Xiaomi Mi A1 Review: Inexpensive Smartphone with a Great Camera

Xiaomi in cooperation with Google and within the Android One program released a smartphone with a pure Android instead of MIUI for the first time in its history. In addition to pure Android, the smartphone is notable for the presence of a powerful headphone amplifier and a camera with two lenses - wide-angle and portrait.

Display

Xiaomi Mi A1 smartphone has 5.5-inch IPS-screen with a Full HD matrix. The display is protected with 2,5D Gorilla Glass. There is an oleophobic coating helping to deal the fingerprints on the screen and provides a pleasant glide of the finger across the glass. The color reproduction of the display slightly tends to cool colors but within the limits of acceptable. The minimum possible level of brightness can be made lower than in most other smartphones, so you can comfortably read from the screen in pitch darkness. The maximum brightness is also impressive - even under direct sunlight, the screen of smartphone does not get completely blind.

Productivity and performance

By its hardware, Xiaomi Mi smartphone can be attributed to the middle class, in the best sense of the word. In this smartphone works the well-known eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor. There is enough RAM in the smartphone - 4 GB, there are also 64 GB of built-in memory (you may add external TF card up to 128GB of space). For the graphics is responsible Adreno 506, running under load at a frequency of up to 650 MHz. Surfing through a lot of browser tabs, viewing Full HD video online or through a local player - all this happens at once.

Camera

Despite the fact that the smartphone runs on the pure Android, the camera software is branded by Xiaomi. That is, there are all manual settings and additional modes from the manufacturer so that you can adjust the focus, shutter speed, ISO and the white balance. The camera software also provides many filters, tilt-shift effects, skin smoothing, face recognition (and age), seven-level adjustment of contrast, sharpness and saturation.

The main photo module in the smartphone is a two-color full-fledged 12-megapixel camera OmniVision OV12A10 with a pixel size of 1.25 microns and with two different lenses, wide-angle and portrait. The first one allows fitting more space into the frame, and the second one gives a double optical approximation without loss of quality.

Conclusion

For everyone who likes the hardware of Xiaomi devices, but does not like the MIUI firmware, an alternative, Xiaomi Mi A1, has finally appeared. The device even causes nostalgia for the once-existing line of Nexus, which is a successful symbiosis of affordable price, pure Android, and the high technical characteristics, along with good cameras.