Xiaomi Mi A2 (4 GB)

When Xiaomi launched the Xiaomi Mi A1 around one year ago, it was the first Android One smartphone from a really big brand in India and had all the potential to take the market by storm. A lot has changed since then and now we have the Mi A2, a successor to it, which once again packs some beefy specs but does it have everything in place to become the number 1? Let’s find out.

Design:

Starting with the design, the Xiaomi Mi A2 has an improved, though a very similar design like Xiaomi’s other massively popular smartphone – the Redmi Note 5 Pro, which means, it comes in a bezel-less metal unibody design which has kind of matte finish on the back which feels good in hands and avoids fingerprints, although it is slippery. The cameras on the back are placed vertically and the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner is comfortable to reach.

The phone feels premium to hold in hands and looks beautiful. It sports a 5.99 inches Full HD+ display which has 18:9 aspect ratio. The display quality is good, the colors and viewing angles are proper, however, the visibility under direct sunlight is a bit low, which you need to take a note of if you have a lot of field work. It comes protected with the Corning Gorilla Glass 5, which is a good thing.

The Xiaomi Mi A2 is very strong in three departments – Performance, Cameras & Software (Android One).

Let’s come to all these areas one by one starting with the performance.

Performance:

The Xiaomi Mi A2 is powered by the new and very powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor, which comes with 8 Kryo 260 cores, which Qualcomm earlier only used in its flagship 8xx series processors. This is also the first time this processor has been used in a sub Rs. 20,000 smartphone. It comes paired with 4 GB LPDDR4x RAM and Adreno 512 GPU. The performance is excellent, it is heavily improved over the Xiaomi Mi A1 which came with the Snapdragon 625. It handles everything you throw at it smoothly, be it heavy multitasking or heavy gaming, it can handle it all. Although, it has a tendency to get warmer during heavy usage.

Cameras:

The Mi A2 comes with a dual rear camera setup having a 12 MP primary Sony IMX486 sensor with f/1.75 aperture and a 20 MP secondary Sony IMX376 sensor with f/1.75 aperture and the much talked about 4-in-1 pixel binning technique. The picture quality is just excellent or say it is great for its price. It clicks beautiful shots in the daylight with natural colors and good control over exposure and dynamic range. What’s more impressive is its low light performance where the pixel binning technique comes in. It combines four pixels into one in low light conditions to allow more light, and the pictures, in turn, come out to be excellent in the night as well, having good light and less amount of noise as compared to most of the budget smartphones.

It also comes with ‘Smart lens selection’ which automatically switches to the secondary lens in low light conditions, which is having 2.0 µm large pixels to allow more light to come in, thus producing better images.

It is safe to say that the Xiaomi Mi A2 is by far one of the best if not the absolute best camera smartphone the entry-level mid-range segment has ever seen.

On the front, there is again the 20 MP Sony IMX376 sensor with f/2.2 aperture, 4-in-1 Super Pixel based on pixel binning, AI-powered semantic segmentation, AI-powered Beautify 4.0, HDR and 4500K soft-toned LED flash. It again is a very good selfie shooter.

Operating System:

The Xiaomi Mi A2 comes under Google’s Android One program and runs on the latest Android 8.1 Oreo with stock Android UI. The best thing is, it gets all the benefits from Google, like monthly security updates and very fast updates to the latest Android versions, at least for the next two years. It comes pre-installed with most of the popular Google apps and also includes apps like the Google Tez. It also gets a few apps pre-installed from Xiaomi as well, the most prominent among them all is the camera app.

SIM, Storage & Battery:

The phone comes with 64 GB of internal storage, which is, very disappointingly, not expandable. This is a big change from the Mi A1 and can be a deal breaker for many. It is a dual sim phone with 4G VoLTE support, however, while using two sim cards simultaneously, one will support 4G while the other will fallback on 3G/2G. It is backed by a 3010 mAh Li-Po battery, which handles the heavy processor and delivers average kind of battery backup and may or may not last you a full day depending upon your usage type.

The Xiaomi Mi A2 comes with fast charging support and is the first phone in India to come with Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.0+ but interestingly, or say funnily, it doesn’t ship with a fast charger in the box, forget Quick Charge 4.0, it doesn’t even come with a Quick Charge 3.0 compatible fast charger and you only get a 5V 2A charger out of the box. So, you either spend some extra to get yourself a fast charging adapter or watch your phone charging slowly, despite it supporting fast charging.

Other Features:

Another interesting choice the company has made is to remove the 3.5 mm headphone jack! But for your consolation, the company ships a USB Type-C to 3.5 mm jack adapter in the box, thankfully! You need to note that, you won’t be able to use the headphones and charge the phone at the same time. So, of course, it comes with USB Type-C for data syncing and charging. The Mi A2 comes with Face Recognition unlock which works well, and it has also got the fingerprint scanner which is very quick and accurate. The Mi A2, like most other Xiaomi smartphones, gets one more good thing – Infrared, which lets you control TV, Set Top Box, AC, Music System and more of your electronic appliances using the Mi Remote app.

Xiaomi Mi A2 (Black):

Xiaomi Mi A2 (Gold):

Xiaomi Mi A2 (Lake Blue):

Xiaomi Mi A2 (Rose Gold):