Xiaomi Mi A1 (Android One) review

Xiaomi Mi A1 (Android One) review

Xiaomi phones always have the same problem. While the company's devices have generally great specifications and design for the price, the software experience is usually not very good. If you've read one of our Xiaomi device reviews, or used one of the company's phones yourself, you probably know what I'm talking about.

All of Xiaomi's phones and tablets ship with MIUI, a heavily modified version of Android that has countless problems. Some of these include Bluetooth connectivity bugs, terrible notification handling, and over-the-top power management that can outright break notifications for many apps. Jordan went in depth about MIUI's issues , if you're interested in details.

Because Xiaomi's devices are mostly just inhibited by the software, people have been asking the company for years to make a phone with stock (or near-stock) Android. Last month, that finally became a reality, when Xiaomi announced its first Android One device - the Mi A1

Xiaomi phone without MIUI? It's pretty fantastic

SPECS

CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon 625
GPU	Adreno 506
Display	5.5" 1080p IPS with Corning Gorilla Glass
RAM	4GB RAM
Storage	64GB storage with hybrid SIM/MicroSD slot
Rear Camera	12MP wide-angle + 12MP telephoto lens with 2x Optical zoom and 10x digital zoom, dual-tone LED flash
Front camera	5MP
Battery	3000mAh
Network	FDD-LTE / TDD-LTE | WCDMA | GSM | VoLTE, Dual SIM and dual standby
Dimensions	155.4 x 75.8 x 7.3 mm, 165 g
Software	Android 7.1.2 (upgrade to Oreo before the end of 2017)
Colors	Black, Gold, Rose Gold
Price	₹14,999 in India (approx. $231)

THE GOOD

Design	This looks and feels like a phone twice the price.
Software	It's stock Android 7.1.2, and Oreo is promised before the end of the year.
Performance	The Snapdragon 625 processor is plenty fast.
Battery life	You might be able to squeeze two days out of one charge.

THE NOT SO GOOD

Camera	Like many budget phones, the A1 has problems with color balance and low light.
Capacitive navigation buttons	The navigation buttons are capacitive instead of on-screen, and they're in the wrong order.
NFC	There is no NFC on this phone.
Availability	You still can't buy this in the United States.

Design and materials

Xiaomi usually does a great job of designing and building phones, even if the result isn't entirely original. The Mi A1 looks and feels like a phone twice the price. But like many of Xiaomi's previous phones, this device looks very much like an Apple phone - in this case, the iPhone 7 Plus. It has the same antenna bands that run across the top and bottom, the same rounded aluminum back, the same dual cameras, and even some of the same color options. The A1 is just a hair thicker than the 7 Plus, coming in at 7.3mm (the 7 Plus is 7.1mm).

To be honest, the lack of originality doesn't bother me in the slightest. If you don't want an iPhone look-alike, there are plenty of other options out there. But by copying most of the iPhone's design philosophy, Xiaomi has made a very good looking phone for the price.

There are some notable differences though, the first of which is one of my few complaints with this phone - the capacitive navigation keys. Just like ASUS and (until recently) Samsung, capacitive navigation buttons have been a staple of Xiaomi's phones for years. The A1's nav buttons aren't awful by any means (at least they light up), except that the overview/back buttons are in the wrong order compared to Nexus/Pixel/stock Android devices. I always prefer software navigation, but this only took a few hours of getting used to.

Moving onto the bottom edge, we see another departure from the iPhone - the headphone jack. Thankfully, the dumb trend of removing headphone jacks hasn't penetrated the mid/low-range phone market for the most part. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I played a sampling of music on both the A1 and my first-gen Google Pixel to compare audio quality. On the A1, a very slight hiss was audible, but audio quality was pretty much identical otherwise.

 

Left: 5-inch Google Pixel; Right: Xiaomi Mi A1