisingly deep too.

 

User Interface

The big selling point of the Mi A1 is that it runs on stock Android. At launch the phone will be shipped with Android 7.1.2 Nougat, but you'll be able to update it to Android 8.0 Oreo as soon as it is available. Xiaomi also tells us that the Mi A1 will be one of the first phones to get Android 9.0 P.

As for the software experience itself, it's basically exactly what you get on a Pixel or Nexus smartphone. All interface elements are unchanged from stock Android: you swipe up on the display to access the app drawer work, and you can find Google Now to the left of the home screen. You can even pull down the notification shade by swiping down on the fingerprint sensor, and double press the power button to launch the camera app, just like you can with a Pixel smartphone. You also get all of the standard Android 7.1.2 features like split-screen multitasking, in-line notification replies, app shortcuts, granular controls for Do Not Disturb, and more.

The only Xiaomi apps included on the phone are the above mentioned Mi Remote app, which lets you use the IR blaster on the top of the phone to control things, and a Mi feedback app. By necessity, the default camera app is also different, and is essentially the same as Xiaomi's Mi UI camera app, which is needed to support the dual rear camera setup. 

One big feature missing from the phone is NFC. That means the Mi A1 isn't compatible with Android Pay or any other cashless payment app.

Performance Benchmarks

In terms of hardware, the Mi A1 is identical to what you'll find inside the Redmi Note 4. You get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor and 4GB RAM paired with an Adreno 506 GPU. While this processor is more than enough for day-to-day tasks, its more than a year old, and phones with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 630 SoC will soon be available (such as the ASUS ZenFone 4). The processor is the one area where the Mi A1 lags behind and fails to punch above its price tag.

Sunspider Javascript

SunSpider JavaScript measures the browsing performance of a device when processing JavaScript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience. 

As expected, the Mi A1 performed about as well as the Redmi Note 4 and ASUS ZenFone 3, both of which run on the same Snapdragon 625 processor. For what it's worth, I couldn't tell any difference in actual real world browsing performance between the A1 and the Mi 6.

Quadrant

Quadrant is an Android benchmark that evaluates a device's CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performances. Again, the Mi A1 showed about the same performance as the Redmi Note 4, however it wasn't significantly worse than the OnePlus 5.

3DMark Sling Shot

3DMark Sling Shot is an advanced 3D graphics benchmark that tests the full range of OpenGL ES 3.1 and ES 3.0 API features including multiple render targets, instanced rendering, uniform buffers and transform feedback. The test also includes impressive volumetric lighting and post-processing effects. We're running this benchmark in Unlimited mode, which ignores screen resolutions.

Here's where we saw the biggest difference between the Snapdragon 625 and 835. The 835 devices are in a completely different class from the 625 devices and the A1 really struggled on this benchmark.

Imaging

The Mi A1 has two 12-megapixel cameras on its rear: the first is a 26mm wide-angle lens with a 1.25-micron pixels sensor and f/2.2 aperture, and the second is a 50mm telephoto lens with a 1.1-micron pixels sensor and f/2.6 aperture that offers 2x optical zoom. While Xiaomi is advertising the A1 as having a "flagship dual camera" setup, it's worth noting that Xiaomi's actual flagship dual camera configuration on the Mi 6 is quite different, offering both a faster aperture and optical image stabilization on the primary wide-angle lens.

The camera app is the same one that comes with all Xiaomi phones and bears a pretty strong resemblance to Apple's default camera app. You can tap the x1 and x2 to toggle between the wide-angle and telephoto lens. Unfortunately, if you want to select a zoom setting in between them you have to pinch to zoom. A pop up slider like the one Apple uses would have been nice here. There are toggles for filters and easy access to various shooting modes, which include panorama, beautify, tilt shift, a square mode for Instagram, and others. For some reason there's also a toggle for enabling a watermark - which is on by default - which adds the words "Shot on Mi A1" in the bottom left corner of every shot. You'll probably want to turn this off.

Image quality from the Mi A1 is quite decent, but not on the same level as flagship smartphone cameras. Shots tend to be a little grainy in less than ideal lighting conditions and the image is also slightly soft towards the edge of the frame. There's also some noticeable smearing when you zoom in on details.

As with most dual camera setups, there's a Portrait mode (Xiaomi calls it Stereo Mode) that lets  you blur the background for some DSLR-like bokeh. You activate Stereo Mode by tapping the portrait icon at the top of the camera interface. Xiaomi's version is surprisingly good, with great edge detection and fairly realistic-looking bokeh. If the cameras themselves were better, the results might come close to what you get out of the Samsung Galaxy Note8 or iPhone 8 Plus. 

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

One of the big differences between the A1 and the Redmi Note 4 is the battery inside the phone. While the Note 4 is known for its massive 4,000mAh battery, the Mi A1 has a more standard-sized 3,080mAh battery, which is actually a little small for a 5.5-inch phone. As a result, battery life was a little underwhelming with the A1 lasting just under ten hours in our video looping benchmark.

One other downside to the A1 is that despite the Snapdragon 625 SoC supporting it, fast charging does not seem to be enabled on the A1. I tried with a few fast charging wall adaptors and unfortunately all of them took about two hours to charge the A1 to full.

Conclusion

While Xiaomi continues to face stiff competition in the competitive S$500-800 price bracket, it is still the king of the sub-S$500 tier. Right now nothing even comes close to what you're getting with the Mi A1 thanks to its combination of premium design, good display and audio, wide-angle and telephoto dual camera setup and pure Android OS. While there are other pure Android smartphones on the market, none offer this level of hardware and design sophistication at this low of a price.

The main drawbacks to the Mi A1 are its dated processor, lack of NFC and fast charging. Furthermore, with the Snapdragon 625 about to be replaced by the Snapdragon 630, the Mi A1's performance is only going to fall further behind. Having said that, if you're buying a phone in this price bracket, high-end performance shouldn't be your primary concern and if you're not a power user, the Snapdragon 625 is more than sufficient for most day-to-day tasks - just know that it will struggle with more graphically intense games. We also expect phones running on the Snapdragon 630, like the upcoming ASUS ZenFone 4, to be quite a bit more expensive than the Mi A1, at least to start with.

With that in mind, we still consider the Mi A1 to be a great value buy as it's basically a budget Pixel phone, or to compare it to another phone, it offers almost everything you get from the OnePlus 5, for under half the price - in fact, you also get the benefit of expandable storage, which I know the lack of can be a deal-breaker for many people.

Pre-orders for the Xiaomi Mi A1 start 7th October at Xiaomi's Suntec City and Causeway Point Mi stores. The phone will officially launch on 14^thOctober 2017  fort S$349 and will be available from the aforementioned stores or purchased online from Xiaomi's official Lazada Mi Store.

 

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