The Xiaomi Mi A1 is a very familiar face, because it comes with basically the same specs as the Xiaomi Mi 5X, but instead of having MIUI 9 on board, it gets pure Android, Android One. This is actually the first stock Android smartphone from Xiaomi and it was launched in the early fall. It’s priced at $209.99 on TomTop.com and it’s a dual camera sexy midranger.
Inside its box we find the USB Type-C cable, the SIM key, charger, manual and no headphones, as usual for a Xiaomi. The handset has a full metal body, it’s quite sleek and slim and seems to borrow the antenna design from the iPhone 7 and Meizu Pro 6. Available in black, gold or rose gold, this phone measures 7.3 mm in thickness, weighs 165 grams and packs a 5.5 inch Full HD IPS LCD display with Gorilla Glass 3 protection.
It’s a dual SIM device, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 CPU inside and this chip is actually familiar, being present on the ASUS ZenFone 3, the Moto Z Play and Huawei Nova. It also includes 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage and a microSD card slot. The battery is a pretty generous 3080 mAh unit and judging by the quality of the Xiaomis lately in the battery area, that sounds quite nice.
On the camera front we’re treated with a dual 12 MP shooter, which sounds pretty similar to the one of the Xiaomi Mi 6, only it lacks F/1.8 aperture and OIS. Still, we get PDAF, 2X optical zoom, dual tone flash and 4K video capture. Selfies are taken with a 5 MP front cam. There’s an USB Type-C port on board and an infrared blaster at the top, usable to control TV sets, set top boxes and other such devices.
The fingerprint scanner can be found at the back and the phone also brings VoLTE and noise reduction. Even though the software is all clean Android, no MIUI, the camera UI has been tweaked by Xiaomi with the classical MIUI options. We’ll be back with a full review very soon and in the meantime you can get the phone from here:
