With a rumored million plus units sold within a day of release, the Xiaomi Redmi 4A is the mobile version of an irresistibly seasoned tasty hot cake eaten on a bone-chilling winter day. Incredibly cheap, packing decent specs to satisfy all but the most snobby and demanding of users, it is a glossy wonder on 4 legs that gets mostly A’s in all performance parameters and reviews for its class. Xiaomi sure outdid themselves here and considerably exceeded yours and my expectations, and all we can do is pause, do a double-take, breathe in deeply and say well-done bros.
Am sure most of you are well acquainted with budget and very low-cost smartphones. They were likely your very first mobile device, till you won the lottery or discovered a gold mine in your backyard and got yourself a ultra-expensive phablet on your birthday. While the vast majority of budget devices do provide a convenient and cheap means of connecting to the globe and its irascible inhabitants, nearly all come with iffy quality, reliability, and specs. Xiaomi seems convincingly set to correct all that and thoroughly revolutionize the budget smartphone segment with a device that overpoweringly punches far above its other competitors and excels in usability, performance, and practicality. Look out world, here come the Xiaomi Redmi 4A juggernaut!
Well, if you have been considering joining the Xiaomi team, here is our Xiaomi Redmi 4A review to enable you speedily make up your mind.
Design and Build Quality
The overall look is slim and functional with nothing really outstanding immediately catching and holding you by the jugular. No major innovative features or functionality are present, nor expected at this price point. The design is solid if unremarkable, functional and effective. The Xiaomi device sports what is all too easily mistaken for an all metal construction. In actuality though, the Xiaomi Redmi 4A is constructed out of plastic not metal, but plastic painted and textured to feel incredibly and realistically metallic. The artifice is so good it is barely noticeable to most users and serves to give the device a somewhat premium finish. The screen real estate is a reasonable 5-inches, and sports sizable bezels for an old-school look.
At the bottom end lies a speaker and a USB port, while an audio jack winks at you from the top. Turn it over, and the smallish main camera sensor with its LED flash peeks back at you. This along with the Xiaomi logo and a speaker grille at the bottom is all there is to see.
Looked at frontally, there is no mistaking the Xiaomi Redmi 4A as anything but a budget smartphone. Turn it over though and eye and feel its sexy back and the stylish Xiaomi logo and you would unhesitatingly swear it to be from the stables of the biggest Western competitors.
Overall dimensions are 141.3 x 69.6 x 8.5 mm, while weight is just 156 grams.
Display
The Xiaomi Redmi 4A ships with a 5-inch IPS LCD screen with a 1280 x 720 resolution. The screen is remarkably excellent in action for the price, with vivid colors and crisp images and videos. Brightness maxes out at 400 nits, making for iffy usability in direct sunlight. Overall, the screen really wows, as long that is you don’t set your expectations too high or start comparing it to the AMOLED crew costing tens as much.
Camera
The main shooter is a 13 MP sensor with LED flash that works best in bright conditions. If used in anything but bright environments expect low quality but still usable footage. The front camera is a 5 MP shooter for the selfie-obsessed and is adequate in practice, but inferior in most performance parameters to its big brother at the back.
Video footage shot with either camera is good though and impressively detailed. Overall, the cameras are excellent considering that this is ostensibly a budget smartphone.
Performance and Connectivity
OS is the Android 6.0 Marshmallow with the MIUI8 skin. This performs as expected with endless customization/personalization options to suit your varied needs. But it ends up hogging the available phone memory, making an SD card necessary.
Brute power is courtesy of a quad-core Snapdragon 425 processor that zooms along at 1.4 GHz. RAM is an impressively generous 2 GB, mated to 16 GB of internal storage. Which however is easily expanded to 128 GB via SD card if desired. I was rather expecting a MediaTek horror under the hood, and it is really surprising and delightful to see or even imagine a Qualcomm chipset in such an entry level budget device like this.
In use, the Xiaomi Redmi 4A performs pretty adequately, but be careful not to overload it. Multitasking is a breeze, but when tasked with coordinating memory/graphics intensive workloads it does stutter like a 5-year old caught with his/her hand in the cookie jar. Games do load and play well, but try to steer clear of hard-core, memory and graphics-hogging ones. Overall, the Xiaomi Redmi 4A packs the performance of much more expensive and snobby mid-ranged offerings in an astoundingly cheap and capable package.
Connectivity options include dual SIM/dual standby via the dual SIM card slots, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/, GPS, Bluetooth 4.1, Proximity sensor, Gyroscope, Accelerator and an Ambient light sensor. Audio performance from the speaker is loud and harsh, distorted at max volumes and with no bass worth mentioning, but good enough for the purpose.
Battery
This is a non-removable 3030 mAh capacity beast that provides more than enough juice for a day of medium usage. Moreover, the device comes equipped with the QuickCharge 2.0 feature which speedily and conveniently tops off the battery, so you continue your online disturbances, discussions, and disputations.
Verdict
At a MSRP price of just $70, the Xiaomi Redmi 4A is a surprisingly reasonably effective dragon slayer. Dirt cheap, capable and sleek, this is one budget phone i wouldn’t in the least mind carting around or be ashamed to be seen in otherwise noble company with. If you need a capable smartphone, but have an acrimonious relationship with money and credit cards, nothing on earth presently beats the Xiaomi Redmi 4A for overall performance, cheapness, capability, and value for money.
The future indeed is Now, and it seems that Xiaomi already has an irresistible head start on the rest of its slumbering competitors. Go on bros, give them the old Xiaomi one-two!